ne (his old pursuer) talking in his ear; and I
used to wonder whether I more admired or more despised this quivering
heroism for evil. The image that occurred to me after his visit was
just; I had been butted by a lamb, and the phase of life that I was now
studying might be called the Revolt of a Sheep.

It could be said of him that he had learned in sorrow what he taught in
song--or wrong; and his life was that of one of his victims. He was born
in the back parts of the State of New York; his father a farmer, who
became subsequently bankrupt and went West. The lawyer and money-lender
who had ruined this poor family seems to have conceived in the end a
feeling of remorse; he turned the father out indeed, but he offered, in
compensation, to charge himself with one of the sons: and Harry, the
fifth child, and already sickly, was chosen to be left behind. He made
himself useful in the office: picked up the scattered rudiments of an
education; read right and left; attended and debated at the Young Men's
Christian Association and in all his early years was the model for a
good story-book. His landlady's daughter was his bane. He showed me her
photograph; she was a big, handsome, dashing, dressy, vulgar hussy,
without character, without tenderness, without mind, and (as the result
proved) without virtue. The sickly and timid boy was in the house; he
was handy; when she was otherwise unoccupied, she used and played with
him--Romeo and Cressida; till in that dreary life of a poor boy in a
country town, she grew to be the light of his days and the subject of
his dreams. He worked hard, like Jacob, for a wife; he surpassed his
patron in sharp practice; he was made head clerk; and the same night,
encouraged by a hundred freedoms, depressed by the sense of his youth
and his infirmities, he offered marriage and was received with laughter.
Not a year had passed, before his master, conscious of growing
infirmities, took him for a partner. He proposed again; he was accepted;
led two years of troubled married life; and awoke one morning to find
his wife had run away with a dashing drummer, and had left him heavily
in debt. The debt, and not the drummer, was supposed to be the cause of
this hegira; she had concealed her liabilities, they were on the point
of bursting forth, she was weary of Bellairs; and she took the drummer
as she might have taken a cab. The blow disabled her husband, his
partner was dead; he was now alone in the busines