I was taken to my father's and left alone with him. Some years before, he had bought a house in Shaw called Ivy Cottage,--a house with a front of painted stucco, looking on a garden,--and though the gable end of the house looked on a street, the other end had a view over some fields, not then built over. My father rented one or two of these fields for his horses and cows, and some farm buildings just big enough for his small establishment. He did not keep a carriage, and had even given up his dogcart, but he always had a saddle-horse for himself and a pony for me; at one time I had two ponies. His horses were his only luxury, but he was as exacting about them as if he had been a rich nobleman. He would not tolerate careless grooming for an instant; bits and stirrups were always kept in a state of exemplary brightness, and when he rode through Shaw he was quite fit to be seen in Hyde Park. At that time he had a jet-black mare of a vicious temper, which only gratified his pride as a horseman, and it so happened (I am not inventing this for a contrast) that my pony was of the purest white with full mane and tail of the same, and shaped exactly like the sturdy war-horses in old pictures. As he was still a fine-looking, handsome man and I was a healthy boy, no doubt we looked well enough, and it is probable that many a poor factory lad envied me my good luck in being able to ride about in that way, instead of working in a mill; but I rode in constant dread of my father's heavy hunting-whip. It had a steel hammer at the end of the long handle, and if at any time its owner fancied that I was turning my toes out, he did not say anything, but with a dexterity acquired by practice he delivered a sharp blow with that hammer on my foot which made me writhe with pain. Nothing vexed him more than any appearance of gentleness or tenderness. I loved my pony, Lily, and did not like to beat her when she was doing her best, and she had hard work to keep up with my father's ill-tempered mare, so he would say, "D--n it, can't you whip her? Can't you whip better than that? The strokes of that whip of yours are so feeble that they wouldn't kill a fly!" Nobody could say that of _his_ hitting. I had a little young dog that was very dear to me, and when it pleased my father one day to walk into the kitchen, it unluckily so happened that the dog was, or seemed to be, in his way, so he gave it a kick that sent it into the middle of the room, and there it lay quivering. He took no notice of it, said what he had to say, in his usual peremptory tone, and then left the room. I knelt down by the poor little dog, which was in its death-agony, and shortly breathed its last.