The Project Gutenberg eBook of Passages from a Relinquished Work, by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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Title: Passages from a Relinquished Work

Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Release Date: September 6, 2003 [eBook #9232]
[Most recently updated: November 9, 2022]

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by: David Widger and Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PASSAGES FROM A RELINQUISHED WORK ***




Passages from a Relinquished Work

by Nathaniel Hawthorne



AT HOME

From infancy I was under the guardianship of a village parson, who made
me the subject of daily prayer and the sufferer of innumerable stripes,
using no distinction, as to these marks of paternal love, between
myself and his own three boys. The result, it must be owned, has been
very different in their cases and mine, they being all respectable men
and well settled in life; the eldest as the successor to his father’s
pulpit, the second as a physician, and the third as a partner in a
wholesale shoe-store; while I, with better prospects than either of
them, have run the course which this volume will describe. Yet there is
room for doubt whether I should have been any better contented with
such success as theirs than with my own misfortunes,—at least, till
after my experience of the latter had made it too late for another
trial.

My guardian had a name of considerable eminence, and fitter for the
place it occupies in ecclesiastical history than for so frivolous a
page as mine. In his own vicinity, among the lighter part of his
hearers, he was called Parson Thumpcushion, from the very forcible
gestures with which he illustrated his doctrines. Certainly, if his
powers as a preacher were to be estimated by the damage done to his
pulpit-furniture, none of his living brethren, and but few dead ones,
would have been worthy even to pronounce a benediction after him. Such
pounding and expounding the moment he began to grow warm, such slapping
with his open palm, thumping with his closed fist, and banging with the
whole weight of the great Bible, convinced me that he held, in
imagination, either the Old Nick or some Unitarian infidel at bay, and
belabored his unhappy cushion as proxy for those abominable
adversaries. Nothing but this exercise of the body while delivering his
sermons could have supported the good parson’s health under the mental
toil which they cost him in composition.

Though Parson Thumpcushion had an upright heart, and some called it a
warm one, he was invariably stern and severe, on principle, I suppose,
to me. With late justice, though early enough, even now, to be
tinctured with generosity I acknowledge him to have been a good and
wise man after his own fashion. If his management failed as to myself,
it succeeded with his three sons; nor, I must frankly say, could any
mode of education with which it was possible for him to be acquainted
have made me much better than what I was or led me to a happier fortune
than the present. He could neither change the nature that God gave me
nor adapt his own inflexible mind to my peculiar character. Perhaps it
was my chief misfortune that I had neither father nor mother alive; for
parents have an instinctive sagacity in regard to the welfare of their
children, and the child feels a confidence both in the wisdom and
affection of his parents which he cannot transfer to any delegate of
their duties, however conscientious. An orphan’s fate is hard, be he
rich or poor. As for Parson Thumpcushion, whenever I see the old
gentleman in my dreams he looks kindly and sorrowfully at me, holding
out his hand as if each had something to forgive. With such kindness
and such forgiveness, but without the sorrow, may our next meeting be!

I was a youth of gay and happy temperament, with an incorrigible levity
of spirit, of no vicious propensities, sensible enough, but wayward and
fanciful. What a character was this to be brought in contact with the
stern old Pilgrim spirit of my guardian! We were at variance on a
thousand points; but our chief and final dispute arose from the
pertinacity with which he insisted on my adopting a particular
profession; while I, being heir to a moderate competence, had avowed my
purpose of keeping aloof from the regular business of life. This would
have been a dangerous resolution anywhere in the world; it was fatal in
New England. There is a grossness in the conceptions of my countrymen;
they will not be convinced that any good thing may consist with what
they call idleness; they can anticipate nothing but evil of a young man
who neither studies physic, law, nor gospel, nor opens a store, nor
takes to farming, but manifests an incomprehensible disposition to be
satisfied with what his father left him. The principle is excellent in
its general influence, but most miserable in its effect on the few that
violate it. I had a quick sensitiveness to public opinion, and felt as
if it ranked me with the tavern haunters and town paupers,—with the
drunken poet who hawked his own Fourth of July odes, and the broken
soldier who had been good for nothing since last war. The consequence
of all this was a piece of light-hearted desperation.

I do not over-estimate my notoriety when I take it for granted that
many of my readers must have heard of me in the wild way of life which
I adopted. The idea of becoming a wandering story-teller had been
suggested, a year or two before, by an encounter with several merry
vagabonds in a showman’s wagon, where they and I had sheltered
ourselves during a summer shower. The project was not more extravagant
than most which a young man forms. Stranger ones are executed every
day; and, not to mention my prototypes in the East, and the wandering
orators and poets whom my own ears have heard, I had the example of one
illustrious itinerant in the other hemisphere,—of Goldsmith, who
planned and performed his travels through France and Italy on a less
promising scheme than mine. I took credit to myself for various
qualifications, mental and personal, suited to the undertaking.
Besides, my mind had latterly tormented me for employment, keeping up
an irregular activity even in sleep, and making me conscious that I
must toil, if it were but in catching butterflies. But my chief motives
were, discontent with home and a bitter grudge against Parson
Thumpcushion, who would rather have laid me in my father’s tomb than
seen me either a novelist or an actor, two characters which I thus hit
upon a method of uniting. After all, it was not half so foolish as if I
had written romances instead of reciting them.

The following pages will contain a picture of my vagrant life,
intermixed with specimens, generally brief and slight, of that great
mass of fiction to which I gave existence, and which has vanished like
cloud-shapes. Besides the occasions when I sought a pecuniary reward, I
was accustomed to exercise my narrative faculty wherever chance had
collected a little audience idle enough to listen. These rehearsals
were useful in testing the strong points of my stories; and, indeed,
the flow of fancy soon came upon me so abundantly that its indulgence
was its own reward, though the hope of praise also became a powerful
incitement. Since I shall never feel the warm gush of new thought as I
did then, let me beseech the reader to believe that my tales were not
always so cold as he may find them now. With each specimen will be
given a sketch of the circumstances in which the story was told. Thus
my air-drawn pictures will be set in frames perhaps more valuable than
the pictures themselves, since they will be embossed with groups of
characteristic figures, amid the lake and mountain scenery, the
villages and fertile fields, of our native land. But I write the book
for the sake of its moral, which many a dreaming youth may profit by,
though it is the experience of a wandering story-teller.

A FLIGHT IN THE FOG.

I set out on my rambles one morning in June about sunrise. The day
promised to be fair, though at that early hour a heavy mist lay along
the earth and settled in minute globules on the folds of my clothes, so
that I looked precisely as if touched with a hoar-frost. The sky was
quite obscured, and the trees and houses invisible till they grew out
of the fog as I came close upon them. There is a hill towards the west
whence the road goes abruptly down, holding a level course through the
village and ascending an eminence on the other side, behind which it
disappears. The whole view comprises an extent of half a mile. Here I
paused; and, while gazing through the misty veil, it partially rose and
swept away with so sudden an effect that a gray cloud seemed to have
taken the aspect of a small white town. A thin vapor being still
diffused through the atmosphere, the wreaths and pillars of fog,
whether hung in air or based on earth, appeared not less substantial
than the edifices, and gave their own indistinctness to the whole. It
was singular that such an unromantic scene should look so visionary.

Half of the parson’s dwelling was a dingy white house, and half of it
was a cloud; but Squire Moody’s mansion, the grandest in the village,
was wholly visible, even the lattice-work of the balcony under the
front window; while in another place only two red chimneys were seen
above the mist, appertaining to my own paternal residence, then
tenanted by strangers. I could not remember those with whom I had dwelt
there, not even my mother. The brick edifice of the bank was in the
clouds; the foundations of what was to be a great block of buildings
had vanished, ominously, as it proved; the dry-goods store of Mr.
Nightingale seemed a doubtful concern; and Dominicus Pike’s tobacco
manufactory an affair of smoke, except the splendid image of an Indian
chief in front. The white spire of the meeting-house ascended out of
the densest heap of vapor, as if that shadowy base were its only
support: or, to give a truer interpretation, the steeple was the emblem
of Religion, enveloped in mystery below, yet pointing to a cloudless
atmosphere, and catching the brightness of the east on its gilded vane.

As I beheld these objects, and the dewy street, with grassy intervals
and a border of trees between the wheeltrack and the sidewalks, all so
indistinct, and not to be traced without an effort, the whole seemed
more like memory than reality. I would have imagined that years had
already passed, and I was far away, contemplating that dim picture of
my native place, which I should retain in my mind through the mist of
time. No tears fell from my eyes among the dewdrops of the morning; nor
does it occur to me that I heaved a sigh. In truth, I had never felt
such a delicious excitement nor known what freedom was till that moment
when I gave up my home and took the whole world in exchange, fluttering
the wings of my spirit as if I would have flown from one star to
another through the universe. I waved my hand towards the dusky
village, bade it a joyous farewell, and turned away to follow any path
but that which might lead me back. Never was Childe Harold’s sentiment
adopted in a spirit more unlike his own.

Naturally enough, I thought of Don Quixote. Recollecting how the knight
and Sancho had watched for auguries when they took the road to Toboso,
I began, between jest and earnest, to feel a similar anxiety. It was
gratified, and by a more poetical phenomenon than the braying of the
dappled ass or the neigh of Rosinante. The sun, then just above the
horizon, shone faintly through the fog, and formed a species of rainbow
in the west, bestriding my intended road like a gigantic portal. I had
never known before that a bow could be generated between the sunshine
and the morning mist. It had no brilliancy, no perceptible hues, but
was a mere unpainted framework, as white and ghostlike as the lunar
rainbow, which is deemed ominous of evil. But, with a light heart, to
which all omens were propitious, I advanced beneath the misty archway
of futurity.

I had determined not to enter on my profession within a hundred miles
of home, and then to cover myself with a fictitious name. The first
precaution was reasonable enough, as otherwise Parson Thumpcushion
might have put an untimely catastrophe to my story; but as nobody would
be much affected by my disgrace, and all was to be suffered in my own
person, I know not why I cared about a name. For a week or two I
travelled almost at random, seeking hardly any guidance except the
whirling of a leaf at, some turn of the road, or the green bough that
beckoned me, or the naked branch that pointed its withered finger
onward. All my care was to be farther from home each night than the
preceding morning.

A FELLOW-TRAVELLER.

One day at noontide, when the sun had burst suddenly out of a cloud,
and threatened to dissolve me, I looked round for shelter, whether of
tavern, cottage, barn, or shady tree. The first which offered itself
was a wood,—not a forest, but a trim plantation of young oaks, growing
just thick enough to keep the mass of sunshine out, while they admitted
a few straggling beams, and thus produced the most cheerful gloom
imaginable. A brook, so small and clear, and apparently so cool, that I
wanted to drink it up, ran under the road through a little arch of
stone without once meeting the sun in its passage from the shade on one
side to the shade on the other. As there was a stepping-place over the
stone wall and a path along the rivulet, I followed it and discovered
its source,—a spring gushing out of an old barrel.

In this pleasant spot I saw a light pack suspended from the branch of a
tree, a stick leaning against the trunk, and a person seated on the
grassy verge of the spring, with his back towards me. He was a slender
figure, dressed in black broadcloth, which was none of the finest nor
very fashionably cut. On hearing my footsteps he started up rather
nervously, and, turning round, showed the face of a young man about my
own age, with his finger in a volume which he had been reading till my
intrusion. His book was evidently a pocket Bible. Though I piqued
myself at that period on my great penetration into people’s characters
and pursuits, I could not decide whether this young man in black were
an unfledged divine from Andover, a college student, or preparing for
college at some academy. In either case I would quite as willingly have
found a merrier companion; such, for instance, as the comedian with
whom Gil Blas shared his dinner beside a fountain in Spain.

After a nod, which was duly returned, I made a goblet of oak-leaves,
filled and emptied it two or three times, and then remarked, to hit the
stranger’s classical associations, that this beautiful fountain ought
to flow from an urn instead of an old barrel. He did not show that he
understood the allusion, and replied very briefly, with a shyness that
was quite out of place between persons who met in such circumstances.
Had he treated my next observation in the same way, we should have
parted without another word.

“It is very singular,” said I,—“though doubtless there are good reasons
for it,—that Nature should provide drink so abundantly, and lavish it
everywhere by the roadside, but so seldom anything to eat. Why should
not we find a loaf of bread on this tree as well as a barrel of good
liquor at the foot of it?”

“There is a loaf of bread on the tree,” replied the stranger, without
even smiling—at a coincidence which made me laugh. “I have something to
eat in my bundle; and, if you can make a dinner with me, you shall be
welcome.”

“I accept your offer with pleasure,” said I. “A pilgrim such as I am
must not refuse a providential meal.”

The young man had risen to take his bundle from the branch of the tree,
but now turned round and regarded me with great earnestness, coloring
deeply at the same time. However, he said nothing, and produced part of
a loaf of bread and some cheese, the former being evidently home baked,
though some days out of the oven. The fare was good enough, with a real
welcome, such as his appeared to be. After spreading these articles on
the stump of a tree, he proceeded to ask a blessing on our food, an
unexpected ceremony, and quite an impressive one at our woodland table,
with the fountain gushing beside us and the bright sky glimmering
through the boughs; nor did his brief petition affect me less because
his embarrassment made his voice tremble. At the end of the meal he
returned thanks with the same tremulous fervor.

He felt a natural kindness for me after thus relieving my necessities,
and showed it by becoming less reserved. On my part, I professed never
to have relished a dinner better; and, in requital of the stranger’s
hospitality, solicited the pleasure of his company to supper.

“Where? At your home?” asked he.

“Yes,” said I, smiling.

“Perhaps our roads are not the same,” observed he.

“O, I can take any road but one, and yet not miss my way,” answered I.
“This morning I breakfasted at home; I shall sup at home to-night; and
a moment ago I dined at home. To be sure, there was a certain place
which I called home; but I have resolved not to see it again till I
have been quite round the globe and enter the street on the east as I
left it on the west. In the mean time, I have a home everywhere, or
nowhere, just as you please to take it.”

“Nowhere, then; for this transitory world is not our home,” said the
young man, with solemnity. “We are all pilgrims and wanderers; but it
is strange that we two should meet.”

I inquired the meaning of this remark, but could obtain no satisfactory
reply. But we had eaten salt together, and it was right that we should
form acquaintance after that ceremony as the Arabs of the desert do,
especially as he had learned something about myself, and the courtesy
of the country entitled me to as much information in return. I asked
whither he was travelling.

“I do not know,” said he; “but God knows.”

“That is strange!” exclaimed I; “not that God should know it, but that
you should not. And how is your road to be pointed out?”

“Perhaps by an inward conviction,” he replied, looking sideways at me
to discover whether I smiled; “perhaps by an outward sign.”

“Then, believe me,” said I, “the outward sign is already granted you,
and the inward conviction ought to follow. We are told of pious men in
old times who committed themselves to the care of Providence, and saw
the manifestation of its will in the slightest circumstances, as in the
shooting of a star, the flight of a bird, or the course taken by some
brute animal. Sometimes even a stupid ass was their guide. May I not be
as good a one?”

“I do not know,” said the pilgrim, with perfect simplicity.

We did, however, follow the same road, and were not overtaken, as I
partly apprehended, by the keepers of any lunatic asylum in pursuit of
a stray patient. Perhaps the stranger felt as much doubt of my sanity
as I did of his, though certainly with less justice, since I was fully
aware of my own extravagances, while he acted as wildly, and deemed it
heavenly wisdom. We were a singular couple, strikingly contrasted, yet
curiously assimilated, each of us remarkable enough by himself, and
doubly so in the other’s company. Without any formal compact, we kept
together day after day till our union appeared permanent. Even had I
seen nothing to love and admire in him, I could never have thought of
deserting one who needed me continually; for I never knew a person; not
even a woman, so unfit to roam the world in solitude as he was,—so
painfully shy, so easily discouraged by slight obstacles, and so often
depressed by a weight within himself.

I was now far from my native place, but had not yet stepped before the
public. A slight tremor seized me whenever I thought of relinquishing
the immunities of a private character, and giving every man, and for
money too, the right which no man yet possessed, of treating me with
open scorn. But about a week after contracting the above alliance I
made my bow to an audience of nine persons, seven of whom hissed me in
a very disagreeable manner, and not without good cause. Indeed, the
failure was so signal that it would have been mere swindling to retain
the money, which had been paid on my implied contract to give its value
of amusement. So I called in the doorkeeper, bade him refund the whole
receipts, a mighty sum and was gratified with a round of applause by
way of offset to the hisses. This event would have looked most horrible
in anticipation,—a thing to make a man shoot himself, or run amuck, or
hide himself in caverns where he might not see his own burning blush;
but the reality was not so very hard to bear. It is a fact that I was
more deeply grieved by an almost parallel misfortune which happened to
my companion on the same evening. In my own behalf I was angry and
excited, not depressed; my blood ran quick, my spirits rose buoyantly,
and I had never felt such a confidence of future success and
determination to achieve it as at that trying moment. I resolved to
persevere, if it were only to wring the reluctant praise from my
enemies.

Hitherto I had immensely underrated the difficulties of my idle trade;
now I recognized that it demanded nothing short of my whole powers
cultivated to the utmost, and exerted with the same prodigality as if I
were speaking for a great party or for the nation at large on the floor
of the Capitol. No talent or attainment could come amiss; everything,
indeed, was requisite,—wide observation, varied knowledge, deep
thoughts, and sparkling ones; pathos and levity, and a mixture of both,
like sunshine in a raindrop; lofty imagination, veiling itself in the
garb of common life; and the practised art which alone could render
these gifts, and more than these, available. Not that I ever hoped to
be thus qualified. But my despair was no ignoble one; for, knowing the
impossibility of satisfying myself, even should the world be satisfied,
I did my best to overcome it; investigated the causes of every defect;
and strove, with patient stubbornness, to remove them in the next
attempt. It is one of my few sources of pride, that, ridiculous as the
object was, I followed it up with the firmness and energy of a man.

I manufactured a great variety of plots and skeletons of tales, and
kept them ready for use, leaving the filling up to the inspiration of
the moment; though I cannot remember ever to have told a tale which did
not vary considerably from my preconceived idea, and acquire a novelty
of aspect as often as I repeated it. Oddly enough, my success was
generally in proportion to the difference between the conception and
accomplishment. I provided two or more commencements and catastrophes
to many of the tales,—a happy expedient, suggested by the double sets
of sleeves and trimmings which diversified the suits in Sir Piercy
Shafton’s wardrobe. But my best efforts had a unity, a wholeness, and a
separate character that did not admit of this sort of mechanism.

THE VILLAGE THEATRE

About the first of September my fellow-traveller and myself arrived at
a country town, where a small company of actors, on their return from a
summer’s campaign in the British Provinces, were giving a series of
dramatic exhibitions. A moderately sized hall of the tavern had been
converted into a theatre. The performances that evening were, The Heir
at Law, and No Song, no Supper, with the recitation of Alexander’s
Feast between the play and farce. The house was thin and dull. But the
next day there appeared to be brighter prospects, the playbills
announcing at every corner, on the town-pump, and—awful sacrilege!—on
the very door of the meeting-house, an Unprecedented Attraction! After
setting forth the ordinary entertainments of a theatre, the public were
informed, in the hugest type that the printing-office could supply,
that the manager had been fortunate enough to accomplish an engagement
with the celebrated Story-Teller. He would make his first appearance
that evening, and recite his famous tale of Mr. Higginbotham’s
Catastrophe, which had been received with rapturous applause by
audiences in all the principal cities. This outrageous flourish of
trumpets, be it known, was wholly unauthorized by me, who had merely
made an engagement for a single evening, without assuming any more
celebrity than the little I possessed. As for the tale, it could hardly
have been applauded by rapturous audiences, being as yet an unfilled
plot; nor even when I stepped upon the stage was it decided whether Mr.
Higginbotham should live or die.

In two or three places, underneath the flaming bills which announced
the Story-Teller, was pasted a small slip of paper, giving notice, in
tremulous characters, of a religious meeting to be held at the
school-house, where, with divine permission, Eliakim Abbott would
address sinners on the welfare of their immortal souls.

In the evening, after the commencement of the tragedy of Douglas, I
took a ramble through the town to quicken my ideas by active motion. My
spirits were good, with a certain glow of mind which I had already
learned to depend upon as the sure prognostic of success. Passing a
small and solitary school-house, where a light was burning dimly and a
few people were entering the door, I went in with them, and saw my
friend Eliakim at the desk. He had collected about fifteen hearers,
mostly females. Just as I entered he was beginning to pray in accents
so low and interrupted that he seemed to doubt the reception of his
efforts both with God and man. There was room for distrust in regard to
the latter. At the conclusion of the prayer several of the little
audience went out, leaving him to begin his discourse under such
discouraging circumstances, added to his natural and agonizing
diffidence. Knowing that my presence on these occasions increased his
embarrassment, I had stationed myself in a dusky place near the door,
and now stole softly out.

On my return to the tavern the tragedy was already concluded; and,
being a feeble one in itself and indifferently performed, it left so
much the better chance for the Story-Teller. The bar was thronged with
customers, the toddy-stick keeping a continual tattoo; while in the
hall there was a broad, deep, buzzing sound, with an occasional peal of
impatient thunder,—all symptoms of all overflowing house and an eager
audience. I drank a glass of wine-and-water, and stood at the side
scene conversing with a young person of doubtful sex. If a gentleman,
how could he have performed the singing girl the night before in No
Song, no Supper? Or, if a lady, why did she enact Young Norval, and now
wear a green coat and white pantaloons in the character of Little
Pickle? In either case the dress was pretty and the wearer bewitching;
so that, at the proper moment, I stepped forward with a gay heart and a
hold one; while the orchestra played a tune that had resounded at many
a country ball, and the curtain, as it rose, discovered something like
a country bar-room. Such a scene was well enough adapted to such a
tale.

The orchestra of our little theatre consisted of two fiddles and a
clarinet; but, if the whole harmony of the Tremont had been there, it
might have swelled in vain beneath the tumult of applause that greeted
me. The good people of the town, knowing that the world contained
innumerable persons of celebrity undreamed of by them, took it for
granted that I was one, and that their roar of welcome was but a feeble
echo of those which had thundered around me in lofty theatres. Such an
enthusiastic uproar was never heard. Each person seemed a Briarcus
clapping a hundred hands, besides keeping his feet and several cudgels
in play with stamping and thumping on the floor; while the ladies
flourished their white cambric handkerchiefs, intermixed with yellow
and red bandanna, like the flags of different nations. After such a
salutation, the celebrated Story-Teller felt almost ashamed to produce
so humble an affair as Mr. Higginbotham’s Catastrophe.

This story was originally more dramatic than as there presented, and
afforded good scope for mimicry and buffoonery, neither of which, to my
shame, did I spare. I never knew the “magic of a name” till I used that
of Mr. Higginbotham. Often as I repeated it, there were louder bursts
of merriment than those which responded to what, in my opinion, were
more legitimate strokes of humor. The success of the piece was
incalculably heightened by a stiff cue of horsehair, which Little
Pickle, in the spirit of that mischief-loving character, had fastened
to my collar, where, unknown to me, it kept making the queerest
gestures of its own in correspondence with all mine. The audience,
supposing that some enormous joke was appended to this long tail
behind, were ineffably delighted, and gave way to such a tumult of
approbation that, just as the story closed, the benches broke beneath
them and left one whole row of my admirers on the floor. Even in that
predicament they continued their applause. In after times, when I had
grown a bitter moralizer, I took this scene for an example how much of
fame is humbug; how much the meed of what our better nature blushes at;
how much an accident; how much bestowed on mistaken principles; and how
small and poor the remnant. From pit and boxes there was now a
universal call for the Story-Teller.

That celebrated personage came not when they did call to him. As I left
the stage, the landlord, being also the postmaster, had given me a
letter with the postmark of my native village, and directed to my
assumed name in the stiff old handwriting of Parson Thumpcushion.
Doubtless he had heard of the rising renown of the Story-Teller, and
conjectured at once that such a nondescript luminary could be no other
than his lost ward. His epistle, though I never read it, affected me
most painfully. I seemed to see the Puritanic figure of my guardian
standing among the fripperies of the theatre and pointing to the
players,—the fantastic and effeminate men, the painted women, the giddy
girl in boy’s clothes, merrier than modest,—pointing to these with
solemn ridicule, and eying me with stern rebuke. His image was a type
of the austere duty, and they of the vanities of life.

I hastened with the letter to my chamber and held it unopened in my
hand, while the applause of my buffoonery yet sounded through the
theatre. Another train of thought came over me. The stern old man
appeared again, but now with the gentleness of sorrow, softening his
authority with love as a father might, and even bending his venerable
head, as if to say that my errors had an apology in his own mistaken
discipline. I strode twice across the chamber, then held the letter in
the flame of the candle, and beheld it consume unread. It is fixed in
my mind, and was so at the time, that he had addressed me in a style of
paternal wisdom, and love, and reconciliation which I could not have
resisted had I but risked the trial. The thought still haunts me that
then I made my irrevocable choice between good and evil fate.

Meanwhile, as this occurrence had disturbed my mind and indisposed me
to the present exercise of my profession, I left the town, in spite of
a laudatory critique in the newspaper, and untempted by the liberal
offers of the manager. As we walked onward, following the same road, on
two such different errands, Eliakim groaned in spirit, and labored with
tears to convince me of the guilt and madness of my life.




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