deep
sadness there was a tender sweetness which was to me most interesting. I
never shall forget his smile--for laugh he never was heard to do.

"I soon discovered two things, that made me feel more for him than all
the rest. One, that he was an extremely well-informed boy, and had
received a home education of a very superior order; and the other, that
he was most unfortunate, and that his misfortunes had one peculiar
ingredient of bitterness in them, namely, that they were of a nature to
excite the scorn and contempt of the vulgar herd that surrounded him,
rather than to move their rude hearts to sympathy and pity.

"The propensity to good in rough, vulgar, thoughtless human beings, is
very apt to show itself in this way--in a sort of contemptuous disgust
against vice and folly, and an alienation from those connected with it,
however innocent We must accept it, upon reflection, I suppose, as a
rude form of good inclination; but I was too young for reflection--too
young to make allowances, too young to be equitable. Such conduct
appeared to me the most glaring and barbarous injustice, and excited in
me a passion ate indignation.

"Never did I hear St. Leger taunted, as he often was, with the frailties
of his mother or the errors of his father, but my heart was all in a
flame--my fist clinched--my cheek burning. Many a fellow have I laid
prostrate upon the earth with a sudden blow who dared, in my presence,
to chase the color from St. Leger's cheek by alluding to the subject.
There was this remarkable in St. Leger, by the way, that he never
colored when his mother's shame or his father's end was alluded to, but
went deadly pale.

"The history was a melancholy one of human frailty, and is soon told.
His mother had been extremely beautiful, his father the possessor of a
small independent fortune. They had lived happily together many years,
and she had brought him five children; four girls and this boy. I have
heard that the father doted with no common passion--in a _husband_,
Catherine--upon the beautiful creature, who was moreover accomplished
and clever. She seemed devoted to her children, and had given no common
attention to her boy in his early years. Hence his mental
accomplishments. The husband was, I suspect, rather her inferior in
intellect; and scarcely her equal in refinement and manner, but it's no
matter, it would have been probably the same whatever he had been. She
who will run astray under one set of cir