ad been made upon her
husband's feelings in more than one or two instances, absented
herself also. Mr. Howland, however much he might regret the hardness
of his unavailing opposition, was not the man to yield anything; and
so the breach remained open, in spite of all the grieving mother's
efforts to heal it.

Of all his children, Mr. Howland saw most to hope for in Edward, who
early perceived it to be his best policy to humor his father, and,
by that means, gain the ends he had in view. Cold in his
temperament, he was generally able to control himself in a way to
deceive his father as to the real motives that were in his heart.
Thus, while Mr. Howland, by his peculiar treatment of his children,
drove some of them off, he made this one a hypocrite.

Not the smallest affection existed between Edward and the other
children, who knew too well the selfish and evil qualities that lay
concealed beneath an external of propriety, put on especially for
his father's eyes. The mother, too, saw beneath the false exterior
assumed by her son, who treated her, except when his father was
present, with little respect or affection.

Martha, the youngest, was a sweet tempered girl, who had managed to
keep, as a general thing, beyond the sphere of antagonism that
marked the intercourse of the other children. To her mother, as she
grew up, she proved a source of comfort; and she could, at almost
any time, dispel by her smiles the cloud that too often rested on
the brow of her morose father.

On reaching his seventeenth year, Edward had been placed in a store
by his father, for the purpose of acquiring knowledge of mercantile
affairs. A young man in this position, if he has any ambition to
make his way in the world, soon gets his mind pretty well filled
with money-making ideas, and sees the way to wealth opening in a
broad vista before him. Every day he hears about this, that, and the
other one, who started in business but a few years before, with
little or no capital, and who are now worth their tens of thousands;
and he thus learns to aspire after wealth, without being made to
feel sensibly the fact, that the number who grow rich rapidly are as
one to a hundred compared with those who succeed as the result of
small beginnings united with long continued and untiring
application. Long before Edward reached his twenty-first year, he
had so fully imbibed the spirit of the atmosphere in which he
breathed, that his mind was made up to go in