In those last months, she scarcely ever got into a railway carriage or into an omnibus, without presently offering tracts to the persons sitting within reach of her, or endeavouring to begin a conversation with some one of the sufficiency of the Blood of Jesus to cleanse the human heart from sin.  Her manners were so gentle and persuasive, she looked so innocent, her small, sparkling features were lighted up with so much benevolence, that I do not think she ever met with discourtesy or roughness.  Imitative imp that I was, I sometimes took part in these strange conversations, and was mightily puffed up by compliments paid, in whispers, to my infant piety.  But my Mother very properly discouraged this, as tending in me to spiritual pride.

If my parents, in their desire to separate themselves from the world, had regretted that through their happiness they seemed to have forfeited the Christian privilege of affliction, they could not continue to complain of any absence of temporal adversity.  Everything seemed to combine, in the course of this fatal year 1856, to harass and alarm them.  Just at the moment when illness created a special drain upon their resources, their slender income, instead of being increased, was seriously diminished.  There is little sympathy felt in this world of rhetoric for the silent sufferings of the genteel poor, yet there is no class that deserves a more charitable commiseration.

At the best of times, the money which my parents had to spend was an exiguous and an inelastic sum.  Strictly economical, proud—­in an old-fashioned mode now quite out of fashion—­to conceal the fact of their poverty, painfully scrupulous to avoid giving inconvenience to shop-people, tradesmen or servants, their whole financial career had to be carried on with the adroitness of a campaign through a hostile country.  But now, at the moment when fresh pressing claims were made on their resources, my Mother’s small capital suddenly disappeared.  It had been placed, on bad advice (they were as children in such matters), in a Cornish mine, the grotesque name of which, Wheal Maria, became familiar to my ears.  One day the river Tamar, in a playful mood, broke into Wheal Maria, and not a penny more was ever lifted from that unfortunate enterprise.  About the same time, a small annuity which my Mother had inherited also ceased to be paid.

On my Father’s books and lectures, therefore, the whole weight now rested, and that at a moment when he was depressed and unnerved by anxiety.  It was contrary to his principles to borrow money, so that it became necessary to pay doctor’s and chemist’s bills punctually, and yet to carry on the little household with the very small margin.  Each artifice of economy was now exercised to enable this to be done without falling into debt, and every branch of expenditure was cut down, clothes, books, the little garden which was my Father’s pride, all felt the pressure of new poverty.  Even our