"My sands of life are running out, and before it is too late I write to you, probably for the last time. You will be glad to hear from me direct, I know, for your nature is different from mine, and your heart has always been open to tender impressions. When I cast you from me I dare say you suffered, but after my first unjust feeling of resentment was over my sufferings have been far greater than yours could have been. It is the honest truth that in abandoning you I abandoned the only real pleasure which life had for me; but my obstinacy, dear lad, would not allow me to take steps towards a reconcilement. It may be that had you done so I should still have hardened my heart against you, and should have done you the injustice of thinking that you wished to propitiate me for selfish motives. In these, as I believe them to be, the last hours of my life, I have no wish to spare myself; I can see more clearly now than I have done for many a long year, and my pride deserves no excuse. This 'pride' has been the bane of my life; it has sapped the fountains of innocent enjoyment; it has enveloped me in a steel shroud which shut me out from love and sympathy. You, and you alone, since I was a young man, were able to penetrate this shroud, and even to you I showed only that worse side of myself by which the world must have judged me. I did not give myself the trouble of inquiring whether the counsel I was instilling into you was true or false; I see now that it was false, and it is some comfort to me to know that your nature was too simple and honourable, too loving and sympathetic, to be warped by it. Early in life I met with a disappointment which soured me. There is no need to inscribe that page in this letter--a loving letter, I beg you to believe. It was a disappointment in love, and from the day I experienced it I became soured and embittered. I was a poor man at the time, and I devoted myself to the task of making money; I made it, and much good has it done me. With wealth at my command I set up two dark starting points, which I allowed to influence me in every question under consideration--one, money, the other human selfishness. These, with a dogged and obstinate belief in the correctness of my own judgment on every matter which came before me, made me what I have been. I had no faith, I had no religion; my life was godless, and the attribute of selfishness which I ascribed to the actions of all other men guided and controlled me in mine. You never really saw me in my true character. That I regarded money as the greatest good I did not conceal from you, but other sides of me, even more objectionable than this, were not, I think, revealed to you. The mischief I would have done you glanced off harmlessly, as the action you took in ruining yourself to pay your father's debts proved. You were armed with an shield, my dear lad, a shield in which shone the religious principle, honourable conduct, and faith in human nature. Be thankful for that armour, Basil; it is not every man who is so blessed. And let me tell you this. It is often an inheritance, and if not that, it is often furnished by a mother's loving teaching and influence. You had the sweetest of mothers; mine was of harder grain. I lay no blame upon her, nor, I repeat, do I seek to excuse myself, but I would point out to you, as a small measure of extenuation, that some of us are more fortunate than others in the early training we receive, and in the possession of inherited virtues.