d eminently displayed, and here he was, ab agendo, at
seventy-three; while Joseph, barely two years younger, and in the most
excellent preservation, had disgraced himself through life by idleness
and eccentricity. Embarked in the leather trade, he had early wearied
of business, for which he was supposed to have small parts. A taste for
general information, not promptly checked, had soon begun to sap his
manhood. There is no passion more debilitating to the mind, unless,
perhaps, it be that itch of public speaking which it not infrequently
accompanies or begets. The two were conjoined in the case of Joseph; the
acute stage of this double malady, that in which the patient delivers
gratuitous lectures, soon declared itself with severity, and not many
years had passed over his head before he would have travelled thirty
miles to address an infant school. He was no student; his reading was
confined to elementary textbooks and the daily papers; he did not even
fly as high as cyclopedias; life, he would say, was his volume. His
lectures were not meant, he would declare, for college professors; they
were addressed direct to 'the great heart of the people', and the
heart of the people must certainly be sounder than its head, for his
lucubrations were received with favour. That entitled 'How to Live
Cheerfully on Forty Pounds a Year', created a sensation among the
unemployed. 'Education: Its Aims, Objects, Purposes, and Desirability',
gained him the respect of the shallow-minded. As for his celebrated
essay on 'Life Insurance Regarded in its Relation to the Masses', read
before the Working Men's Mutual Improvement Society, Isle of Dogs, it
was received with a 'literal ovation' by an unintelligent audience of
both sexes, and so marked was the effect that he was next year elected
honorary president of the institution, an office of less than
no emolument--since the holder was expected to come down with a
donation--but one which highly satisfied his self-esteem.

While Joseph was thus building himself up a reputation among the more
cultivated portion of the ignorant, his domestic life was suddenly
overwhelmed by orphans. The death of his younger brother Jacob saddled
him with the charge of two boys, Morris and John; and in the course of
the same year his family was still further swelled by the addition of a
little girl, the daughter of John Henry Hazeltine, Esq., a gentleman
of small property and fewer friends. He had met Joseph only o