For awhile, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. An
effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten,
but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother told
him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than
in stature.
For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great
sorrow of our father's death. Shortly after this we were sent to a day
school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy there, but my
brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge
of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a
little in English composition. When I was about fourteen my mother
capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she
had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was
enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome
income, but not, alas! before the death of my mother.
Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible with
us and explain it. She had become enamoured of those millenarian
opinions which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty years ago.
The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was
imbued with a conviction that all the many and varied horrors with which
it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment.
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