led it freely), but
for one consideration. Reckless as he was, that consideration stayed his
feet on the brink of a sacred threshold which he dared not pass, perhaps
to leave it behind him for ever--the threshold of his mother's door.

Strangely as it expressed itself, and irregularly as it influenced
his conduct, Zack's love for his mother was yet, in its own nature, a
beautiful and admirable element in his character; full of promise for
the future, if his father had been able to discover it, and had been
wise enough to be guided by the discovery. As to outward expression, the
lad's fondness for Mrs. Thorpe was a wild, boisterous, inconsiderate,
unsentimental fondness, noisily in harmony with his thoughtless,
rattle-pated disposition. It swayed him by fits and starts; influencing
him nobly to patience and forbearance at one time; abandoning him, to
all appearance, at another. But it was genuine, ineradicable fondness,
nevertheless--however often heedlessness and temptation might overpower
the still small voice in which its impulses spoke to his conscience, and
pleaded with his heart.

Among other unlucky results of Mr. Thorpe's conscientious imprisonment
of his son in a merchant's office, was the vast increase which Zack's
commercial penance produced in his natural appetite for the amusements
and dissipations of the town. After nine hours of the most ungrateful
daily labor that could well have been inflicted on him, the sight
of play-bills and other wayside advertisements of places of public
recreation appealed to him on his way home, with irresistible
fascination.

Mr. Thorpe drew the line of demarcation between permissible and
forbidden evening amusements at the lecture-rooms of the Royal and
Polytechnic Institutions, and the oratorio performances in Exeter Hall.
All gates opening on the outer side of the boundary thus laid down, were
gates of Vice--gates that no son of his should ever be allowed to pass.
The domestic laws which obliged Zack to be home every night at eleven
o'clock, and forbade the possession of a door-key, were directed
especially to the purpose of closing up against him the forbidden
entrances to theaters and public gardens--places of resort which Mr.
Thorpe characterized, in a strain of devout allegory, as "Labyrinths of
National Infamy." It was perfectly useless to suggest to the father (as
some of Zack's maternal relatives did suggest to him), that the son
was originally descended from Eve, a