degree that they destroyed what ought to have been the flower of the
male population. The strong and hearty men who believed that they could
be imprudent with impunity, the lively, intelligent, and sociable men
who wanted the wittiest and brightest talk that was to be had in the
neighborhood, the bachelor whose hearth was lonely, and the widower
whose house had been made desolate, all these were tempted to join
meetings of merry companions who set no limits to the strength or the
quantity of their potations. My poor father was a man of great physical
endowments, and he came at last to have a mistaken pride in being able
to drink deeply without betraying any evil effects; but a few years of
such an existence undermined one of the finest constitutions ever given
to mortal man. A quarryman once told me that my father had appeared at
the quarry at six o'clock in the morning looking quite fresh and hearty,
when, taking up the heaviest sledge-hammer he could find, he gayly
challenged the men to try who could throw it farthest. None of them came
near him, on which he turned and said with a laugh of satisfaction,
--"Not bad that, for a man who drank thirty glasses of brandy the
day before!" Whether he had ever approached such a formidable
number I will not venture to say, but the incident exactly paints my
father in his northern pride of strength, the fatal pride that believes
itself able to resist poison because it has the muscles of an athlete.

It was always said by those who knew the family that my father was the
cleverest member of it, but his ability must have expended itself in
witty conversation and in his professional work, as I do not remember
the smallest evidence of what are called intellectual tastes. My mother
had a few books that had belonged to her family, and to these my father
added scarcely anything. I can remember his books quite clearly, even at
this distance of time. One was a biography of William IV., another a set
of sketches of Reform Ministers, a third was Baines's "History of