ught hold of him, and pulled him away. He said he couldn't
stop to lick me then, but he'd do it within twenty-four hours. Then he
hit me when I called for help."

"The young scoundrel! That boy is worse than a pestilence in any
neighborhood. Mr. Baird seems to have no control over him."

Suddenly, and without any apparent reason, Mr. Lowington's compressed
lips and contracted brow relaxed, and his face wore its usual expression
of dignified serenity. Harry could not understand the cause of this
sudden change; but his uncle's anger had passed away. The fact was, that
Mr. Lowington happened to think, while his indignation prompted him to
resort to the severest punishment for Shuffles, that he himself had been
just such a boy as the plunderer of his cherished fruit. At the age of
fifteen he had been the pest of the town in which he resided. His father
was a very wealthy man, and resorted to many expedients to cure the boy
of his vicious propensities.

Young Lowington had a taste for the sea, and his father finally procured
a midshipman's warrant for him to enter the navy. The strict discipline
of a ship of war proved to be the "one thing needful" for the
reformation of the wild youth; and he not only became a steady young
man, but a hard student and an accomplished officer. The navy made a man
of him, as it has of hundreds of the sons of rich men, demoralized by
idleness and the absence of a reasonable ambition.

When Mr. Lowington was thirty years old, his father died, leaving to
each of his three children a quarter of a million; and he had resigned
his position in the navy, in order to take care of his property, and to
lead a more domestic life with his wife and daughter than the discipline
of the service would permit.

He had taken up his residence in Brockway, the early home of his wife.
It was a large town on the sea shore, only a few miles from the
metropolis of New England, thus combining all the advantages of a home
in the city and in the country. For several years he had been happy in
his peaceful retirement. But not wealth, nor even integrity and piety,
can bar the door of the lofty mansion against the Destroyer of the race.
His wife died of an hereditary disease, which gave no indication of its
presence till she had passed her thirtieth year. Two years later, his
daughter, just blooming into maturity, followed her mother down to the
silent tomb, stricken in her freshness and beauty by the same insidious
mal