What imagination will do I can show from my own experience. When a boy, in the Pyrenees, I once drank from a spring, and saw to my horror, when I had already swallowed a mouthful, that the water was alive with small leeches. I had a bad time of it for two or three days. I firmly believed I had leeches alive and sucking my blood inside me; I felt them. I became languid. I believed they would drain my blood away. Happily, my father heard what was the matter with me, and explained to me the corrosive nature of the gastric fluid, and assured me that nothing living and of the nature of a leech could resist it. "My dear boy," said he, "from personal observation of your proceedings at meal-time, I am convinced you could digest a pair of boots, and no leeches could stand a moment against the force of your vigorous gastric fluid." I believed him, and forgot all about my imaginary malady. [Illustration] [Illustration: SCAPEGRACES] CHAPTER XII. Every family and village has had its scapegrace. The family ne'er-do-weel has been its greatest curse, and has torn down and dissipated in a few years what it has taken generations to set up; any fool can destroy--only the wise can build. But it is not so much folly as lack of principle which constitutes the ne'er-do-weel. Many a good man is a stupid one, and his goodness saves his stupidity from carrying him and his family to ruin. And sometimes a clever man is a ne'er-do-weel, because his cleverness is undirected by principle. Perhaps the most flagrant instance of the ne'er-do-weel among the aristocracy was that of Philip Duke of Wharton, the inheritor of a princely fortune, of extensive estates, and endowed by nature with brilliant talents, a man who forfeited everything simply because he was without principle, and died in abject poverty, the last of a race which had been the pride of the North of England; but he died in something worse than poverty--in dishonour. It was of him that Pope wrote these scathing lines: "Clodis--the scorn and wonder of our days, Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise; Born with whate'er could win it from the wise, Women or fools must like him, or he dies. * * * * * His passion still to covet general praise, His life to forfeit it a thousand ways. A tyrant to the wife his heart approves, A rebel to the very king he loves; He dies, sad outcast of each Church and State, And harder still, flagitious, yet not great. Ask you why Clodis broke through every rule? 'Twas all for fear the knaves should call him fool." The present time shows us some of these among the inheritors of noble names and fortunes--men as foolish and unprincipled as the wretched Duke of Wharton, and who run through a hardly less disreputable course, to the disgrace of the name which has hitherto been held high in history.