entreated me to listen to her. My mother, whose health had always been
delicate, had within these three last years fallen into what is called a
very nervous state, and this, with her natural timidity and sensibility,
inclined her now to a variety of superstitious feelings--to a belief in
_presentiments_ and presages, omens and dreams, added to her original
belief in sympathies and antipathies. Some of these her peculiarities of
opinion and feeling had perhaps, at first, only been assumed, or yielded to
in her season of youth and beauty, to interest her admirers and to
distinguish herself in society; but as age advanced, they had been
confirmed by habit and weakness, so that what in the beginning might have
been affectation, was in the end reality. She was alarmed, she said, by the
series of strange coincidences which, from my earliest childhood, had
occurred, seeming to connect my fate, in some extraordinary manner, with
these Jews. She recalled all the circumstances of my illness when I was a
child: she confessed that she had retained a sort of antipathy to the idea
of a Jew--a weakness it might be--but she had had dreams and
_presentiments_, and my fortune had been told her while I was at Cambridge;
and some evil, she had been assured, hung over me within the five ensuing
years--some evil connected with a Jew: in short, she did not absolutely
believe in such prophecies, but still it was extraordinary that the first
thing my mind should be intent upon, in coming to town, should be a Spanish
Jew, and she earnestly wished that I would avoid rather than seek the
connexion.

Knowing my mother's turn for the romantic, I had anticipated her delight at
the idea of making acquaintance with a noble-minded travelled Spaniard; but
unluckily her imagination had galloped off in a contrary direction to mine,
and now my only chance was to make her hear reason, and a very bad chance I
knew this to be. I endeavoured to combat her _presentiment_, and to explain
whatever appeared extraordinary in my love and hatred of the Jews, by