golden
coil.

She threw her head back, her eyes narrowing and her forehead drawing down
so that Dick thought her head actually flattened itself. He started
involuntarily; for she looked so like the little girl who had struck him
with those sharp flashing teeth, that the whole scene came back, and he
felt the stroke again as if it had just been given, and the two white
scars began to sting as they did after the old Doctor had burned them
with that stick of gray caustic, which looked so like a slate pencil, and
felt so much like the end of a red-hot poker.

It took something more than a gallop to set him right after this. The
next day he mentioned having received a letter from a mercantile agent
with whom he had dealings. What his business was is, perhaps, none of
our business. At any rate, it required him to go at once to the city
where his correspondent resided.

Independently of this "business" which called him, there may have been
other motives, such as have been hinted at. People who have been living
for a long time in dreary country-places, without any emotion beyond such
as are occasioned by a trivial pleasure or annoyance, often get crazy at
last for a vital paroxysm of some kind or other. In this state they rush
to the great cities for a plunge into their turbid life-baths, with a
frantic thirst for every exciting pleasure, which makes them the willing
and easy victims of all those who sell the Devil's wares on commission.
The less intelligent and instructed class of unfortunates, who venture
with their ignorance and their instincts into what is sometimes called
the "life" of great cities, are put through a rapid course of instruction
which entitles them very commonly to a diploma from the police court. But
they only illustrate the working of the same tendency in mankind at large
which has been occasionally noticed in the sons of ministers and other
eminently worthy people, by many ascribed to that intense congenital
hatred for goodness which distinguishes human nature from that of the
brute, but perhaps as readily accounted for by considering it as the
yawning and stretching of a young soul cramped too long in one moral
posture.

Richard Veneer was a young man of remarkable experience for his years.
He ran less risk, therefore, in exposing himself to the temptations and
dangers of a great city than many older men, who, seeking the livelier
scenes of excitement to be found in large towns as a relaxation