“I’m a brute, a savage,” was Hugh’s not very self complimentary soliloquy, as he went up the stairs. “What did I want to twit Ad for? What good did it do, only to make her mad and bother mother? I wish I could do better, but I can’t. Confound my badness!” and having by this time reached his own door, Hugh entered his room, and drawing a chair to the fire always kindled for him at night, sat down to think. CHAPTER III. HUGH’S SOLILOQUY. “One, two, three, yes, as good as four women and a child,” he began, “to say nothing of the negroes, who all must eat and drink. A goodly number for one whose income is hardly as much as some young men spend every year upon themselves; and the hardest of all is the having people call me stingy and mean, the seeing young girls lift their eyebrows and wink when young Hunks, as Ad says they call me, appears, and the knowing that this opinion of me is encouraged and kept alive by the remarks and insinuations of my own sister, for whom I’ve denied myself more than one new coat that she might have the dress she coveted,” and in the red gleam of the firelight the bearded chin quivered for a moment as Hugh thought how unjust ’Lina was to him, and how hard was the lot imposed upon him. Soon recovering his composure he continued, “There’s that bill at Harney’s, how in the world I’m to pay it when it comes due is more than I know. These duds,” and he glanced ruefully at his coarse clothes, “will look a heap worse than they do now,” and shifting the position of his feet, which had hitherto rested upon the hearth, to a more comfortable and suggestive one upon the mantel, Hugh tried to find a spot in which he could economize. “I needn’t have a fire in my room nights,” he said, as a coal fell into the pan and thus reminded him of its existence, “and I won’t, either. It’s nonsense for a great hot-blooded clown like me to be babied with a fire. I’ve no tags to braid, no false switches to comb out and hide, only a few buttons to undo, a shake or so, and I’m all right. So there’s one thing, the fire—quite an item, too, at the rate coal is selling. Then there’s coffee. I can do without that, I suppose, though it will be perfect torment to smell it, and Hannah makes such splendid coffee, too; but will is everything. Fire, coffee—I’m getting on famously. What else?”