Robert Buchanan | Page 5

of his fellow missionaries excelled him in oratorical gifts, but in knowledge of the subjects discussed, and in range of general information he had no equal among them. His manners were far from courtly, but his strong intellectual qualities attracted Miss Williams, and before they had been very long acquainted they were engaged to be married. The marriage took place in the autumn of 1840, and on the 18th day of August, 1841, Robert, their only son, was born. About twelve years later Mrs. Buchanan gave birth to a little girl, who died in infancy, so Robert was practically their only child.
The fact that his parents had no other surviving children was, I think, the chief misfortune of his life, as well as its crowning blessing. An only child, he became the idol of his mother, whose affection for him he returned with absolutely overmastering intensity. His feeling towards his father, he often said, was one of ordinary, though strong affection, but towards his mother it was far from ordinary. His earliest memories were of her beauty and quite girlish grace. She was a particularly young-looking woman at all times, and he could never, at any hour of his life, realise the fact that she was growing old. In looking at her even when she was close upon eighty years of age, he saw only the soft blue eyes and golden hair as he had seen them long ago, and I have heard him remark again and again that it always gave him a shock if any one happened to refer to her as "old." " I cannot imagine my mother old," he would say, and again, the very day after she died, "I do not feel that she is dead, for I cannot imagine the world without my mother!" As I have said, he adored her, and was in turn adored. Thus reared and sheltered from every harsh influence, he grew sensitive beyond measure, and his naturally nervous temperament became so highly strung, that he was ill prepared for the struggles of the world. This was a misfortune, and the cause later on of infinite pain and heartache. He was spoiled by too much tenderness and solicitude, weakened by too many gusts of childish passion which wrung his heart the more because he was not openly demonstrative, but given on the contrary to the concealment of his deepest feelings. But the influence of his mother was not merely emotional. He learned from her teaching to be sympathetic and tender-hearted, to worship goodness and to rise in revolt against any form of injustice or oppression. The words of the great Humanitarians were on her lips, she had learned them at her father's knee, and he learned them in turn at hers.
From his parents he had no religious training whatever, yet slowly and imperceptibly there grew in him a deep and abiding sense of natural religion, of awe and reverence for the mysterious Power which moves the world. He could never remember when he first began to say his prayers, but he knew that as a child he said them, and later on to my knowledge on two memorable occasions he said them--first, by the dead body of his wife, next by the dead body of his mother, she who to him was the symbol of all that was beautiful and loving in humanity.
1 "Latter Day Leaves."
CHAPTER II.
EARLY MEMORIES, 184150
"THE reward of Socialist missionaries in those days was, I fear, quite inadequate to their personal necessities, and my father was one of many who found it necessary to eke out a subsistence by reporting for the Press. Just after I was born he joined the staff of the Sun newspaper, combining with his occupation of reporter that of small news-vendor. A few months later, when I was still an infant, my mother went to join the community at Ham Common, in Surrey, the manager of which was Mr. William Oldham, whose chief eccentricity was a preference for wet sheets to dry ones. The inmates of Alcott House, or, as it was called, the Concordian, were vegetarians, objected to the use of even salt and tea, and, naturally, to all stimulants, and advocated entire abstinence from indulgences of the flesh, including marriage. My mother, as a married woman, was refused admission to the inner, or perfectly sacred, circle, which was presided over by Oldham, the grand "Pater." A diet consisting almost entirely of uncooked cabbage is apt to grow monotonous, and my mother did not remain at Ham Common long. A year or two later, however, when New Harmony was established, she went on Robert Owen's special invitation to Queenwood, near Wisbech, Norfolk, a baronial structure surrounded by spacious woods and promenades. The inmates of Queenwood, though they were all believers in