THE TRUANT. 41 



were roused to fiercer opposition. He carried about with 

 him a long clasp-knife, with which to repel any attack 

 that might be made upon him by his uncles. They next 

 had recourse to expostulation. They represented to 

 him, with affectionate earnestness, that he was losing 

 his sole chance of escaping a life of manual labour, and 

 urged that the possession of faculties whose right use 

 would enable him to rise in life, made it the more 

 disgraceful in him to sink actually below his father's 

 station. The arguments were unanswerable, and Hugh 

 seems to have made no attempt to answer them ; but 

 he held his own course. His mother, profoundly afflicted 

 by the seeming disappointment of her hopes, gave 

 him up altogether, and bestowed her affection on his 

 two sisters. In the winter of 1816, both the little 

 girls died. Hugh loved them, and was deeply af- 

 fected when the music of their voices, which had 

 cheered the cottage so long, passed suddenly away for 

 ever. But keener far was the pang which struck to 

 his heart when he overheard his mother remarking how 

 different would her condition have been, had it pleased 

 Heaven to take her son and leave one of her daughters. 

 ' It was bitter for me/ he says, ' to think, and yet I 

 could not think otherwise, that she had cause of sorrow, 

 both for those whom she had lost, and for him who 

 survived; and I would willingly have laid down my 

 life, could the sacrifice have restored to her one of my 

 sisters/ A noble impulse and sincere, but an impulse 

 merely ; in a few weeks he was again at the head of his 

 band. ' A particular way of thinking/ he remarks, ' a 

 peculiar course of reading, a singular train of oral nar- 

 ration, had concurred from the period at which I first 

 thought, read, or listened, in giving my character v the 

 impress it then bore, and it was not in the power of 



