erse appeared to be concentrated
thitherward.

It is my private opinion that, at this period of his life,
Hollingsworth was fast going mad; and, as with other crazy people
(among whom I include humorists of every degree), it required all the
constancy of friendship to restrain his associates from pronouncing him
an intolerable bore. Such prolonged fiddling upon one string--such
multiform presentation of one idea! His specific object (of which he
made the public more than sufficiently aware, through the medium of
lectures and pamphlets) was to obtain funds for the construction of an
edifice, with a sort of collegiate endowment. On this foundation he
purposed to devote himself and a few disciples to the reform and mental
culture of our criminal brethren. His visionary edifice was
Hollingsworth's one castle in the air; it was the material type in
which his philanthropic dream strove to embody itself; and he made the
scheme more definite, and caught hold of it the more strongly, and kept
his clutch the more pertinaciously, by rendering it visible to the
bodily eye. I have seen him, a hundred times, with a pencil and sheet
of paper, sketching the facade, the side-view, or the rear of the
structure, or planning the internal arrangements, as lovingly as
another man might plan those of the projected home where he meant to be
happy with his wife and children. I have known him to begin a model of
the building with little stones, gathered at the brookside, whither we
had gone to cool ourselves in the sultry noon of haying-time. Unlike
all other ghosts, his spirit haunted an edifice, which, instead of
being time-worn, and full of storied love, and joy, and sorrow, had
never yet come into existence.

"Dear friend," said I once to Hollingsworth, before leaving my
sick-chamber, "I heartily wish that I could make your schemes my
schemes, because it would be so great a happiness to find myself
treading the same path with you. But I am afraid there is not stuff in
me stern enough for a philanthropist,--or not in this peculiar
direction,--or, at all events, not solely in this. Can you bear with
me, if such should prove to be the case?"

"I will at least wait awhile," answered Hollingsworth, gazing at me
sternly and gloomily. "But how can you be my life-long friend, except
you strive with me towards the great object of my life?"

Heaven forgive me! A horrible suspicion crept into my heart, and stung
the very core of it as wi