home. When the return dinners were given, and he was asked to
come in at tea-time, and left to sit unregarded in a corner, it
never occurred to him to imagine that he was treated with any
want of consideration or respect. He was part of the furniture of
the house, and it was the business as well as the pleasure of his
life to turn himself to any use to which his brother might please
to put him.

So much for what I have heard from others on the subject of my
Uncle George. My own personal experience of him is limited to
what I remember as a mere child. Let me say something, however,
first about my parents, my sister and myself.

My sister was the eldest born and the best loved. I did not come
into the world till four years after her birth, and no other
child followed me. Caroline, from her earliest days, was the
perfection of beauty and health. I was small, weakly, and, if the
truth must be told, almost as plain-featured as Uncle George
himself. It would be ungracious and undutiful in me to presume to
decide whether there was any foundation or not for the dislike
that my father's family always felt for my mother. All I can
venture to say is, that her children never had any cause to
complain of her.

Her passionate affection for my sister, her pride in the child's
beauty, I remember well, as also her uniform kindness and
indulgence toward me. My personal defects must have been a sore
trial to her in secret, but neither she nor my father ever showed
me that they perceived any difference between Caroline and
myself. When presents were made to my sister, presents were made