The Fair Haven | Page 7

the morning. But the arrival of this lady and her
being put to sleep in the nursery were great events to us in those days,
and being particularly wanted to go to sleep, we of course sat up in bed
talking and keeping ourselves awake till she should come upstairs.
Perhaps we had fancied that she would give us something, but if so we
were disappointed. However, whether this was the case or not, we were
wide awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no particular
object to gain, we made no pretence of sleeping. The lady kissed us
both, told us to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then
began doing her hair.
I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered
a good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto
been beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and
clothes which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to
me, "all solid woman," but that women were not in reality more
substantially built than men, and had legs as much as he had, a fact
which he had never yet realised. On this he for a long time considered
them as impostors, who had wronged him by leading him to suppose
that they had far more "body in them" (so he said), than he now found
they had. This was a sort of thing which he regarded with stern moral
reprobation. If he had been old enough to have a solicitor I believe he
would have put the matter into his hands, as well as certain other things
which had lately troubled him. For but recently my mother had bought
a fowl, and he had seen it plucked, and the inside taken out; his
irritation had been extreme on discovering that fowls were not all solid
flesh, but that their insides--and these formed, as it appeared to him, an
enormous percentage of the bird--were perfectly useless. He was now

beginning to understand that sheep and cows were also hollow as far as
good meat was concerned; the flesh they had was only a mouthful in
comparison with what they ought to have considering their apparent
bulk-- insignificant, mere skin and bone covering a cavern. What right
had they, or anything else, to assert themselves as so big, and prove so
empty? And now this discovery of woman's falsehood was quite too
much for him. The world itself was hollow, made up of shams and
delusions, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was to
be exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and
everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto.
If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;
nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he
had himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of
changing; there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all
things were to be perfectly consistent, and all premises to be carried
with extremest rigour to their legitimate conclusions. Heaven was to be
very neat (for he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden
shocks to the nervous system, such as those caused by dogs barking at
him, or cows driven in the streets. God was to resemble my father, and
the Holy Spirit to bear some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother.
Such were the ideal theories of his childhood--unconsciously formed,
but very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made such modifications
as were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every
modification was an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful
resistance to what he recognised as his initial mental defect.
I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the
preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice it
as an almost invariable rule that children's earliest ideas of God are
modelled upon the character of their father--if they have one. Should
the father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of
showing it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the child having
learned to look upon God as His Heavenly Father through the Lord's
Prayer and our Church Services, will feel towards God as he does

towards his own father; this conception will stick to a man for years
and years after he has attained manhood--probably it will never leave
him. For all children love their fathers and mothers, if these last will
only let them; it is not a little unkindness that will kill so hardy a