The family estate consisted of an old farm-house and a few acres near Windsor Locks; the house is now burned down, and upon the ancestral acres grows rank tobacco. What precious humbug is all this! Well, well, let us not despise humbug; _nihil humani alienum_. Let us rather see this humbug; let us put it on a pin, and examine this insect. You may be sure Charlie found his account therein. Frivolity is a word for dullards; I wish the ministers could enforce their precepts half as well as the dressmakers. Fashion is a marvellous potency, the public opinion of small things; in a democracy who can despise it? As I write, fashion tells our womankind, Put birds upon thy bonnet; and lo! four hundred thousand women in New York alone wear fowls. How many years ago was it, now, that someone said, Sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor? And four hundred thousand in the world have done it, not yet. As for Charlie--in Mrs. Edgeworth, or in “Sandford and Merton,” or other book of our childhood I once read a fable: how Honesty, Industry, and Ability formed a partnership for the acquirement of ambergris from whales. And Ability caught a hundred whales in the first year, and Industry carefully separated from all these whales a few ounces of ambergris, and Honesty sold this ambergris for a large sum of money. And Rapacity, who had been lying by, laughing, all this time, signed the check and took the ambergris; and lo! the check was worthless. And Society looked on and laughed, and said Rapacity was a smart fellow; and in the next year there were many worthless checks, but no ambergris. Now Charlie was not Rapacity; but he was a clever fellow and could see this and other fables as they were enacted before his eyes. And he would not steal; nor would he go to the North Pole and search for whales. But he was in search of _les moyens de parvenir_. CHAPTER XII. A COMMUNIST AND HIS SISTER.