woman, lying cold and pale and insensible was very shocking to me." Contrary to the custom of Scottish gentlemen, he resolved to attend the funeral, and got through it very decently. Then he privately read the funeral service over the coffin in the presence of his sons, and was temporarily relieved by that.
But in the next days and weeks gradually there breaks over him such an overwhelming sense of what he has lost that he is "avid of death," and wonders why people are so eager to bring offspring into the world to meet with so much misery and so little real happiness. In his depressed fantastic moods his wife, he now remembers, had been wont to be his comforter and to suggest "rational thoughts" to him. The complex and annoying business of the estate she had in great part taken off his mind. The five sons and daughters—he is terribly attached to them, now that he thinks of them; and he has got to think of them now very hard. Their schooling, for example, must receive attention at once, and what problems for his poor head! The girls are too precocious and too independent to be sent to any ordinary governess; he himself has no "authority" over them and can influence them only by "affection." One of the boys he will send to Eton; the other he takes into his own bachelor apartment in London and provides a private tutor for him; but this arrangement worries him because the poor little fellow has no one to associate with but the old housekeeper and the footman. He rests badly at night, thinking of his sickly mind, his bereavement, the disappointment of his "hopes of success in life," the embarrassment of his affairs, "the disadvantage to my children in having so wretched a father," the
