"I told you, the other day, that I would give you, at some early
opportunity, a brief sketch of my life. This confidence is due to you in
return for yours; and since you will soon leave me, and I am an old
man, whose life no prudent calculation can fix, I may as well choose the
present time to favour you with my confessions."

Clarence expressed and looked his interest, and the old man thus
commenced,--

THE HISTORY OF A VAIN MAN.

I was the favourite of my parents, for I was quick at my lessons, and my
father said I inherited my genius from him; and comely in my person, and
my mother said that my good looks came from her. So the honest pair saw
in their eldest son the union of their own attractions, and thought they
were making much of themselves when they lavished their caresses upon
me. They had another son, poor Arthur,--I think I see him now! He was a
shy, quiet, subdued boy, of a very plain personal appearance. My father
and mother were vain, showy, ambitious people of the world, and they
were as ashamed of my brother as they were proud of myself. However, he
afterwards entered the army and distinguished himself highly. He died in
battle, leaving an only daughter, who married, as you know, a nobleman
of high rank. Her subsequent fate it is now needless to relate.

Petted and pampered from my childhood, I grew up with a profound belief
in my own excellences, and a feverish and irritating desire to impress
every one who came in my way with the same idea. There is a sentence
in Sir William Temple, which I have often thought of with a painful
conviction of its truth: "A restlessness in men's minds to be something
they are not, and to have something they have not, is the root of all
immorality." [And of all good.--AUTHOR.] At school, I was confessedly
the cleverest boy in my remove; and, what I valued equally as much, I
was the best cricketer of the best eleven. Here, then, you will say
my vanity was satisfied,--no such thing! There was a boy who shared my
room, and was next me in the school; we were, therefore, always thrown
together. He was a great stupid, lubberly cub, equally ridiculed by the
masters and disliked by the boys. Will you believe that this individual
was the express and almost sole object of my envy? He was more than
my rival, he was my superior; and I hated him with all the unleavened
bitterness of my soul.

I have said he was my superior: it was in one thing. He could balance a
stick, nay, a