story, and forensics of an
elementary sort.

With his good head for figures he doubted doctors and despised
preachers; he thought lawyers were all rascals, but he respected them
for their ability; he was not himself litigious, but he enjoyed the
intellectual encounters of a difficult lawsuit, and he often attended
a sitting of the fall term of court, when he went to town, for the
pleasure of hearing the speeches. He was a good citizen, and a good
husband. As a good father, he was rather severe with his children, and
used to whip them, especially the gentle Conrad, who somehow crossed him
most, till the twins died. After that he never struck any of them; and
from the sight of a blow dealt a horse he turned as if sick. It was a
long time before he lifted himself up from his sorrow, and then the will
of the man seemed to have been breached through his affections. He let
the girls do as they pleased--the twins had been girls; he let them go
away to school, and got them a piano. It was they who made him sell the
farm. If Conrad had only had their spirit he could have made him keep
it, he felt; and he resented the want of support he might have found in
a less yielding spirit than his son's.

His moral decay began with his perception of the opportunity of making
money quickly and abundantly, which offered itself to him after he sold
his farm. He awoke to it slowly, from a desolation in which he tasted
the last bitter of homesickness, the utter misery of idleness and
listlessness. When he broke down and cried for the hard-working,
wholesome life he had lost, he was near the end of this season of
despair, but he was also near the end of what was best in himself. He
devolved upon a meaner ideal than that of conservative good citizenship,
which had been his chief moral experience: the money he had already made
without effort and without merit bred its unholy self-love in him; he
began to honor money, especially money that had been won suddenly and
in large sums; for money that had been earned painfully, slowly, and
in little amounts, he had only pity and contempt. The poison of that
ambition to go somewhere and be somebody which the local speculators had
instilled into him began to work in the vanity which had succeeded his
somewhat scornful self-respect; he rejected Europe as the proper field
for his expansion; he rejected Washington; he preferred New York,
whither the men who have made money and do not yet know that money has