work, and the limbs should stiffen and straighten in the last chill of
mortality.

And yet John Crawford was really by no means the very old man indicated
by his white hairs, his dimmed eyes and his palsied shiverings. He was
very little past sixty, and at an age when under ordinary circumstances
several years of pleasant life might have been calculated upon. Nor was
he the victim of constitutional disease, which had been fought and
combatted until it had at last triumphed and brought down the torn
banner of manhood trailing in the dust. And still less had a life of
early indulgence and evil courses laid the mine for this
after-destruction. He was not old to senility; he belonged to a family
that had been noted for their long life, continued vigor and freedom
from hereditary disease; and he had carefully avoided those errors in
drink, food and personal indulgence which open the doors of life's
citadel to the invader from beyond the dark valley. What, then, was the
fatal secret? John Crawford was a suicide, and he had chosen a
peculiarly American mode of self-immolation. Or perhaps it may with more
propriety be said that he was a Faust in ordinary life, and that he had
called upon a national demon to be his aid and his foe. He had _worked
himself to death_--a phrase by many supposed to be hollow and unmeaning,
but one too sadly illustrated every day in our modern life.

Born wealthy, he seemed to have imbibed with his earliest breath the
impression that he was comparatively poor, and that only the most
laborious drudgery of mind and body, to which the toil of the slave in
the cotton-field is little more than play, could keep him from becoming
still poorer. He had been a miser at once of his pennies and his hours,
when a boy; and as he had grown older he had become a still worse miser
in every opportunity for gain, and a reckless spendthrift of his own
comfort and energy. No laborer on his farm had worked so many hours or
so laboriously, the impression having seemed all the while to abide with
him that if _he_ did not labor he would have only eye-service, and
nothing would be left him. When others had slept, and he had been
debarred from laboring with his hands, he had still toiled with his
brain, turning restlessly on his bed when he should have slept, and
planning to make his fertile acres still more productive or to add to
them others that lay in tempting proximity. When hours of relaxation had
been demanded by the c