19/23 And your dear wife still alive to share your trouble. Just think for a moment of what happened to my father. His wife and six children all swept off in a month--and I just born, to be brought up with a bottle!" I never meant, of course, to have said a word of this, but was carried away by that common old idea of consoling great sorrow with a greater one. And the sense of my imprudence broke vexatiously upon me when the old man came and stood between me and his daughter's portraits. |