ore often than I could wish, seen a case like this. A
young man of good family sent away to college. He gets in with the wrong
crowd, for they are not all angels in colleges yet, quite. Gets to
smoking and drinking and gambling, improper hours, bad companions, and
all that. His real friends try to advise him, but without effect. By and
by the college authorities remonstrate with him, and he tries to
improve, but without much success after the first pull. And after a
while, very reluctantly, he is suspended, and sent home in disgrace. He
feels very bad, and makes good resolutions and earnest promises, and
when he returns he does do much better for a time. But it does not last
long. Soon he is in with the old crowd again, the old round of habits
and dissipations, only now it gets worse than before; the pace is
faster. And the upshot of it all is that he is called up before the
authorities and expelled, sent home in utter disgrace, not to return.

And here is his chum who roomed with him, ate with him, lived with him.
He says, "Well, I declare, I am all broken up over Jim. It's too bad! He
was "hail-fellow, well met," and now he has gone like that. I'm awfully
sorry. It's too bad! too bad!!" And by and by he forgets about it
except as an unpleasant memory roused up now and then. And here is one
of his professors who knew him best perhaps, and liked him. "Well," he
says, "it is too bad about young Collins. Strange, too, he came of good
family; good blood in his veins; and yet he seems to have gone right
down with the ragtag. It's too bad! too bad!! I am so sorry." And the
matter passes from his mind in the press of duties and is remembered
only occasionally as one of the disagreeable things to be regretted, and
perhaps philosophized over.

And there is the boy's father's partner, down in the home town. "Well,"
he soliloquizes, "it is too bad about Collins' boy. He is all broken up
over it, and no wonder. Doesn't it seem queer? That boy has as good
blood as there is: good father, lovely mother, and yet gone clean to the
bad, and so young. It is too bad! I am awfully sorry for Collins." And
in the busy round of life he forgets, save as a bad dream which will
come back now and then.

But down in that boy's home there is a woman--a mother,
heart-broken--secretly bleeding her heart out through her eyes. She goes
quietly, faithfully about her round of life, but her hair gets thinner,
and the gray streaks it plainer, her form be