Ah! what a nursery of crooked, abnormal motives the family often is! How many really deep wrongs are done to impressible children, to which the parents are utterly blind, because so ignorant of the laws of mental development. When Clara’s troubles with Dan were unendurable, she had sometimes gone to her mother. Once she did so, bursting out with, “_I wish I could kill him_.” The mother was horrified; but, alas! only at the language; not seeing beneath the surface what madness had been induced in the child’s heart, nor inferring a necessary and adequate cause. She only reproved Clara for such “dreadful words,” and sent for Dan. “My son, why do you teaze your sister so? Do you not know it is very wicked, and that if you are wicked you will never go to Heaven?” In truth, she was utterly incapable of comprehending the difficulty between the children, and as Dan was on his good behavior when his father was present, and as all the family tacitly agreed to never trouble the doctor unnecessarily, knowing that he ought to rest during the short time his practice left him free, he never knew of this peculiar trial of Clara’s until long after. When Mrs. Forest would remind Dan of his danger of losing Heaven, she naturally thought that it should have great weight with him; though if she could have read his thoughts, she would have quickly seen her mistake. Heaven, to Dan, meant a country “Where congregations ne’er break up, And Sabbaths never end;” and though he thought such a dull place might do for girls and for people like the widow Buzzell, he knew perfectly well that it was no place for a live boy, who liked fishing and setting snares in the woods much better than any congregation he could imagine. But to go back to the family circle. When the doctor wondered where the “young rat” was, Clara kept silent. Mrs. Buzzell hazarded the suggestion that he might be off with those low Dykes—the Dykes being a family whom nobody visited, and who were generally set down as “no better than they should be.” This was precisely where Dan was at that moment, and the attraction was possibly Susie Dykes, though he took no particular notice of any one but Jim Dykes, who possessed a pair of old battered foils, and with them gave the delighted Dan several desultory lessons in the art of fencing. Jim being a great swaggerer, and a little older than Dan, was mighty in his eyes; especially when he discoursed on the “guards” and “passes,” his hat cocked over his left eye, his legs straddled, and an unmanageable end of tobacco in his mouth. “It is strange,” said Mrs. Forest, “what Dan finds so agreeable in that family. I am sure I could not endure the house. Mrs. Dykes is a slattern, and her children have no sort of bringing up, as I am told.” “Why,” said the doctor, “I don’t see but Susie is a very nice girl. She behaves very well indeed—totally unlike that uncouth brother of hers. I like the pretty way she does her hair.”