n's hair
gray in a night. Such afflictions had not fallen to Soeren's lot. The
sorrows that had sprinkled his hair with gray, rounded his shoulders,
and made him old before his time, were of a lingering and vulgar type.
They were bread-sorrows.

Bread-sorrows are to other sorrows as toothache to other disorders.
A simple pain can be conquered in open fight; a nervous fever, or any
other "regular" illness, goes through a normal development and comes
to a crisis. But while toothache has the long-drawn sameness of the
tape-worm, bread-sorrows envelop their victim like a grimy cloud: he
puts them on every morning with his threadbare clothes, and he seldom
sleeps so deeply as to forget them.

It was in the long fight against encroaching poverty that Soeren had worn
himself out; and yet he was great at economy.

But there are two sorts of economy: the active and the passive. Passive
economy thinks day and night of the way to save a half-penny; active
economy broods no less intently on the way to earn a dollar. The first
sort of economy, the passive, prevails among us; the active in the great
nations--chiefly in America.

Soeren's strength lay in the passive direction. He devoted all his spare
time and some of his office-hours to thinking out schemes for saving and
retrenchment. But whether it was that the luck was against him, or, more
probably, that his income was really too small to support a wife and
five children--in any case, his financial position went from bad to
worse.

Every place in life seems filled to the uttermost, and yet there are
people who make their way everywhere. Soeren did not belong to this
class. He sought in vain for the extra work on which he and Marie
had reckoned as a vague but ample source of income. Nor had his good
connections availed him aught. There are always plenty of people ready
to help young men of promise who can help themselves; but the needy
father of a family is never welcome.

Soeren had been a man of many friends. It could not be said that they
had drawn back from him, but he seemed somehow to have disappeared
from their view. When they happened to meet, there was a certain
embarrassment on both sides. Soeren no longer cared for the things
that interested them, and they were bored when he held forth upon the
severity of his daily grind, and the expensiveness of living.

And if, now and then, one of his old friends invited him to a
bachelor-party, he did as people are apt to