w.
Besides, he despised mercantile life--without reason, of course; but he
was always notional. His love of literature was one of the rocks he
foundered on. He wasn't successful; his best compositions were too
delicate--fanciful--to please the popular taste; and then he was full of
the radical and fanatical notions which infected so many people at that
time in New England, and infect them now, for that matter; and his
sublimated, impracticable ideas and principles, which he kept till his
dying day, and which, I confess, alienated me from him, always staved
off his chances of success. Consequently, he never rose above the
drudgery of some employment on newspapers. Then he was terribly
passionate, not without cause, I allow; but it wasn't wise. What I mean
is this: if he saw, or if he fancied he saw, any wrong or injury done to
any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black in
the face and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the wrongdoer. I
do believe he would have visited his own brother with the most unsparing
invective, if that brother had laid a harming finger on a street-beggar,
or a colored man, or a poor person of any kind. I don't blame the
feeling; though with a man like him, it was very apt to be a false or
mistaken one; but, at any rate, its exhibition wasn't sensible. Well, as
I was saying, he buffeted about in this world a long time, poorly paid,
fed, and clad; taking more care of other people than he did of himself.
Then mental suffering, physical exposure, and want killed him."

The stern voice had grown softer than a child's. The same look of
unutterable tenderness brooded on the mournful face of the phantom by
his side; but its thin, shining hand was laid upon his head, and its
countenance had undergone a change. The form was still undefined; but
the features had become distinct. They were those of a young man,
beautiful and wan, and marked with great suffering.

A pause had fallen on the conversation, in which the father and daughter
heard the solemn sighing of the wintry wind around the dwelling. The
silence seemed scarcely broken by the voice of the young girl.

"Dear father, this was very sad. Did you say he died of want?"

"Of want, my child, of hunger and cold. I don't doubt it. He had
wandered about, as I gather, houseless for a couple of days and nights.
It was in December, too. Some one found him, on a rainy night, lying in
the street, drenched and burning with f