man; a country minister with a
small salary and a large family; and his education, instead of being a
blessing, has been an actual curse to him. He has pined for all sorts
of things which he couldn't have--books, engravings, foreign travel,
leisure for study, nice people and nice things about him. I've made
up my mind that, whatever else I may be, I won't be poor, and I
won't be a minister, and I won't have a wife and brats hanging
to me. I tell you that, next to ill health, poverty is the worst
thing that can happen to a man. All the sentimental grievances
that are represented in novels and poetry as the deepest of human
afflictions,--disappointed ambitions, death of friends, loss of faith,
estrangements, having your girl go back on you,--they don't signify
very long if a man has sound health and a full purse. The ministers
and novel writers and fellows that preach the sentimental view of life
don't believe it themselves. It's a kind of professional or literary
quackery with them. Just let them feel the pinch of poverty, and then
offer them a higher salary or a chance to make a little 'sordid gain'
in some way, and see how quick they'll accept the call to 'a higher
sphere of usefulness.' Berk, hand over a match, will you; this cigar
has gone out."

"Loud cries of 'We will--we will'!" said Berkeley. "But can it be? Has
the poick turned cynic, and the sickly sentimentalist become a
materialist and a misogynist?"

(Armstrong was our class poet, and had worried the official muse on
Presentation Day to the utterance of some four hundred lines filled
with allusions to Alma Mater, Friendship's Altar, the Elms of Yale,
etc. His piece on that occasion had been "pronounced, by a well-known
literary gentleman who was present, equal to the finest productions of
our own Willis.")

"I'll bet the cigars," said Doddridge, "that Armstrong marries the
first girl he sees in New York."

"Yes," said Clay, "his boarding-house keeper's daughter."

"And has a dozen children before he is forty," added Berkeley; "a
dozen kids, and all of them girls. Charley is sure to be a begetter of
wenches."

"And writes birthday odes 'To My Infant Daughter' for the 'Home
Journal,'" continued Clay.

"No, no," said the victim of this banter, shaking his head solemnly.
"I shall give no hostages to Fortune. I mean to live snug and carry as
little sail as possible: to leave only the narrowest margin out for
Fate to tread on. The man who has the fewest