him from the fact that he was thus transplanted into an altogether lower level, and that his new family was little elevated above the class from which he had been in the habit of drawing his servants, not his friends. Their habits, their modes of speech, their ways of thinking, were all strange to him. It is true that he accommodated himself readily to these differences, as exhibited in the old grandmother whom I have just presented to the reader, and the gentle, soft-voiced, poetic Jeanie; but with the other members of his new family, poor Edgar had felt all his powers of self-control fail him. Their presence, their contact, their familiarity, and the undeniable fact that it was to them and their sphere that he actually belonged was terrible to the young man, who, in his better days, had not known what pride meant. Life is in reality so much the same in all classes that no doubt he would have come to perceive the identity of substance notwithstanding the difference of form, had he not been cast so suddenly into this other phase of existence without preparation, without anything to break the fall; but as it was, he had no preparation, and the blow went to his heart. This fall had taken place nearly three years before the time at which this story opens, and poor Edgar, stunned by his overthrow, repelled by his new relatives, vaguely wretched, notwithstanding the stoutness of heart with which he had braced himself to meet calamity, had done but little with his life for these two years. A small provision had been secured for him from his successor in the estates of Arden, the rightful heir whom he had unwittingly wronged, and to whom he did instant justice as soon as he heard of the wrong; and this little provision had been augmented by the small property of the Rector of Arden, Mr. Fielding, who had left him everything he possessed. He had thus enough to support him, that most dangerous of all endowments for a young man. Poor fellow! he had made his sacrifice with great bravery, and had wrenched himself away from all he cared for with the smile of a hero, neither sinking under the blow, nor exaggerating its force. “Courage!” he had said to himself, when he lost the place where he had been lord and master, and went forth poor, humble, and nameless, to face the world. He meant nothing less than to make a new life for himself better than the last, to assert the superiority of a guiltless heart and free conscience over fate. But, alas, it is so easy to do this in the general, so difficult in detail! “We will make our lives sublime,” says the poet, with such cheap magniloquence--and how many an enthusiast youth has delighted himself with the thought!