An event soon occurred in the town which aroused feelings and emotions in the breast of Ernest, the statical condition of which had never before been disturbed. A family moved into the town, among whose members was a young man about the age of Ernest. A few days after their arrival, a sign was seen over a store-door in large black letters--A. J. Comston & Son. The “son” belonging to this firm is the only one of the family whose life projects into the present history. Xerxes Comston was the equal of Ernest in physical attractions, and his superior in almost everything pertaining to the elegant frivolities and conventional refinements of fashionable society. He was emphatically a man of the world--a disciple of Chesterfield, who had made social etiquette a special study. He had no depth of intellect and no solid education, but was master of that small talk, silvery nonsense, so delightful to vacuous minds. It is a well-known fact that truly educated men, who have “drunk deep of the Pierian spring,” rarely ever shine in promiscuous society. They appear timid and destitute of ideas, while men who have collected only the scum of ephemeral literature, and studied terpsichorean gymnastics, and committed to memory a stock of witticisms pleasing to light-headed women, pass in society at a value far more than their real worth. Xerxes was a man of this description. He had studied dinner-table etiquette and ball-room dynamics more than any other branch of human literature. The comparison between Ernest and Xerxes in regard to moral excellences would be like that of Brobdingnag and Lilliputian. Yet in fashionable assemblies, where Ernest would sit in embarrassed silence, Xerxes would rattle away with astonishing and entertaining volubility--a volubility without ideas, but still, necessary to preserve the regular flow of the stream of conversation. Men like Ernest are frequently voted “stupid” by the gilded butterflies of society, when the truth is, they can scarcely ever find a “pleasure-party” that can appreciate the subjects with which they are familiar. They are not unsocial, as is generally supposed, but they dwell in a world of thought, a world which is so sparsely settled that they necessarily spend much or most of their time in solitude. This class is quite small. Hence, speaking metaphorically, they live in a wilderness in which there is here and there a house inhabited by a literary recluse. Ernest and Xerxes were, as to moral character, like Zenith and Nadir.