November Paternal Education. 5 



out a definite plan for the employment of our time. 

 Employment is necessary to us all, and in all circum- 

 stances, but it is most especially necessary to those who 

 have to bear some poignant and constantly-recurring 

 sorrow. In the solitude that death had made for me, 

 I felt myself drawn nearer to my remaining son, and 

 resolved to have him with me for a whole year in that 

 lonely dwelling of the Val Sainte Veronique. If this 

 arrangement retarded his school-work, there might be, 

 it seemed, an ample compensation in the constant exer- 

 cise of a beneficent paternal influence, whilst the life he 

 would lead with me was in the highest degree favora- 

 ble to his physical growth and health. Nor was it 

 inevitable, either, that his studies should be neglected 

 during the months he passed with me. Though quite 

 without ambition, I had employed a life of leisure in 

 maintaining and extending my own culture in various 

 directions, and might reasonably suppose myself capable 

 of teaching what my boy, at his age, could have learned 

 in an ordinary public school. The two disabilities which 

 so commonly make paternal education practically an 

 impossibility, the want of leisure and the want of the 

 necessary scholarship, did not exist in my case. I par- 

 ticularly desired to associate in my boy's mind the love 

 of nature with the love of literature, and art, and science ; 

 being firmly convinced, and knowing partly from my 

 own experience, that these pursuits enhance the value 

 of wealth to those who possess it, and are in themselves 

 true riches for many who have little material gold. I 

 determined, therefore, that we would not pass our time 



