enough to understand the frightful waste of the best gifts involved in
that premature ending; as for my grief, perhaps the true explanation of
it may be that I mourned rather the father who had been kind to me in
Wales, than the cruel master at Ivy Cottage.

I sometimes try to imagine what he might have been under more favorable
circumstances. There were times after his wife's death when he meditated
a complete change of residence, which might have saved him. He would
always have been severe and authoritative, but without alcohol he would
probably not have been cruel.

I remember the day of the funeral quite distinctly. My father's two
brothers came, though he had had scarcely any intercourse with them for
years. They were most respectable men, quite free from my father's
errors; but they had not half his life and energy. Such was the strength
of his constitution that so recently as the time of our journey in Wales
his health was not visibly impaired, and at the time of his death he had
that rare possession for a man of thirty-nine, a complete set of
perfectly sound teeth.

His coffin was carried on the shoulders of six men from Ivy Cottage to
the graveyard near the chapel. Shaw at that time had only a chapel, a
hideous building on a bleak piece of rising ground, surrounded by many
graves. It never looked more dreary than on that wretched January day in
1844, when we stood round as the sexton threw earth on my father's
coffin. He was laid in the same tomb with the poor young wife who had
loved him truly, and to whom he had been a tender and devoted husband
whilst their short union lasted.

I am the only survivor of that day's ceremony. The little procession has