ecause each human being has, after all, a
small fraction of individuality about him which gives him a flavor, so
that he is distinguishable from others by his friends or in a court of
justice, and which occasionally makes a genius or a saint or a
criminal of him. It is well that young persons cannot read these fatal
oracles of Nature. Blind impulse is her highest wisdom, after all. We
make our great jump, and then she takes the bandage off our eyes. That
is the way the broad sea-level of average is maintained, and the
physiological democracy is enabled to fight against the principle of
selection which would disinherit all the weaker children. The
magnificent constituency of mediocrities of which the world is made
up,--the people without biographies, whose lives have made a clear
solution in the fluid menstruum of time, instead of being precipitated
in the opaque sediment of history----

But this is a narrative, and not a disquisition.

CHAPTER XX.

FROM WITHOUT AND FROM WITHIN.

There were not wanting people who accused Dudley Venner of weakness
and bad judgment in his treatment of his daughter. Some were of
opinion that the great mistake was in not "breaking her will" when she
was a little child. There was nothing the matter with her, they said,
but that she had been spoiled by indulgence. If _they_ had had the
charge of her, they'd have brought her down. She'd got the upperhand
of her father now; but if he'd only taken hold of her in season! There
are people who think that everything may be done, if the doer, be he
educator or physician, be only called "in season." No doubt,--but _in
season_ would often be a hundred or two years before the child was
born; and people never send so early as that.

The father of Elsie Venner knew his duties and his difficulties too
well to trouble himself about anything others might think or say. So
soon as he found that he could not govern his child, he gave his life
up to following her and protecting her as far as he could. It was a
stern and terrible trial for a man of acute sensibility, and not
without force of intellect and will, and the manly ambition for
himself and his family-name which belonged to his endowments and his
position. Passive endurance is the hardest trial to persons of such a
nature.

What made it still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing
his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could
not talk of them even with those wh