ting office from time immemorial.

He had every sort of luck. He was left a widower with but one son. The
boy he sent to the grammar school; he must be educated, not so much
for his own sake as to train a successor to the business; and Sechard
treated the lad harshly so as to prolong the time of parental rule,
making him work at case on holidays, telling him that he must learn to
earn his own living, so as to recompense his poor old father, who was
slaving his life out to give him an education.

Then the Abbe went, and Sechard promoted one of his four compositors to
be foreman, making his choice on the future bishop's recommendation of
the man as an honest and intelligent workman. In these ways the worthy
printer thought to tide over the time until his son could take a
business which was sure to extend in young and clever hands.

David Sechard's school career was a brilliant one. Old Sechard, as a
"bear" who had succeeded in life without any education, entertained a
very considerable contempt for attainments in book learning; and when
he sent his son to Paris to study the higher branches of typography,
he recommended the lad so earnestly to save a good round sum in the
"working man's paradise" (as he was pleased to call the city), and so
distinctly gave the boy to understand that he was not to draw upon the
paternal purse, that it seemed as if old Sechard saw some way of gaining
private ends of his own by that sojourn in the Land of Sapience. So
David learned his trade, and completed his education at the same time,
and Didot's foreman became a scholar; and yet when he left Paris at the
end of 1819, summoned home by his father to take the helm of business,
he had not cost his parent a farthing.

Now Nicolas Sechard's establishment hitherto had enjoyed a monopoly of
all the official printing in the department, besides the work of the
prefecture and the diocese--three connections which should prove mighty
profitable to an active young printer; but precisely at this juncture
the firm of Cointet Brothers, paper manufacturers, applied to the
authorities for the second printer's license in Angouleme. Hitherto old
Sechard had contrived to reduce this license to a dead letter, thanks
to the war crisis of the Empire, and consequent atrophy of commercial
enterprise; but he had neglected to buy up the right himself, and this
piece of parsimony was the ruin of the old business. Sechard thought
joyfully when he heard the news that