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But they are stingy in another way, that brings with it its own punishment–they starve themselves. I know of several of your half million folks, not a thousand miles from where I now sit, whose table does not cost them fifty cents a day, and that too with tolerably numerous families. I was once ill-advised enough to dine with a gentleman of this description, in a sister city, in consequence of his repeated and pressing invitations. We had part of a fore-quarter of very small mutton boiled, with a small modicum of potatoes; one man could have eaten the whole. To be sure, I had a glass of “London particular” Madeira after dinner, if it deserves the name, but as soon as I had done I made my excuses–“indispensable business–obliged to go out of town, etc.” and fled to an eating-house, where I satisfied what Dan Homer emphatically calls the “thumos edodes,” the madness of appetite, with something more to the purpose than lean mutton.

Mr. Longford was “none of them sort;”–he retired from business with only fifty thousand dollars, but with a clear conscience, adjusted books, and not a single cent of debt–he never refused his charity to deserving objects, and never signed a subscription paper for their relief,–he was never a member of a charitable society, and never contributed a cent to the Missionary funds, whether for the Valley of the Mississippi or the Island of Borneo, where there are nothing but monkeys, or Malays as incapable of being christianized as the monkeys. Had he lived at the present time, and in this section of the country, he would have been prayed for and prayed at, at least once a day, and been, besides, occasionally held up in the pulpit as a specimen of total depravity, and a child of perdition.

Yet, with all these defects, Mr. George Longford was a sincerely devout man, and a most firm believer in the Christian religion,–from a conviction of its truth, not merely because it was the fashion to believe it, or because his fathers believed it before him,–and a practical observer of its moral precepts. He read and studied the New Testament, because it contained a compendium of all his every-day duties as a rational and accountable being, and as a member of society, not because it was a magazine of polemical divinity and abstruse doctrines. The evening of such a man’s life is calm and tranquil; his death is indeed the death of the righteous.

James was this man’s eldest son;–I cannot say, as novel writers generally do, that “in him were centred the hopes and wishes of his fond parents,”–for they were not–they looked for support and comfort in their old age to their other children. James was a refractory and disobedient child from the very cradle. It is ridiculous to say that all men are born alike in dispositions and capacities; the great poet of nature, from whom I have, as usual, taken my text, says no; and I would sooner have a single line from him than folios of ingenious theories and metaphysical arguments from the profoundest philosophers. I have not much faith in innate ideas, but I confess that I have in innate dispositions, both good and bad.

James Longford’s disposition was most decidedly bad by nature–he was constantly, even when a mere schoolboy, in mischief, and that, too, of a kind that marked a malicious and cruel temper. His father in vain exhausted kindness and severity, in the hope of subduing this most unhappy temper; but neither the infliction of punishment, that he deserved twenty times a day, nor the caresses of the tenderest parental affection, appeared to have the least influence in mollifying his stubborn and morose disposition–he seemed to be one of those whom St. Paul characterizes, in that tremendous first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, as being “without natural affection.” Notwithstanding all these faults, he had naturally a strong mind and good talents; so that by the time he had attained his eighteenth year he was, at one and the same time, one of the most ungovernable and ill-tempered boys and best scholars in Parson Crabtree’s seminary of some fifty in number.