Who needs be told the career on which the boy entered? Who but would sicken and turn away from the record of his houseless wanderings, his desperate shifts, his recklessness and wickedness. Who that could read with anything but sorrow of the scenes of squalid want, of cunning vice, of mad profligacy, through which he passed before his youth was yet begun. There could be but one result; all that was weak in him was bent to the service of sin, all that was noble was turned to bitterness; the refinement of his nature made him rise, but it was to no heights of truth and virtue; ambition had taken the place of all noble aspirations, and sustained him through ignominy, and reproach, and poverty, helped him to trample on difficulties that would have daunted a less desperate man, and scruples that would have shaken a better one, aided him to free himself from the pollutions that his wild boyhood had contracted, and to shake off the trammels of the past, and crown himself with the success that he had made his god. But through it all, there lived a fear lest the forgotten stain of his birth should be revived, the foundation stone be pulled from his fair fabric of good fortune; and this morbid dread so haunted him, that he came to hate the very sunshine and soft air of France, to fear the very children in the streets, the strangers whose curious eyes he met in the thoroughfares of business. And with all the fearful and enslaved of the earth, he turned his eyes toward the fair land that promises absolution and new life to the sinful and miserable of other lands, and denies its rich benison of hope and freedom neither to the criminal who flies from justice, nor the miserable who flies from memory. With three thousand miles of ocean between him and France, perhaps he could shake off the slavish dread that gnawed forever at his peace, and rise to a position where he need not fear its sting. The untainted air of that new land had never heard the whisper of his shame, should never hear it; even in his own bosom, it should die forgotten and unfeared.