him at least one strain not far removed from the savage, while on the
other hand there were mental conditions apparently presupposing ages of
culture. At the university he had indulged in large reading outside the
hedge of his required studies, and gained thus an acquaintance with and
developed a faculty in literature destined to stand him in good stead.

Inheriting earthly life and a history--nothing more--from a long line of
ancestors, and a few thousand pounds--less than twenty--from his father,
who was a country attorney, a gentle, quarrelsome man, who yet never,
except upon absolute necessity, carried a case into court, he had found,
as his family increased, that his income was not sufficient for their
maintenance in accustomed ease. With not one expensive personal taste
between them, they had neither of them the faculty for saving
money--often but another phrase for doing mean things. Neither husband
nor wife was capable of _screwing_. Had the latter been, certainly
the free-handedness of the former would have driven her to it; but while
Mrs. Raymount would go without a new bonnet till an outcry arose in the
family that its respectability was in danger, she could not offer two
shillings a day to a sempstress who thought herself worth half-a-crown;
she could not allow a dish to be set on her table which was not as
likely to encourage hunger as allay it; neither because some richer
neighbors gave so little, would she take to herself the spiritual fare
provided in church without making a liberal acknowledgment in carnal
things. The result of this way of life was the deplorable one that Mr.
Raymount was compelled to rouse himself, and, from the chair of a
somewhat self-indulgent reader of many books, betake himself to his
study-table, to prove whether it were not possible for him to become the
writer of such as might add to an income showing scantier every quarter.
Here we may see the natural punishment of liberal habits; for this man
indulging in them, and, instead of checking them in his wife, loving her