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[331] very severely). One day he was detained from the dinnertable by a man who begged for a pair of trousers; and, thinking he might as well give him the pair he had on, and don a new pair he had lately purchased, he went up-stairs and made the change. He was somewhat dashed, on coming to the table and explaining matters, by my mother's exclamation: ‘If you gave him the pair you had on, you gave him your new trousers!’ But he laughed and said: ‘Well, he has a good pair, anyhow.’ If my mother sometimes chided him for his excess of generosity, she was not less prone to give freely to those who needed it; and not only did she part with her own things, but she would unshrinkingly assume the far harder, and, to her, particularly disagreeable, task of soliciting aid from others. On one occasion she went from store to store the whole length of Washington Street, selling the pamphlet narrative of a French political refugee who had escaped from Cayenne, until1 she had disposed of four hundred copies and thus made a hundred dollars for him.

Of necessity, my father was a great wanderer on both continents, and he never wearied of seeing new faces and new types of mankind, and making new friends. Yet, like Wordsworth's ‘Happy Warrior,’ his was

A soul whose master-bias leans
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.

I cannot recall his ever coming home in other than a bright and joyous mood, bringing with him the ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.’ Had he arrived distraught or depressed, I think the mere sight of wife and children would have gladdened him. The brunt of domestic discipline generally falls on the mother, and ours, in sheer fatigue, sometimes laid the day's naughtiness before her husband for his moral support of her censure; but the offence was too remote, and the child-nature too near, to evoke the proper warmth of reproof from him. Both our parents appealed to us as reasonable and affectionate beings, never using violence and seldom force with tolerably

1 Ante, 3.464.

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