lop one-sided.
The poetic, upward tendency of his nature will help him, and his
devotion to his mother will hold him unwarped, while the struggle
with a great, pure, and utterly hopeless passion shall at least make
a sacred desert of his heart, where no unhallowed thought shall take
root. His was eminently a nature to be strengthened and purified by
suffering.

But he had the law in his hands. No matter how gnarled, warped or
obscure were the paths to its lurking-places, he would find them all
out, and pluck out all its meanings, and make its soul his own. He had
already learned from his brother the fallacy of the vulgar judgment of
the law, and he knew enough of history to know that some of the wisest
and greatest of men were eminent lawyers, and he thought nothing of
the moral dangers of the law as a profession. He had never been even
in a magistrate's court, but he had heard the legends and traditions
of the advocates; had read that eminent fiction, Wirt's Life of
Patrick Henry, and a volume of Charles Phillips's speeches, and had
felt that strong inner going forth of the soul that yearned to find
utterance in oversweeping speech.

Several times on his way home he stopped to read, and only suspended
his studies at the approach of evening, which found him east of the
pond, lying across his direct route, and which he found the means of
passing.

Blackstone he took in earnest, and smiled to find nothing that he did
not seem to comprehend, and often went back, fearing that the seeming
might not be the real meaning.

At the end of a week he returned to his kind friend, the General,
not without misgivings as to the result of his work. He found him at
leisure in the afternoon, and was received with much kindness.

"Well, how goes Blackstone?"

"Indeed I don't know; and I am anxious, if you have leisure, to find
out."

The General took the book, and turning to the definition of law, and
the statement of a few elementary principles, found that they were
thoroughly understood. Turning on, he paused with his finger in the
book.

"What do you think of the English Constitution?"

Bart looked a little puzzled.

"The English government seems to be an admirable structure--on paper;
but as to the principles that lie below it, or around it, that
govern and control its workings, and from which it can't depart, I am
cloudy."

"Yes, a good many are; but then there is, as you know, a great
unwritten English Constitution--