after an ill-considered sale of valuable stock, let fly his temper, and further acceptance of his favour was out of the question.  Hamilton, after a scene with his wife, in which his agony and remorse quickened all the finest passions in her own nature, sailed for the Island of St. Vincent, in the hope of finding employment with one of his former business connections.  He had no choice but to leave his wife and children dependent upon her relatives until he could send for them; and a week later Rachael was forced to move to Peter Lytton’s.

Her brother-in-law’s house was very large.  She was given an upstairs wing of it and treated with much consideration, but this final ignominy broke her haughty spirit, and she lost interest in herself.  She was thankful that her children were not to grow up in want, that Alexander was able to continue his studies with Hugh Knox.  He was beyond her now in everything but French, in which they read and talked together daily.  She also discussed constantly with him those heroes of history distinguished not only for great achievements, but for sternest honour.  She dreamed of his future greatness, and sometimes of her part in it.  But her inner life was swathed like a mummy.

To Alexander the change would have been welcome had he understood his mother less.  But the ordinary bright boy of nine is acute and observing, and this boy of Rachael’s, with his extraordinary intuitions, his unboyish brain, his sympathetic and profound affection for his mother, felt with her and criticised his father severely.  To him failure was incomprehensible, then, as later, for self-confidence and indomitability were parts of his equipment; and that a man of his father’s age and experience, to say nothing of his education and intellect, should so fail in the common relation of life, and break the heart and pride of the uncommonest of women, filled him with a deep disappointment, which, no doubt, was the first step toward the early loss of certain illusions.

Otherwise his life was vastly improved.  He soon became intimate with boys of neighbouring estates, Edward and Thomas Stevens, and Benjamin Yard, and for a time they all studied together under Hugh Knox.  At first there was discord, for Alexander would have led a host of cherubims or had naught to do with them, and these boys were clever and spirited.  There were rights of word and fist in the lee of Mr. Lytton’s barn, where interference was unlikely; but the three succumbed speedily, not alone to the powerful magnetism in little Hamilton’s mind, and to his active fists, but because he invariably excited passionate attachment, unless he encountered jealous hate.  When his popularity with these boys was established they adored the very blaze of his temper, and when he formed them into a soldier company and marched them up and down the palm avenue for a morning at a time, they never murmured, although they were like to die of the heat and unaccustomed exertion.  Neddy Stevens, who resembled him somewhat in face, was the closest of these boyhood friends.