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He had just completed his thirteenth year when his mother died. He felt that he had lost a real friend, for during the twelve months of her illness he had come to know her personally, as it were, and established a relationship between them which is rare between parents and children. He was a clever boy and had developed early; he had read a great many books besides his schoolbooks, for his father, a professor of botany at the Academy of Science, possessed a very good library. His mother, on the other hand, was not a well-educated woman; she had merely been head housekeeper and children’s nurse in her husband’s house. Numerous births and countless vigils (she had not slept through a single night for the last sixteen years), had exhausted her strength, and when she became bedridden, at the age of thirty-nine, and was no longer able to look after her house, she made the acquaintance of her second son; her eldest boy was at a military school and only at home during the week ends. Now that her part as mother of the family was played to the end and nothing remained of her but a poor invalid, the old-fashioned relationship of strict discipline, that barrier between parents and children, was superseded. The thirteen-year-old son was almost constantly at her bedside, reading to her whenever he was not at school or doing home lessons. She had many questions to ask and he had a great deal to explain, and therefore all those distinguishing marks erected by age and position vanished, one after the other: if there was a superior at all, it was the son. But the mother, too, had much to teach, for she had learnt her lessons in the school of life; and so they were alternately teacher and pupil. They discussed all subjects. With the tact of a mother and the modesty of the other sex she told her son all he ought to know of the mystery of life. He was still innocent, but he had heard many things discussed by the boys at school which had shocked and disgusted him. The mother explained to him all she could explain; warned him of the greatest danger to a young man, and exacted a promise from him never to visit a house of ill-fame, not even out of curiosity, because, as she pointed out, in such a case no man could ever trust himself. And she implored him to live a temperate life, and turn to God in prayer whenever temptation assaulted him.

His father was entirely devoted to science, which was a sealed book to his wife. When the mother was already on the point of death, he made a discovery which he hoped would make his name immortal in the scientific world. He discovered, on a rubbish heap, outside the gates of Stockholm, a new kind of goose-foot with curved hairs on the usually straight-haired calyx. He was in communication with the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and the latter was even now considering the advisability of including the new variety in the “Flora Germanica”; he was daily expecting to hear whether or not the Academy had decided to immortalise his name by calling the plant Chenopodium Wennerstroemianium. At his wife’s death-bed he was absentminded, almost unkind, for he had just received an answer in the affirmative, and he fretted because neither he nor his wife could enjoy the great news. She thought only of heaven and her children. He could not help realising that to talk to her now of a calyx with curved hairs would be the height of absurdity; but, he justified himself, it was not so much a question of a calyx with straight or curved hairs, as of a scientific discovery; and, more than that, it was a question of his future and the future of his children, for their father’s distinction meant bread for them.