science which was as good as unknown in his youth, he was practically
a stranger to living nature. He allowed the garden with its many
splendours to become a wilderness, and finally let it to a gardener on
condition that he and his children should be allowed certain
privileges. The son used the garden as a park and enjoyed its beauty
as he found it, without taking the trouble to try and understand it
scientifically.

One might compare the boy's character to an ill-proportioned
compensation pendulum; it contained too much of the soft metal of the
mother, not enough of the hard metal of the father. Friction and
irregular oscillations were the natural consequences. Now he was full
of sentiment, now hard and sceptical. His mother's death affected him
beyond words. He mourned her deeply, and she always lived in his memory
as the personification of all that was good and great and beautiful.

He wasted the summer following her death in brooding and novel-reading.
Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous
system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April
showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning:
but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in
a frosty May night, before the fruit has had time to set.

He was fifteen years old and had therefore arrived at the age when
civilised man attains to manhood and is ripe to give life to a new
generation, but is prevented from doing so by his inability to
maintain a family. Consequently he was about to begin the ten years'
martyrdom which a young man is called upon to endure in the struggle
against an overwhelming force of nature, before he is in a position to
fulfil her laws.