steps to the grave.  But I have no remembrance of what I have since been told I did,—­insisting, with loud cries, that they should not put the body in the ground.  I suppose that my emotion was spent at the time, and so there was nothing to fix that moment in my memory.

’I did not then, nor do I now, find any beauty in these ceremonies.  What had they to do with the sweet playful child?  Her life and death were alike beautiful, but all this sad parade was not.  Thus my first experience of life was one of death.  She who would have been the companion of my life was severed from me, and I was left alone.  This has made a vast difference in my lot.  Her character, if that fair face promised right, would have been soft, graceful and lively:  it would have tempered mine to a gentler and more gradual course.

OVERWORK.

’My father,—­all whose feelings were now concentred on me,—­instructed me himself.  The effect of this was so far good that, not passing through the hands of many ignorant and weak persons as so many do at preparatory schools, I was put at once under discipline of considerable severity, and, at the same time, had a more than ordinarily high standard presented to me.  My father was a man of business, even in literature; he had been a high scholar at college, and was warmly attached to all he had learned there, both from the pleasure he had derived in the exercise of his faculties and the associated memories of success and good repute.  He was, beside, well read in French literature, and in English, a Queen Anne’s man.  He hoped to make me the heir of all he knew, and of as much more as the income of his profession enabled him to give me means of acquiring.  At the very beginning, he made one great mistake, more common, it is to be hoped, in the last generation, than the warnings of physiologists will permit it to be with the next.  He thought to gain time, by bringing forward the intellect as early as possible.  Thus I had tasks given me, as many and various as the hours would allow, and on subjects beyond my age; with the additional disadvantage of reciting to him in the evening, after he returned from his office.  As he was subject to many interruptions, I was often kept up till very late; and as he was a severe teacher, both from his habits of mind and his ambition for me, my feelings were kept on the stretch till the recitations were over.  Thus frequently, I was sent to bed several hours too late, with nerves unnaturally stimulated.  The consequence was a premature development of the brain, that made me a “youthful prodigy” by day, and by night a victim of spectral illusions, nightmare, and somnambulism, which at the time prevented the harmonious development of my bodily powers and checked my growth, while, later, they induced continual headache, weakness and nervous affections, of all kinds.  As these again re-acted on the brain, giving undue force to every thought and