son of a stalwart French Baron, used to duels and trained to war. The boy inherited from his father a splendid physique, of which he was unduly proud, and a restless disposition that he never sincerely asked God to control. By the death of the baron, his son, an infant, was left to the sole tutelage of his English mother. The latter was of high birth, by nature a noble woman, and in every way worthy of a better son than the one whom he had turned out to be. She had idolized her brawny spouse in his lifetime, and when she had recovered from the shock his death caused, her yearning heart, little by little, turned from the idol in the tomb to the child he had left her. Ere long she lived again in the rapture of a love all absorbing, all bestowing, all ruling. She lavished her affection on the youth, not because he was particularly lovable, for he was not, but because he was the only one left her to love, and she was so constituted that she must love; the necessity of loving to her made it easy. “Then there were many things in the features and form of her son that reminded her of the man who, in brighter days, had won entirely her maiden heart and her young wife love. The child was wont to wonder why his mother embraced him as she did sometimes, with a wondering, startled, wild, passionate embrace; but when he got older he discerned the meaning of these outbreaks. He knew that the mother-heart was having a vision of past wifehood, memory’s grace-given solace of widowhood. Besides this the embraces were her appealings or warnings to death; her heart suddenly seizing as if to shelter and save her last and only idol; for the thought would sometimes come with shadows deep enough, that perhaps the boy might also die. Such love would have been a prized wealth and blessing to some; but in this case, on the one hand, it unfitted this mother for the proper disciplining of this son, and this son though, sometimes, when his conceit permitted it, realizing that the love was given, not won, began to expect it as his due or despise it for its lavishness. In due time he entered the period expressively designated, ‘The monster age.’ This is the time when expanding young life has outgrown the tenderness of infancy and failed of putting on manly and womanly graces; a time when there is a mighty ambition to put on the characteristics of adult life and a mighty lack of ability gracefully to wear them. At this period, perhaps, the majority of youths of both sexes, are interesting chiefly for what they have been, or what it is hoped they will be. They feel, conscious of their growing powers, great self-conceit, and with their growth comes an expansion of their capacities and wants. The plenitude of their wantings makes them avaricious, hence parsimonious toward others of every thing, especially of gratitude. Reverence for elders, respect for fathers, holy regard for mothers, tenderness toward women, chief charms