Confession

likely to suffer outrage at my hands. In every other respect our moods and tempers were utterly unlike. I thought him dull, very frequently, when he was only balancing between jealous and sensitive tastes;--and ignorant of the actual, when, in fact, his ignorance simply arose from the decided preference which he gave to the foreign and abstract. He was contemplative--an idealist; I was impetuous and devoted to the real and living world around me, in which I was disposed to mingle with an eagerness which might have been fatal; but for that restraint to which my own distrust of all things and persons habitually subjected me.

CHAPTER II.

BOY PASSIONS--A PROFESSION CHOSEN.

Between William Edgerton and Julia Clifford my young life and best affections were divided, entirely, if not equally. I lived for no other--I cared to seek, to know, no other--and yet I often shrunk from both. Even at that boyish period, while the heavier cares and the more painful vexations of l