Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. REMINISCENCES. I Have been describing the event of Mr. Humphreys' arrival at Brookboro', together with the first impression his appearance created among the people. If the kind reader will allow, I will in a single chapter give a sketch of his earlier days, of his friends, and of the circumstances with which he found himself now surrounded. It is Bo true that there is no pleasure in this world without some pain, no goodness unless closely yoked with a power of evil, no flattering promise without a worm in the bud to gnaw straight to its heart. It is so ordered of Heaven, all for the wisest and best of purposes, that the two principles of good and ill, of joy and sorrow, of light and darkness, shall not be set over against one another, but be so intimately mingled and mixed together — one in- twining the other with a show even of affection — as that the influence of the better shall be able, in time, to eradicate that of the worse, and out of contrasts and contrarieties of the most violent character a true and beautiful order shallbe established, promising to endure when every thing material shall have faded away. Little, perhaps, would any one' ha'vg thought that Mr. Humphreys' situation was apropos to this observation; yet, in one sense, it certainly was. Let us look back upon his history. His father was a lawyer, in the town of Briarfield, — not more than sixty or seventy miles distant, — a man of wealth and standing, proud and imperious, impatient of another's will than his own, and determined in all cases, if within the limits of possibility, to carry forward his individual plans and projects to a successful issue. To be balked in any thing he had set his mind upon, was to have his fiercest resentment kindled against the one through whose instrumental...