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favourite and a creature of the back-stairs of Fortune. He could no
longer see without confusion one of these brave young fellows battling
up-hill against adversity. Had he not filched that fellow's birthright?
At best was he not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and
greedily devouring stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his
father, who had worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn
it; but by what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as
yet, done nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty, joined
to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these
considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position
might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good
services to mankind justify the appropriation of expense. It was not so
with my friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full
of that trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the
first blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce
in their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all
this while he suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on
his boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was
his best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free
himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and to
battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities
were thickest. When he thought of all the other young men of singular
promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home to
die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and
how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no
devotion of soul and body, that could repay and justify these
partialities. A religious lady, to whom he communicated these
reflections, could see no force in them whatever. "It was God's will,"
said she. But he knew it was by God's will that Joan of Arc was burnt at
Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by
God's will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused
neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate. He knew,
moreover, that altho