XXXV. MR. LEIGH HAS A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE MADE HIM 493 XXXVI. THE RIOT AND ITS VICTIM 507 XXXVII. WOLFFERT'S NEIGHBORS 517 XXXVIII. WOLFFERT'S PHILOSOPHY 527 XXXIX. THE CONFLICT 539 XL. THE CURTAIN 563 ILLUSTRATIONS _"To ply your old trade?" I asked_ Frontispiece _Wolffert ... was cursing me with all the eloquence of a rich vocabulary_ 20 _"Hi! What you doin'?" he stammered_ 60 _"But you must not come in"_ 140 _"Perhaps, you are the man yourself?" she added insolently_ 302 _"Speak her soft, Galley"_ 412 _"I suppose it is necessary that we should at least appear to be exchanging the ordinary inanities"_ 468 _I am sure it was on that stream that Halcyone found retreat_ 556 JOHN MARVEL, ASSISTANT I MY FIRST FAILURE I shall feel at liberty to tell my story in my own way; rambling along at my own gait; now going from point to point; now tearing ahead; now stopping to rest or to ruminate, and even straying from the path whenever I think a digression will be for my own enjoyment. I shall begin with my college career, a period to which I look back now with a pleasure wholly incommensurate with what I achieved in it; which I find due to the friends I made and to the memories I garnered there in a time when I possessed the unprized treasures of youth: spirits, hope, and abounding conceit. As these memories, with the courage (to use a mild term) that a college background gives, are about all that I got out of my life there, I shall dwell on them only enough to introduce two or three friends and one enemy, who played later a very considerable part in my life. My family was an old and distinguished one; that is, it could be traced back about two hundred years, and several of my ancestors had accomplished enough to be known in the history of the State--a fact of which I was so proud that I was quite satisfied at college to rest on their achievements, and felt no need to add to its distinction by any labors of my own. We had formerly been well off; we had, indeed, at one time prior to the Revolutionary War, owned large estates--a time to which I was so fond of referring when I first went to college that one of my acquaintances, named Peck, an envious fellow, observed one day that I thought I had inherited all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. My childhood was spent on an old plantation, so far removed from anything that I have since known that it might almost have been in another planet.