MY FATHER, MY DEAR FATHER,--This is no reply to your letters. I know
not if itself can be called a letter. I cannot yet decide whether it
be meant to reach your hands. Tired with talking to myself, I sit
down to talk to you. Often have I reproached myself for not seeing
every fitting occasion to let you distinctly know how warmly I love,
how deeply I reverence you; you, O friend, O father. But we
Chillinglys are not a demonstrative race. I don't remember that you,
by words, ever expressed to me the truth that you loved your son
infinitely more than he deserves. Yet, do I not know that you would
send all your beloved old books to the hammer rather than I should
pine in vain for some untried, if sinless, delight on which I had set
my heart? And do you not know equally well, that I would part with
all my heritage, and turn day-labourer, rather than you should miss
the beloved old books?

That mutual knowledge is taken for granted in all that my heart yearns
to pour forth to your own. But, if I divine aright, a day is coming
when, as between you and me, there must be a sacrifice on the part of
one to the other. If so, I implore that the sacrifice may come from
you. How is this? How am I so ungenerous, so egotistical, so
selfish, so ungratefully unmindful of all I already owe to you, and
may never repay? I can only answer, "It is fate, it is nature, it is
love "--

. . . . . . . . .

Here I must break off. It is midnight, the moon halts opposite to the
window at which I sit, and on the stream that runs below there is a
long narrow track on which every wave trembles in her light; on either