day-school, tried the experiment
of placing him at one where the boys were much of his own age. But
Sidney, on the third day, came back with a black eye, and he would
return no more. Philip several times thought of changing their lodging
for one where there were young people. But Sidney had taken a fancy to
the kind old widow who was their landlady, and cried at the thought of
removal. Unfortunately, the old woman was deaf and rheumatic; and though
she bore teasing ad libitum, she could not entertain the child long on
a stretch. Too young to be reasonable, Sidney could not, or would not,
comprehend why his brother was so long away from him; and once he said,
peevishly,--

"If I had thought I was to be moped up so, I would not have left Mrs.
Morton. Tom was a bad boy, but still it was somebody to play with. I
wish I had not gone away with you!"

This speech cut Philip to the heart. What, then, he had taken from the
child a respectable and safe shelter--the sure provision of a life--and
the child now reproached him! When this was said to him, the tears
gushed from his eyes. "God forgive me, Sidney," said he, and turned
away.

But then Sidney, who had the most endearing ways with him, seeing his
brother so vexed, ran up and kissed him, and scolded himself for being
naughty. Still the words were spoken, and their meaning rankled deep.
Philip himself, too, was morbid in his excessive tenderness for this
boy. There is a certain age, before the love for the sex commences, when
the feeling of friendship is almost a passion. You see it constantly
in girls and boys at school. It is the first vague craving of the heart
after the master food of human life--Love. It has its jealousies, and
humours, and caprices, like love itself. Philip was painfully acute to
Sidney's affection, was jealous of every particle of it. He dreaded lest
his brother should ever be torn from him.

He would start from his sleep at night, and go to Sidney's bed to see
that he was there. He left him in the morning with forebodings--he
returned in the dark with fear. Meanwhile the character of this young
man, so sweet and tender to Sidney, was gradually becoming more hard and
stern to others. He had now climbed to the post of command in that rude
establishment; and premature command in any sphere tends to make men
unsocial and imperious.

One day Mr. Stubmore called him into his own countinghouse, where stood
a gentleman, with one hand in his coatpocket,