was mistaken for a rat, and father took the shovel to kill him, while mother carefully opened the door so that the rat might squeeze his way out to be killed, but poor Poll got the blow instead, and had his neck broken.  All that day my father stayed at home weeping for Polly, and no business misfortune in my recollection ever affected him as the death of the parrot did.  He could flog me without mercy, but he could not see the suffering of a domestic or wild animal without tears, nor would he tolerate in us children the slightest tendency to cruelty to the least living thing.

I have alluded to the differences between him and my mother on the subject of education, the inutility of which, beyond a common-school standard, he made an article of faith, and the return to the workshop for the balance of the vacation, after my school-teaching failure, was the occasion of the final battle.  As the vacation drew to an end, and the time which was still available for studying up the subjects of the last term, for the examination on reentering, approached its imperative limit, I notified him that I must stop work.  He said nothing until I had actually given it up and gone back to my study, about two weeks before the examination day.  Coming home from the shop that day to dinner, in a very bad humor, he asked me why I had not been at work.  I replied that I had barely the time absolutely necessary to make up my arrears of study to enter college for the next term.  Then he broke out on me with a torrent of abuse as an idle, shirking boy, who only cared to avoid work, ending with the accusation that all I wanted was to “eat the bread of idleness,” a phrase he was very fond of.  I suppose I inherited some of his inequality of temper, and I replied by leaving the table, throwing my chair across the room as I did so; and, assuring him that when I ate another morsel of bread in his house he would know the reason why, I left the house in a towering rage.  Having forewarned him days before that I must go, without his making the least objection, and having postponed the step to the latest possible moment, out of consideration for the work in hand, I considered this treatment as ungenerous, and was indignant.

I do not think that, weighing all the circumstances of the case, one could say that my father was entitled to impose his authority in a purely arbitrary interference with a matter in which the family council had decided on my course, and which involved all my future, or that my refusal to obey an irrational command implies any disrespect to him.  At all events, I decided at once that I would not yield in this matter, and I made my preparations to seek another home, even with a modification in my career.  If I must abandon the liberal education, I would not waste my life in a little workshop with three workmen, and no opportunity to widen the sphere of activity, or opening into a larger occupation.  If I should be obliged to leave the college, it should be for something in the direction of art, and in this light I did not much regret the change.  I had not, however, calculated on my mother’s tenacity, or the imperceptible domination she exercised over my father.