a courtship as brief as it was happy. For a year he shared the
hap-hazard life of his wife and father-in-law; then Nature saw fit to
alter the small _menage_. The artist died, and almost at the same time
little John was born.

With the coming of the child, Henderson conceived a new impetus and also
a new sense of bitterness and self-reproach. A homeless failure may
tramp the face of the earth and feel no shame; but the unsuccessful man
who is a husband and a father moves upon a different plane. He has
ties--responsibilities--something for which he must answer to himself.

There is pathos in the picture of a man setting forth at fifty-one to
conquer the world anew; and its grim futility is not good to look upon.
Henderson had failed for himself, and he failed equally for others. The
years that followed his marriage were but the unwinding of a pitifully
old story. Before his boy was ten years old he had run the gamut of
humiliation; he had done everything that the pinch of poverty could
demand, except apply for aid to his brother Andrew. This even the
faithful, patient wife who had stood stanch in all his trials never
dared to suggest.

In this atmosphere John learned to look upon life. A naturally
high-spirited and courageous child, he gradually fell under that spell
of premature understanding that is the portion of a mind forced too soon
to realize the significance of ways and means. Day by day his serious
eyes grew to comprehend the lines that marked his mother's beloved face;
to know the cost at which his own education, his own wants, were
supplied by the tired, silent father, who, despite his shabby clothes
and prematurely broken air, seemed perpetually to move in the glamour of
a past romance; and gradually, steadily, passionately, as these things
came home to him, there grew up in his youthful mind a desire to
compensate by his own future for the struggle he daily witnessed.

Many were the nights when--his lessons for the next day finished, and
his father away at one of the many precarious tasks that kept the
household together--he would draw close to his mother, as she sat
industriously sewing, and beg her for the hundredth time to recount the
story of the grim Scotch home where his father had lost his birthright;
of the stern old grandfather who had died inexorably unforgiving; of the
unknown uncle of whom rumor told many eccentric stories. And, roused by
the recital, his boyish face would flush, his boyish m