own as the Goodrich Place,--a fine,
comfortable, well-stocked and well-tilled farm, presenting an appearance
of prosperity to the eye of the observer and calculated to make the
impression that its owner must be well-to-do in the world. As we have
heretofore hinted, however, Ward Glazier failed to prosper there. Why
this was the case it is hard to tell. A late writer has suggested that
"not only the higher intellectual gifts but even the finer moral
emotions are an incumbrance to the fortune-hunter." That "a gentle
disposition and extreme frankness and generosity have been the ruin in a
worldly sense of many a noble spirit;" and he adds that "there is a
degree of cautiousness and distrust and a certain insensibility and
sternness that seem essential to a man who has to bustle through the
world and engineer his own affairs,"--and if he be right, the matter
may be easily understood.

However that may be, he failed to prosper, and as business misfortunes
began to fall thick and fast upon his head, he gave up the farm to his
creditors, together with all his other effects, and took up his abode at
the Davis Place.

Who the particular Davis was whose name clung to the place we have been
unable to ascertain, but when Ward Glazier moved there, the house seemed
fairly to scowl upon the passer-by--so utterly unprepossessing was its
appearance. A rude, capacious wooden structure, it stood fronting the
highway, and was a place where the beautiful had no existence. The very
soil looked black and rough--the vegetation rugged. Every inclosure was
of stone or knotted timber, and even a dove-cot which in its fresher
days some hand had placed upon the lawn, was now roofless and shattered,
and lay prone upon the ground, a shapeless mass of collapsed boards. The
lawn--if such it could be named--resembled a bleak shore, blackened with
stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers had long years before gone
down at sea. The broken windows in the dormitories were festooned with
cobwebs that had housed long lines of ancestral spiders, and where a
pane or two of glass remained among the many empty frames, one fancied a
gibbering spectre might look out from the gloomy depths behind.

The back-ground against which this bleak and sombre place was thrown was
no less grim and stern. Huge rocks in tiers, like stone coffins, rose in
fierce ranges one above another up and up--back and farther back until
they reached a point from whence a miniature forest