r at home with him. You are glad when he leaves you to his
more composed wife. You never knew or heard of his saying or doing
anything wrong or even unbecoming. You look upon him as a peculiar
sort of man--well, somehow--but! He is at the bar defending that
woman, who sits by him, dressed in mourning--some chancery case. Or
it is a criminal case, and it is the widow's only son that Leland is
defending. If you had been in his office for the last week, you
would have acknowledged that he has studied the case, has prepared
himself on it as thoroughly as a man can. He is an ambitious man. He
intensely desires to make for himself a fortune and a position. His
address to the judge, or to the jury, as the case may be, is a good
one. Yet, somehow, he does not convince. He himself is carried away
by his own earnestness, but he does not carry away with him his
hearers. His remarks are interesting. People listen to him from
first to last closely. Yet his arguing does not, somehow, convince.
His pathos does not, somehow, melt. He is the sort of man that
people think of for the Legislature. No man ever thinks of him in
connexion with the Supreme Bench or Senate.

Wherein lies the defect? Arthur Leland is well read, a gentleman of
spotless character, of earnest application, of popular manners. Why
is not this man a man of more weight, power, standing? Why, you
answer, the man is just what he is. He fills just the position up to
which his force of mind raises him. Did he have more talent, he
would be more. No, sir. Every acquaintance he has known, he himself
knows, that he is capable of being much more than he is--somehow,
somehow he does not attain to it! It is this singular impression
Leland makes upon you. It is this singular, uneasy, unsatisfied
feeling he himself is preyed upon by. "He might be, but he is not,"
say his neighbours. "I am not, yet I might be," worries him as an
incessant and eternal truth.

It broke upon him like a revelation.

He was at work one fine morning in his garden, in a square in which
young watermelon plants of a choice kind were just springing. Willie
was there with him, just emerged fresh for fun from the waters of
sleep. Very anxious to be as near as possible to his father, who was
always his only playmate, Willie had strayed from the walk in which
his father had seated him, and stood beside his father. With a
quick, passionate motion, Leland seized his child, and placed him
violently back in the w