enough to succeed), the remotest desert will not hide you from the evil designs of your enemies.  You may seek some crystal stream; you may let your tears flow with its waters; but such will not lighten your disappointment, for the persecuted heart is no peace-offering to the political victor.  Politically vanquished; and you are like an unhappy lover who seeks him a rural deity and sings his complaints to the winds.  Your eye will become jealous at the fortunes of others, but your sighs over the cruelty of what you are pleased to call human imperfections will not bring back your own.  Stay quietly at home, my son, and if you cannot be a schoolmaster, chance may one day turn you up President of these United States.  Let your insanity for writing books not beguile you into crime; and above all, I would enjoin you, my son, never to write the ‘Life and Character’ of an in-going President, for then, to follow the fashion of the day, and make for him a life that would apply with equal truth to King Mancho, or any one of his sable subjects, will be necessary that you write him down the hero of adventures he never dreamed of, and leave out the score of delinquincies his real life is blemished with.  If you do this, wise men will set you down a scribbler for charity’s sake.”

Thus spoke my venerable father.  But I remembered that he had several times before said that if I would so square my morals as to become in favor with the matronly portion of the parish he would even try and make a parson of me, which was, in his opinion, a promotion still higher than schoolmaster.  Having got a parish, and chosen the richest damsel of the flock for my wife, there was nothing to hinder me from snapping my fingers at the world and its persecutions.

My father, I would here observe, in justice to his memory, was much given to the study of religion, and would not unfrequently invite to his house the parson of a neighboring village, that he might debate with him on matters appertaining to the creed, which he had been thirty years narrowing down to the finest point.  And yet he always kept a vigilant eye to his worldly affairs, nor ever let a man get the better of him in a bargain.  Indeed it was said of him that though he had not been to sea for many a day he so linked himself to the fortunes of his neighbors as to secure a large share of the bounty so generously paid by our government.  That there was nothing in this inconsistent with his love of true religion my father was assured by the parson, who held that worldly possessions in no wise blunted the appetite for redemption; and that even bill-discounting quakers, with their bags of gold on their backs, would not find the gates of heaven shut to them.  And as the parson was a man of great learning, though small of figure, and very curatical in his features and dress, his opinions were in high favor with the villagers, among whom he had given it out that he was a graduate of Yale and Harvard, both of which