In resuming the story of my father's life after the death of his son we have to do with the life of a changed man—a man whose most cherished hopes had been dashed to pieces; whose remorse and deadly grief shook the very foundations of his character. I say remorse because, now that it was too late, it undoubtedly dawned upon him that he had done unwisely in taxing to the uttermost a willing and precocious intellect unprotected by a strong physique. It was a secret remorse for he would never acknowledge, and indeed he denied that he had, in any way whatever, forced his son along the fatal path. I have heard my father described, and by one of his warmest admirers, as a man “full of theories.” Of all these, his theories on the subject of education and the management of the young were perhaps most often in his mind, and were those upon which he had most prided himself. The result (as may be guessed by an allusion or two in his letters, written after the calamity) added a refinement of bitterness to what he was called upon to suffer. The “finger of scorn,” as he says, could be pointed at him as one who had egregiously failed in that very thing of all others in which he had promised himself success.

Strange as it may seem, in the descriptions my father wrote of his suffering at that time there is no hyperbole.