Now, from his youth up, nay, from very childhood, Everett had borne the character thus implied. A verdict was early pronounced on him by an eminent phrenologist who happened to be visiting the family. "A beautiful mind, a comprehensive intellect, but marvellously unpractical,--singularly unfitted to cope with the difficulties of every-day life." And Everett's mother, hanging on the words of the man of science, breathless and tearful, murmured to herself, while stroking her unconscious little son's bright curls,--"I always feared he was too good for this wicked world." The child began to justify the professor's _dictum_ with his very first entry into active life. He entertained ideas for improving the social condition of rabbits, some time before he could conveniently raise himself to a level with the hutch in which three of them, jointly belonging to himself and his brother, abode. His theory was consummate; in practice, however, it proved imperfect,--and great wrath on the part of Richard Gray, and much confusion and disappointment to Everett, were the result. Richard, two years younger than Everett by the calendar, was at least three older than he in size, appearance, habits, and self-assertion. He was what is understood by "a regular boy": a fine, manly little fellow, practical, unsensitive, hard-headed, and overflowing with life and vigor. He had little patience with his brother's quiet ways; and his unsuccessful attempts at working out theories met with no sympathy at his hands. After the affair of the rabbits, his experiments, however certain of success he deemed them, were always made on or with regard to his own belongings. The little plot of garden-ground which he held in absolute possession was continually being dug up and refashioned, in his eager efforts to convert it successively into a vineyard, a Portuguese _quinta_, (to effect which he diligently planted orange-pips and manured the earth with the peel,) or, favorite scheme of all, a wheat-field,--dimensions, eighteen feet by twelve,--the harvest of which was to provide all the poor children of the village with bread, in those hard seasons when their pinched faces and shrill, complaining cries appealed so mightily to little Everett's heart.