e had
friends to stimulate it;--summer friends, alas! too many of them proved
to be. His character was without reproach; his disposition easy and
genial; his mind of that happy middle order which always commands
respect, while it feels none of the restless ambition and impotent
longing for public recognition that usually attend the possession of
superior abilities.

Such was the position of Captain Wilde, and such the character he bore
during the first thirty-eight years of his life. Not many have known
a more lengthened prosperity,--and few, very few, a more sudden and
terrible reverse. Fortune, like a fond mistress, had lavished her gifts
on him without stint,--but, like a jealous one, seemed resolved that he
should owe everything to her gratuitous bounty, and the moment he sought
to win an object of desire by his own exertions turned her face away
forever, persecuting her former favorite thenceforth with vindictive
malice. Continuing to yield, for a time, with apparent complacency,
every boon he sought, she treacherously concealed therein the germs of
all his woes.

In the year 17--Captain Wilde was persuaded to better his already happy
condition by marriage. The lady he chose, or suffered to be chosen for
him, was a Miss M----, a scion of one of those extensive families, not
now so common as formerly, which by repeated intermarriage and always
settling together develop a spirit of clanship, so exclusive as to make
them almost incapable of any feeling of interest outside of their own
name and connection, and render them liable to regard any person
of different blood, who may happen to intermarry among them, as an
intruder. In some parts of the Union these clans may still be found
flourishing in considerable purity and vigor,--the same name sometimes
prevailing over a district of many miles,--a fact which an observant
traveller would surmise from a certain prevailing cast of form and
feature.

It was with a family of this kind that Captain Wilde was, in an evil
hour, induced to ally himself,--a step which soon proved to be the first
in a long career of misfortune. The lady possessed that worst of
all tempers, a quick and irritable, but at the same time hard and
unforgiving one. And she soon showed, that, in her estimation, the
feelings and interests of her husband were as nothing in comparison with
those of her family, and that, in any variance, she would leave the
former and cleave to the latter. Such variances w