scantiest
possible, and obtained by a few winter-months' attendance at a district
school. Left early to his own guidance, he had begun to be
self-dependent while yet a boy; and it was a condition aptly suited to
his natural force of will. Though now but twenty-two years old
(lacking some months, which are years in such a life), he had already
been, first, a country schoolmaster; next, a salesman in a country
store; and, either at the same time or afterwards, the political editor
of a country newspaper. He had subsequently travelled New England and
the Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
manufactory of cologne-water and other essences. In an episodical way
he had studied and practised dentistry, and with very flattering
success, especially in many of the factory-towns along our inland
streams. As a supernumerary official, of some kind or other, aboard a
packet-ship, he had visited Europe, and found means, before his return,
to see Italy, and part of France and Germany. At a later period he had
spent some months in a community of Fourierists. Still more recently
he had been a public lecturer on Mesmerism, for which science (as he
assured Phoebe, and, indeed, satisfactorily proved, by putting
Chanticleer, who happened to be scratching near by, to sleep) he had
very remarkable endowments.

His present phase, as a daguerreotypist, was of no more importance in
his own view, nor likely to be more permanent, than any of the
preceding ones. It had been taken up with the careless alacrity of an
adventurer, who had his bread to earn. It would be thrown aside as
carelessly, whenever he should choose to earn his bread by some other
equally digressive means. But what was most remarkable, and, perhaps,
showed a more than common poise in the young man, was the fact that,
amid all these personal vicissitudes, he had never lost his identity.
Homeless as he had been,--continually changing his whereabout, and,
therefore, responsible neither to public opinion nor to
individuals,--putting off one exterior, and snatching up another, to be
soon shifted for a third,--he had never violated the innermost man, but
had carried his conscience along with him. It was impossible to know
Holgrave without recognizing this to be the fact. Hepzibah had seen
it. Phoebe soon saw it likewise, and gave him the sort of confidence
which such a certainty inspires. She was startled, however, and
sometimes repelled,--not