All this was, in every respect, very trying to the poor boy. He religiously adhered to his resolution of abstinence from all spirituous liquors, and constantly and prayerfully struggled against the ebullitions of his own impetuous temper. But the life he led acted nearly fatally upon a very fragile organization; and all individuals of antagonistically-mixed races are known to be frail. The continued loss of rest, habitual irregularity in food and sleep, affectionate anxiety upon account of his master, tender solicitude for his own gentle, little wife, frequent and excessive provocation from Oswald, all combined to wear and fret his originally excitable temperament to a state of unnatural nervous irritability, that could scarcely sustain with calmness the rudeness of the shocks to which, in his false position, he was constantly exposed; and therefore he was very frequently--to use his own expression at the "love feasts"--in great danger of falling from grace. Reflecting upon this portion of the poor, doomed boy's life; recollecting the great, the almost superhuman struggle his spirit was making against the terrible, combined powers of evil; of his discordant organization; his fiery, impulsive temperament; his unfortunate education; his unhappy position, and his exasperating surroundings, all antagonistic, false and fateful, we find his parallel nowhere in modern times, and are forced to think of the age of antiquity, and of those mighty but ineffectual struggles of some foredoomed mortal, like OEdipus, in the power of the angry Fates. Upon poor Valentine's silent, deadly struggle, none but the pitying eye of our Father looked. And nothing but a miracle could have averted its final and fatal issue; and miracles are not wrought at the expense of moral free agency. There came at last a day--an awful day--when the boy spoke, and others heard, of that fell struggle with the powers of darkness. But we anticipate. The dark and trying seasons were relieved by brighter ones, alternating like night and day. The hours spent with Fannie, either in the gay, lighted shop, among a thousand objects of taste and beauty, and occupations shared with her, and congenial to his own æsthetic fancy, or in their little home, that, despite of poverty, Fannie's taste had made beautiful, were seasons of unclouded happiness, in which all care was forgotten.