Looking at him now, his back buried in the soft chair, his face, so pleasant to the eye, turned rather upwards, and his thin white hands resting listlessly, one on the elbow of the chair, one down on his knee, a stranger would have failed to detect anything amiss with the person of Isaac St. John, or that it was not like other men's. For the first forty years of Isaac St. John's existence, his days had been as one long, ever-present mortification; that disfiguring hump and his sensitiveness doing battle together. Why it should be so, I know not, but it is an indisputable fact, that where any defect of person exists, any deformity--two of the qualities pertaining to our nature exist in the mind in a supereminent degree, sensitiveness and vanity, perhaps for the good of the soul, certainly to the marring of its peace. It has been so since the world began; it will be so to its ending. Isaac St. John was no exception. There never can be an exception; for this seems to be a law of nature. Remember the club-foot of Byron, and what it did for him. This shrinking sensitiveness, far more than his health, had converted Mr. St. John into a hermit. It was terrible to him to go forth unto the gaze of his fellow-men, for--he carried his deformity with him. Now that he was advancing in years, growing onwards to be an old man, the feeling was wearing off; the keen edge of the razor which had cut all ways was becoming somewhat blunt: but it must ever remain with him in a greater or lesser degree. He was not thinking of it now. It was when he was in the presence of others, or when making up his mind to go into their presence, that the defect was so painfully present to him. As he sat there, his brow knit with its lines, two things were troubling him: the one was a real, tangible care, the other was only a perplexity. His own mother had lived to bring him up; and how she had cherished and loved her unfortunate son, the only heir to the broad lands of the St. Johns, that son's heart ached even now to think of. At the time she died, he wished he could die also; his happiest thoughts now were spent in her remembrance; his most comforting moments those when he lost himself in the anticipation of the meeting that awaited them hereafter. He was a grown-up man, getting old it almost seemed to his lonely heart, when the little half-brother was born, the only issue of his father's second marriage. How Isaac St. John took to this little baby, loved it, fondled it, played with it, he might have been half ashamed to tell in words. The boy had been his; as his own; since the death of their father, he had been his sole care; and now that boy, grown to manhood, was going the way of the world and bringing trouble into his home. No very great and irremediable trouble yet: but enough to pain and worry the sensitive heart that so loved him.