Yes, reader, I was now Abram Skinner in all respects, and I loved his children, as he had done before me. In entering his body, I became, as I have mentioned repeatedly before, the subject of every peculiarity of being that marked the original possessor: without which, indeed, the great experiment my destiny permitted me to make of the comparative good and evil of different spheres of existence, must have been made in vain. What my prototype hated I was enforced to hate; what he loved I found myself compelled in like manner to love. While moving in the bodies of John H. Higginson and I. D. Dawkins, I do not remember that I experienced any affection for anybody; which happened, doubtless, because these individuals confined their affections to their own persons. Abram Skinner, on the contrary, loved his children; which I suppose was owing to their being the worst children that ever tormented a parent. He loved them, and so did I; he pondered with bitterness over the ingratitude of their tempers, and the profligacy of their lives, and I--despite all my attempts to the contrary--did the same. I forgot, at last, that I was not their parent, and my feelings showed me that I was; and I found in the anguish that attacked my spirit, when I thought of them, one of the modes in which Heaven visits with retribution the worshipper of the false god of the country. When the votary of Mammon has propitiated his deity, let him count the children he has sacrificed upon his altar. Avarice, as well as wrath, sows the storm only to reap the whirlwind. I am growing serious upon this subject, but I cannot help it. This portion of my history dwells on my remembrance with gloom; it keeps me moralizing over the career of my neighbours. When I see or hear of a man who is bending all his energies to the acquisition of a fortune, and is already the master of his thousands, I ask, "What has become of his sons?" or, "What _will_ become of them?" With the affection for the children of Abram Skinner that took possession of my mind, came also a persuasion, exceedingly painful, that they were a triad of graceless, ungrateful reprobates; and, what was worse, there was something whispered within me that much, if not all, the evil of their lives and natures, was owing to the neglect in which their parent, while engrossed with the high thought of heaping up money, had allowed them to grow up. The consequences of this neglect I felt as if it had been my own act.