carried away by his discourse; I believe two or three
heads of families in the neighbourhood gave their sons absolute liberty of
choice in the matter of their professions - and am not sure that they had not
afterwards considerable cause to regret having done so. The visitors seeing
Theobald look shy and wholly unmoved by the exhibition of so much consideration
for his wishes, would remark to themselves that the boy seemed hardly likely to
be equal to his father and would set him down as an unenthusiastic youth who
ought to have more life in him, and be more sensible of his advantages than he
appeared to be. No one believed in the righteousness of the whole transaction
more firmly than the boy himself; a sense of being ill at ease kept him silent,
but it was too profound and too much without break for him to become fully alive
to it, and come to an understanding with himself. He feared the dark scowl would
come over his father's face upon the slightest opposition. His father's violent
threats, or coarse sneers would not have been taken au sérieux by a stronger
boy, but Theobald was not a strong boy, and rightly or wrongly gave his father
credit for being quite ready to carry his threats into execution. Opposition had
never got him anything he wanted yet, nor indeed had yielding, for the matter of
that, unless he happened to want exactly what his father wanted for him. If he
had ever entertained thoughts of resistance he had none now, and the power to
oppose was so completely lost for want of exercise that hardly did the wish
remain; there was nothing left save dull acquiescence as of an ass crouched
beneath two burdens. He may have had an ill-defined sense of ideals that were
not his actuals; he might occasionally dream of himself as a soldier or a sailor
far away in foreign lands, or even as a farmer's boy upon the wolds, but there
was not go enough in him for there to be any chance of his turning his dreams
into realities, and he drifted on with his stream which was a slow, and, I am
afraid, a muddy one.
    I think the church catechism has a good deal to do with the unhappy
relations which commonly even now exist between parents and children. That work
was written too exclusively from the parental point of view; the person who
composed it did not get a few children to come in and help him; he was clearly
not young himself, nor should I say it was the work of one who even liked
children - in spite of the words my good child which if I