exercise himself a little in English composition. When I was about
fourteen my mother capitalised a part of her income and started me
off to America, where she had friends who could give me a helping
hand; by their kindness I was enabled, after an absence of twenty
years, to return with a handsome income, but not, alas, before the
death of my mother.

Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible
with us and explain it. She had become deeply impressed with the
millenarian fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or
thirty years ago. The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in
the Bible, and she was imbued with the fullest conviction that all
the threatened horrors with which it teems were upon the eve of their
accomplishment. The year eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be
(as indeed it was) a time of general bloodshed and confusion, while
in eighteen hundred and sixty-six, should it please God to spare her,
her eyes would be gladdened by the visible descent of the Son of Man
with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trump of God;
and the dead in Christ should rise first; then she, as one of them
that were alive, would be caught up with other saints into the air,
and would possibly receive while rising some distinguishing token of
confidence and approbation which should fall with due impressiveness
upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the consummation of
all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She died peaceably
in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic was the
nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year
eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.

These opinions of my mother's were positively disastrous--injuring
her naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in