Gerald Raymount went walking through the pine-woods on his hills. Little
satisfaction lay in land to which such a son was to succeed! No! the
land was his own! not an acre, not as much as would bury him, should the
rascal have! Alas! he had taken honesty as a matter of course in
_his_ family. Were they not _his_ children? He had not thought
of God as the bond of life between him and them, nor sought to nourish
the life in them. He was their father and was content with them. He had
pondered much the laws by which society proceeds and prospers, but had
not endeavoured in his own case to carry towards perfection the relation
that first goes to the making of society: the relation between himself
and his children had been left to shift for itself. He had never known
anything of what was going on in the mind of his son. He had never asked
himself if the boy loved the truth--if he cared that things should stand
in him on the footing of eternal reason, or if his consciousness was
anything better than the wallowing of a happy-go-lucky satisfaction in
being. And now he was astonished to find _his_ boy no better than
the common sort of human animal! My reader may say he was worse, for
there is the stealing; but that is just the point in which I see him
likest the common run of men, while in his home relations he was worse.
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