202 Later Years 



VII 



Above all things, he was affectionate and stead- 

 fast in friendship and affection. His devotion to 

 his wife the letters I have quoted faintly show. 

 Wherever he was, he wanted her to share with 

 him the beauty and the fun of his surroundings, 

 and always minimised the danger, knowing her 

 anxiety for him. I confess in old days I used to 

 contemplate with a feeling of irritation the way 

 in which my father used to reconcile and explain it 

 to himself, that because he had a wife and family 

 it was his dire and awful duty to go and hunt 

 grizzly bears in a Red-Indian-infested district, and 

 the like. I fancy now that I was wrong to have 

 felt any irritation with him. It is undoubtedly true 

 that he could have made more money had he settled 

 down to an English practice as a physician ; also 

 undoubtedly true that he thoroughly enjoyed grizzly 

 bear hunting and ' loved the bright eyes of danger ' ; 

 still, there was in him enough of the natural man to 

 give him the instinctive feeling that the duty of a 

 father of a family was to go out hunting and fighting 

 while his wife kept the home. But I am fully con- 

 vinced his taking this view of life really caused the 

 illness which killed my mother. For months at a 

 time she was kept in an unbroken strain of nervous 

 anxiety about him. There were months when no 

 letter came ; then when one came it was merely 

 retrospectively reassuring for the period behind its 

 rather vague date, and usually indicated that he was 

 forthwith going on somewhere else, where his chance 



