The lady can’t do it.  This class, of what I suppose you would call peasant women (I won’t have the word), seems made for the purpose of rectifying everything, and redressing the balance, inspiring us with that awe which the immediate presence of absolute womanhood creates in us.  The plain, practical woman, with the outspoken throat and the eternal eyes.  Oh, mince me, madam, mince me your pretty mincings!  Deliberate your dainty reticences!  Balbutient loveliness, avaunt!  Here is a woman that talks like a bugle, and, in everything, sees God.

[Sidenote:  T.E.  Brown]

...  The wreck of the Drummond Castle is much in my mind.  What lovely creatures those French are!  The women and children, carrying their poor drowned sisters! that little baby in its coffin decked with roses!  Don’t you yearn towards those dear souls?  What are Agincourt and Waterloo in the presence of such sweetness?  Well, I love them anyway, and shall brood over them and pray for them while I live....

[Sidenote:  T.E.  Brown]

I am generally rather a happy “sort” of man, but your letter makes me very happy.  How kind you are!  Up in the morning betimes to catch people still in their beds warm with a generous enthusiasm, to surprise their sympathies before they had “faded into the light of common day,” and to collect all their “loving” words for me.  That was a good and faithful act; and I am deeply grateful.

Yes, the man was right.  I do love the poor wastrels, and you are right, I have it from my father.  He had a way of taking for granted, not only the innate virtue of these outcasts, but their unquestioned respectability.  He, at least, never questioned it.  The effect was twofold.

Some of the “weak brethren” felt uncomfortable at being met on those terms of equality.  My father might have been practising on them the most dreadful irony; and they were “that shy” and confused.  But it was not irony, not a bit of it; just a sense of respect, fine consideration for the poor “sowls,” well—­respect, that’s it, respect for all human beings; his respect made them respectable.  Wasn’t it grand?  To others my father was a perfect Port-y-shee.[3] To be in the same room with him was enough.  To be conscious that he was there, that he didn’t fight strange of them, that he never dreamt of “scowlin’” them, that they were treated as gentlemen.  Oh the comfort, the gerjugh,[4] the interval of repose!  Extraordinary, though, was it not?  To think of a Pazon respecting men’s vices even; not as vices, God forbid! but as parts of them, very likely all but inseparable from them; at any rate, theirs.  Pitying with an eternal pity, but not exposing, not rebuking.  My father would have considered he was “taking a liberty” if he had confronted the sinner with his sin.  Doubtless he carried this too far.  But don’t suppose for a moment that the “weak brethren” thought he was conniving at their weakness.  Not they—­they