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A BRACE OF BOYS retirement on a fortune. They had mellowed on the sunny shelves of prosperity, like every good thing which has an astringent skin when it is green. They would greatly have liked to see Daniel shine in society. Of his erudition they were proud, even to worship. The young man never had any business, and his father never seemed to think of giving him any; knowing, as Billy would say, that he had stamps enough to “see him through.” If Daniel liked, his father would have endowed a professorship in some college and have given him the chair; but that would have taken him away from his own room and the family physician.

Daniel knew how much his parents wished him to make a figure in the world, and only blamed himself for his failure, magnanimously forgetting that they had crushed out the faculties which enable a man to mint the small change of everyday society in the exclusive cultivation of such as fit him for smelting its ponderous ingots. With that merciful blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of nerveless reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share in the harm done him, when they ascribed to his delicate organization the fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could not see a balmoral without his cheeks rivaling the most vivid stripe in it. They flattered themselves that he would outgrow his bashfulness, but Daniel had no such 229