t my complexion! But I don't
believe I'd take it with _him_ thrown in."

It is doubtful whether young girls of Miss Matchin's kind are ever
quite candid in their soliloquies. It is certain she was not when she
assured herself that she did not know why she went to Farnham's house
that morning. She went primarily to make his acquaintance, with the
hope also that by this means she might be put in some easy and genteel
way of earning money. She was one of a very numerous class in large
American towns. Her father was a carpenter, of a rare sort. He was a
good workman, sober, industrious, and unambitious. He was contented
with his daily work and wage, and would have thanked Heaven if he could
have been assured that his children would fare as well as he. He was of
English blood, and had never seemed to imbibe into his veins the
restless haste and hunger to rise which is the source of much that is
good and most that is evil in American life. In the dreams of his early
married days he created a future for his children, in the image of his
own decent existence. The boys should succeed him in his shop, and the
daughters should go out to service in respectable families. This
thought sweetened his toil. When he got on well enough to build a shop
for himself, he burdened himself with debt, building it firmly and
well, so as to last out his boys' time as well as his own. When he was
employed on the joiner-work of some of those large houses in Algonquin
Avenue, he lost himself in reveries in which he saw his daughters
employed as house-maids in them. He studied the faces and the words of
the proprietors, when they visited the new buildings, to guess if they
would make kind and considerate employers. He put many an extra stroke
of fine work upon the servants' rooms he finished, thinking: "Who knows
but my Mattie may live here sometime?"

But Saul Matchin found, like many others of us, that fate was not so
easily managed. His boys never occupied the old shop on Dean Street,
which was built with so many sacrifices and so much of hopeful love.
One of them ran away from home on the first intimation that he was
expected to learn his father's trade, shipped as a cabin-boy on one of
the lake steamers, and was drowned in a storm which destroyed the
vessel. The other, less defiant or less energetic, entered the shop and
attained some proficiency in the work. But as he grew toward manhood,
he became, as the old man called it, "trifling"; a word