Sarah’s life had hitherto been blessed above that of most women. But youth, health and wealth had now passed from her, and her proud, stern spirit had yet to undergo trials she had never dreamed within the scope of possibility as falling to her lot. Her eldest boy, the “Tommy good-shoes” of former days, was now the source of an anguish a mother’s heart alone can know. Forced upon a course of education for which he had no taste and scarcely any capacity, the four years allotted to collegiate studies were to him four years of unbroken idleness. The same easy, docile nature that had made him the “Tommy good-child” of early years, rendered him still pliant to the influences about him. These, unhappily, as is generally the case in idleness, were not good. College suspensions and remonstrances were the commencement of a course of which little bills soon followed in the wake. When these fell into his father’s hands, they were often paid without a word, for he had learned to dread, scarce less than the boy, the bitterness of his wife’s indignation when they reached her knowledge. To his mother’s keen reproaches, Tom listened in silence, the same kind of frightened, meek, obstinate silence with which his father had endured many a harangue before him. But they did not mend his ways. Mrs. Eldon had heard from time to time rumors that “Tom Allen was very wild,” but she had thought that “boys will be boys,” and her husband said “young men will be young men,” and thus they had both attributed the rumors they had heard to the indiscretions of a youthful spirit. But here they were mistaken. Tom’s were not the errors of a youthful but of a weak nature. The influence abroad was bad, and the conduct at home injudicious. If Mr. Allen’s children did not exactly say with the world, “Oh! he is nobody,” they yet felt the fact; while their mother was to them “the everybody” they feared and looked up to. Consequently, if Tom got into a scrape there was nothing he so much dreaded as his mother’s hearing of it. There was scarcely any public opprobrium he would not rather have endured than her anger. In fact, the sort of Coventry in which he was put, the sad, severe looks that were bestowed upon him at home were slight inducements to a weak and timid spirit to reveal difficulties, pour forth confession and implore relief, and thus what had begun in weakness ended in disgrace. A debt which, though not large in itself, yet of considerable magnitude in the eyes of a youth, had been contracted almost unconsciously, and which he had not courage to avow at home. Harassed, tormented, terrified, he made use of funds which were not his own, and which his situation in a counting-house, where he had at last been placed, put within his reach. Weak, timid and reserved, he neither revealed his situation, nor asked for aid from either his young companions or natural friends—but when he found detection could no longer be warded off—fled.