Page:Live and Let Live.djvu/11

Rh good." Children have an instinct as infallible as a chymical test in detecting the presence of certain qualities.

Mrs. Lee prepared some toast and tea for her husband and a little deformed boy in the cradle, and then sat down with her three girls to a breakfast on rye-mush.

The parents of Lucy Lee, our humble heroine, were married some fifteen years before our story begins. Richard Lee was then a young lawyer in a country town in New England. His wife had no near kindred, but she had been kindly cared for, and well nurtured in the family of a distant relation; and having a small fortune and a good education, in the best sense of the word, that is, having had her faculties well developed and prepared for the uses of life, she had a rational prospect of prosperity and happiness. Her husband was an only son, who had talents, ardent feelings, amiable manners, and a small but sufficient fortune to begin life upon in a country where the current sets to prosperity. Such a beginning would have secured pecuniary independence, unless singular misfortune had intervened, or vice had appeared to counteract and destroy the operation of the laws of Providence. Vice it was. Six months after her marriage, Mrs. Lee discovered that her husband was in the habit of intemperate drinking. How the seeds of this habit were sown in his childhood, by his parents' foolish indulgence of the cravings of his appetite for whatever tasted good—how appetite, combining with the selfishness that is nurtured by low animal gratifications, obtained so early the mastery over his better nature, it is not our purpose to describe.