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Rh a young man grown, but I never knew it. I was perfectly happy." He spoke of his father at some length and with a respect which I privately declined to emulate. Mr. Pickering had been, to my sense, a cold egotist, unable to conceive of any larger vocation for his son than to became a mechanical reflection of himself. "I know I've been strangely brought up," said my friend, "and that the result is something grotesque; but my education, piece by piece, in detail, became one of my father's personal habits, as it were. He took a fancy to it at first through his intense affection for my mother and the sort of worship he paid her memory. She died at my birth, and as I grew up, it seems that I bore an extraordinary likeness to her. Besides, my father had a great many theories; he prided himself on his conservative opinions; he thought the usual American laissez aller in education was a very vulgar practice, and that children were not to grow up like dusty thorns by the wayside. So you see," Pickering went on, smiling and blushing, and yet with something of the irony of vain regret, "I'm a regular garden plant. I 've been watched and watered and pruned, and, if there is any virtue in tending, I ought to take the prize at a flower-show. Some three years ago my father's health broke down and he was kept very much within doors. So, although I was a man grown, I lived altogether at home. If I was out of his sight