“‘Pray, don’t say anything more on the subject, Mr Jackson,’ I replied. ‘It has been a happiness to me to have been led to befriend your child; and, indeed, he has become so dear to me, that I know not how to part with him. But, of course, as he is yours, not mine, you are at liberty to take him when you will, or to leave him with me till you can provide a settled home for him.’
“My visitor was greatly moved, and grasped my hand most warmly. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘the best recompense I can make to one who has acted towards me as you have done, is to lay myself under still deeper obligation to you; and I will do so. I may tell you thus much about myself—I am not what I seem. I have a great object which I am seeking to accomplish, and I am, I think, on the road to success. I shall be most thankful to leave my boy in your hands, at any rate, for the present, and shall be most happy to charge myself with all his expenses at home and at school.’
“‘Nay, Mr Jackson,’ I replied; ‘while he remains with me it shall be my privilege to supply him with all that he needs, as I can well afford to do, and I shall be further truly happy to be of personal service to yourself if I can.’
“‘I accept your offer with gratitude,’ he replied. ‘You can help me, I dare say. I want employment as a clerk or book-keeper. Dare you trust me yourself, or dare you recommend me to another? I dare myself affirm that I will not disappoint an employer who may trust me.’
“There was a frankness and sincerity in his manner which completely disarmed me of all suspicion or hesitation; whatever colonial prudence might suggest, I could not distrust him. So I offered him at once a place in my own office with a moderate stipend. He accepted it without hesitation, and lived in my house as a member of the family; and never did employer have a more intelligent and faithful worker. As for the child, his father never in the least interfered with my management of him, though I brought him up after my own utterly unfashionable, or perhaps more properly speaking, old-fashioned ideas. On the contrary, he warmly approved of my system.
“‘I cannot tell you,’ he said one day, soon after he had come to live with me, ‘how truly grateful I am to see you forming my dear boy’s character in the way you are doing. I want him to be the very opposite to what I was myself at his age, and to what the generality of children are now. I was brought up just to please myself and to have my own way—to be, in fact, a little incarnation of self-will and selfishness. I was allowed to ask for everything I liked at the table, no restriction being put upon my self-indulgence. I went where I liked, and did what I liked, and was never checked except when I was in the way, or had become intolerably troublesome. I was placed under no regular discipline, and was allowed to thrust myself and my opinions forward amongst my seniors and those who were my superiors in everything but worldly position; and as I grew older, and became inconveniently self-asserting, I was alternately snubbed and humoured according to the whim or temper of those who claimed authority over me. And what was the result? Alas! Early reckless extravagance followed by ruin, and a character which might have been moulded into something noble, now for a long time shapeless and distorted. And my boy—well, I am only too thankful that he has fallen into your hands out of his unworthy father’s.’ He spoke these words with deep emotion.
“‘I am truly glad, Mr Jackson,’ I said, ‘that you are able to look at things in this better and clearer light. I quite agree with you about the present bringing up of children. For a few years they are treated as little idols by parents, who are too selfish to give themselves the pain and trouble of correcting and disciplining them, and this, too, even in cases where the parents themselves are true Christians; and then, when they begin to get unbearable, and have passed out of the winning ways of early childhood, they are too often thrown back upon themselves, and made to suffer the penalty of neglect of discipline and training, which ought properly to be inflicted on the parents, who have not done their duty towards them.’
“‘It is so. I have seen it; I have felt it, Colonel Dawson,’ he replied warmly; ‘and so I just leave Horace’s education entirely in your hands.’
“And thus it was that I brought up my dear nephew, as I still continued to call him, in my own way—that is to say, to eat what was given him, to do what was told him, to go where I allowed him, and to have as much liberty as I thought good for him; to listen when his elders were speaking, to be diligent in his lessons, early in his hours of rising and going to bed, and regular in all his habits. And he will tell you himself, I don’t doubt, as he has told me over and over again, that, so far from feeling this discipline and these wholesome restraints a bondage, he was as happy as the day was long under them. And I am sure of this, dear friends, that the little, stuck-up, pampered, self-willed, selfish children which abound in our day, who are supposed to rejoice in having their own way, are really slaves to themselves, as well as a burden to their friends, and are strangers to that vigorous enjoyment which is the privilege of a childhood passed under judicious and even discipline.
“Well, so it was with Horace; and so his father rejoiced to find it. And what made me rejoice still more was the happy conviction that a deeper work still was beginning to manifest itself in the heart and life of the dear boy. Yes, you may think it strange, dear friends that I am entering into all these particulars on an occasion so public as the present, and with your young squire by my side; but I have a reason for it, as you will see by-and-by, and I am doing it with the full consent and approval of my dear nephew himself. Let me, then, proceed with my story.