toil.

It was not until his age brought him in contact with others, that there
seemed to be any difference between his nature and the common race
of children. Always, however, some touch of sullenness lurked in his
temperament; and whatever thwarted his will or fancy darkened the light
of his clear eyes, and drew a dull pallor over his blooming cheek, till
his mother used to tell him at such times that he stood between her and
the sunshine.

But as he grew older, and shared in the sports of his companions, a
strange thing came to pass. Beside the shadow that follows us all in the
light, another, like that, but something deeper, began to go with Roger
Pierce,--not falling with the other, a dial-mark to show the light that
cast it, but capriciously to right or left; on whomever or whatever was
nearest him at the moment, there that Shadow lay; and as time crept on,
the Shadow pertinaciously crept with it, till it was forever hanging
about him, ready to chill with vague terror, or harden as with a frost,
either his fellows or himself.

One peculiar trait this Shadow had: the more the restless child thought
of his visitant, the deeper it grew,--shrinking in size, but becoming
more intensely dark, till it seemed like part of a heavy thunder-cloud,
only that no lightning ever played across its blank gloom.

The first time that the Shadow ever stood before him as an actual
presence was when, a mere child, he was busied one day in the warm May
sunshine making a garden by the school-house, in a line with other
little squares, tracked and moulded by childish fingers, and set with
branches of sallow silvered with downy catkins, half-opened dandelions,