When they had decided that such a life would not do for him, his training had almost entirely unfitted him for any other active calling. The strict propriety with which he had been brought up had resulted in weak lungs, poor digestion, sluggish circulation, and torpid liver. Moreover, he was troubled with the painfulest bashfulness which ever made a mother think her child too ethereal, or a dispassionate outsider regard him as too flimsy, for this world. These were weights enough to carry, even if he had not labored under that heaviest of all, a well-stored mind. No misnomer that last to any one who has ever frequented the Atlantic Docks, or seen storage in any large port of entry. How does a storehouse look? It's a vast, dark, cold chamber-dust an inch deep on the floor, cobwebs festooning the girders--and piled from floor to ceiling on the principle of getting the largest bulk into the least room, with barrels, boxes, bales, baskets, chests, crates, and carboys--merchandise of all description, from the rough, raw material to the most exquisite _choses de luxe_. The inmost layers are inextricable without pulling down the outer ones. If you want a particular case of broadcloth you must clear yourself an alleyway through a hundred tierces of hams, and last week's entry of clayed sugars is inaccessible without tumbling on your head a mountain of Yankee notions. In my nephew's unfortunate youth such storage as this had minds. As long as the crown of his brain's arch was not crushed in by some intellectual Furman Street diaster, those stevedores of learning, the schoolmasters, kept on unloading the Rome and Athens lighters into a boy's crowded skull, and breaking out of the hold of that colossal old junk, The Pure Mathematics, all the formulas which could be crowded into the interstices between his Latin and Greek. At the time I introduce Billy, both Lu and her husband were much changed. They had gained a great deal in width of view and liberality of judgment. They read Dickens and Thackeray with avidity; went now and then to the opera; proposed to let Billy take a quarter at Dod-worth's; had statues in their parlor without any thought of shame at their lack of petticoats, and did multitudes of things which, in their early married life, they would have considered shocking. Part of this change was due to the great increase of travel, the wonderful progress in art and refinement which has enlarged this generation's thought and corrected its ignorant opinions; infusing cosmopolitanism into our manners by a revolution so gradual that its subjects were a new people before their combativeness became alarmed, yet so rapid that a man of thirty can scarcely believe his birthday, and questions whether he has not added his life up wrong by a century or so when he compares his own boy-Hood with that of the present day. But a good deal of the transformation resulted from the means of gratifying elegant tastes, the comfort, luxury, and culture which came with