knowledge and all his pleasure seemed but the means by which he
endeavored to gain her deeper affection. She indeed became his companion
in science, and her own just and well regulated taste constantly
furnished him new motives for adding to his wide accumulations of art.

I can recall with some difficulty the day when with my father in a room
immediately below the bedroom in which my mother was confined he awaited
the summons of the doctors to see his wife for the last time. It was a
rainy day, the clouds were drifting across a dull November sky. Through
an opening in the trees then leafless, the Hudson was visible, even then
flaked with ice, while an early snow covered the sloping lawn and
whitened the broad-limbed oaks. I remember indistinctly his leading me
by the hand through the hallway up the stairs, and softly whispering to
me to be quite still, entered the large room dimly lit where my mother,
attended by a nurse and a doctor, lay on the white bed. I remember being
kissed by her and then being led from the room by the nurse. My father
doubtless lingered until all was over, and the dear associate of his
life, whose tenderness and charity had made all who approached her
grateful, whose genial and appreciative mind had supplied the stimulus
of recognition he needed for his own studies, passed away. After that I
seemed dimly to recall a period of extreme loneliness when I was left in
charge of a private instructor, while my father, as I later learned,
bewildered by his great loss, and temporarily driven into a sort of
madness, wandered in an aimless track of travel over the United States.

On his return the sharp recurrence to the scenes of his former happiness
renewed the bitterness of his spirit, and he reluctantly concluded to
abandon his home. His own thoughts had not as yet clearly formed any
decision in his mind as to where he would go or what he would do. It was
inevitable, however, that he should revert to his scientific