o a county jail, and, from the force of melancholy associations, had
lost all its original beauty in his eyes. The world was now within his
grasp--its busy scenes all before him: these he expected to find replete
with happiness and decked with flowers.

We will not follow our young adventurer to the academic halls, or trace
his path through foreign lands. It is enough for our purpose that he
acquired little knowledge at college, save the knowledge of evil; and
that he met with many misadventures, and suffered much inconvenience and
mortification, during his journey through the Continent. He soon
discovered that the world was not a paradise; that his uncle was not a
wise man; and that human nature, with some trifling variations, which
were generally more the result of circumstances and education than of
any peculiar virtue in the individual, was much the same at home and
abroad; that men, in order to conform to the usages of society, were
often obliged to appear what they were not, and sacrifice their best
feelings to secure the approbation of persons whom in secret they
despised; that he who would fight the battle of life and come off
victorious, must do it with other weapons than those with which fashion
and pleasure supply their champions.

Years of reckless folly fled away, before these wholesome lessons of
experience were forced upon Algernon's unguarded heart. Fearful of
falling into his brother's error, he ran into the contrary extreme, and
never suspected himself a dupe, until he found himself the victim of
some designing adventurer, who had served a longer apprenticeship to the
world, and had gained a more perfect knowledge of the fallibility of its
children.

His father groaned over his extravagant bills: yet not one-third of the
money remitted to Algernon was expended by him. His uncle was the
principal aggressor; for he felt no remorse while introducing his nephew
to scenes which, in his early days, had effected his own ruin. Their
immoral tendency, and the sorrow and trouble they were likely to entail
upon the young man, by arousing the anger of his father, never gave him
the least uneasiness. He had squandered such large sums of money at the
gambling-houses in Paris, that he dared not show his face at the Hall
until the storm was blown over; and to such a thoughtless, extravagant
being as Alfred Hurdlestone, "sufficient to the day was the evil
thereof."

Without any strikingly vicious propensities, it w