least solitary moments were those in which I pushed off in my boat, at evening, towards the centre of the lake; it seemed to me that the sky, and the glowing mountain-tops, and the wide blue water, surrounded me with a cherishing love such as no human face had shed on me since my mother’s love had vanished out of my life.  I used to do as Jean Jacques did—­lie down in my boat and let it glide where it would, while I looked up at the departing glow leaving one mountain-top after the other, as if the prophet’s chariot of fire were passing over them on its way to the home of light.  Then, when the white summits were all sad and corpse-like, I had to push homeward, for I was under careful surveillance, and was allowed no late wanderings.  This disposition of mine was not favourable to the formation of intimate friendships among the numerous youths of my own age who are always to be found studying at Geneva.  Yet I made one such friendship; and, singularly enough, it was with a youth whose intellectual tendencies were the very reverse of my own.  I shall call him Charles Meunier; his real surname—­an English one, for he was of English extraction—­having since become celebrated.  He was an orphan, who lived on a miserable pittance while he pursued the medical studies for which he had a special genius.  Strange! that with my vague mind, susceptible and unobservant, hating inquiry and given up to contemplation, I should have been drawn towards a youth whose strongest passion was science.  But the bond was not an intellectual one; it came from a source that can happily blend the stupid with the brilliant, the dreamy with the practical:  it came from community of feeling.  Charles was poor and ugly, derided by Genevese gamins, and not acceptable in drawing-rooms.  I saw that he was isolated, as I was, though from a different cause, and, stimulated by a sympathetic resentment, I made timid advances towards him.  It is enough to say that there sprang up as much comradeship between us as our different habits would allow; and in Charles’s rare holidays we went up the Saleve together, or took the boat to Vevay, while I listened dreamily to the monologues in which he unfolded his bold conceptions of future experiment and discovery.  I mingled them confusedly in my thought with glimpses of blue water and delicate floating cloud, with the notes of birds and the distant glitter of the glacier.  He knew quite well that my mind was half absent, yet he liked to talk to me in this way; for don’t we talk of our hopes and our projects even to dogs and birds, when they love us?  I have mentioned this one friendship because of its connexion with a strange and terrible scene which I shall have to narrate in my subsequent life.

This happier life at Geneva was put an end to by a severe illness, which is partly a blank to me, partly a time of dimly-remembered suffering, with the presence of my father by my bed from time to time.  Then came the languid monotony of convalescence, the days gradually breaking into variety and distinctness as my strength enabled me to take longer and longer drives.  On one of these more vividly remembered days, my father said to me, as he sat beside my sofa—­