Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/23

 *ing up the soft loam with his feet, spending long days in dreams of the miraculous future, and evenings in conversation with his mother,—that wonderful mother whose mind was so secure, whose conceptions of the heavy duties that wait upon the gift of life were so odd, yet so exact. He recalled her as a gaunt, strong, and tall woman, with a red face, rather coarse hands, and a shabby black hat tied in a frayed velvet bow under her chin.

He could never remember to have heard her complain of life and fortune. She wore the same clothes year after year; sought no amelioration from her wearisome and unremitting labors; never seemed to vary in her sturdiness of health and temper; and always maintained plain, robust, material opinions. Her life had been a sordid and continuous struggle for the acquisition of money, a pound here and a pound there, but there was no trace of avarice in her character. She had educated him wholly beyond her means, but permitted herself no romance about it. She believed that being her son, and the son of the man she had married,—whom life had cut off in an arbitrary manner before he had had a chance to display his gifts,—he would be a man of sound abilities. She had decided in her own mind three months before he was born that to have a fair field for his talents he must go to the bar.

"I have a little imagination, but not enough," she would say to him, as he sat with her an hour after supper in the winter evenings. "Your father was a man of good imagination, and used to read the best authors to me. My mental limitations did not permit me to understand their truth, but I always felt their power. Your father was a brilliant