permitting any other wages for sin than death. And though, through
His mercy, sin forsaken escapes sin's penalty, and every human being
has it in his own power to modify, if not to conquer, any hereditary
moral as well as physical disease, thereby avoiding the doom and
alleviating the curse, still the original law remains in force, and
ought to remain, an example and a warning. As true as that every
individual sin that a man commits breeds multitudes more, is it that
every individual sin may transmit his own peculiar type of weakness
or wickedness to a whole race, disappearing in one generation,
re-appearing in another, exactly the same as physical peculiarities
do, requiring the utmost caution of education to counteract the
terrible tendencies of nature--the "something in the blood" which is
so difficult to eradicate: which may even make the third and fourth
generation execrate the memory of him or her who was its origin.

The long life-curse of Henry Leaf the elder, and Henry Leaf the
younger, had been--the women of the family well knew--that they were
men who "couldn't say No." So keenly were the three sisters alive to
this fault--it could hardly be called a crime, and yet in its
consequences it was so--so sickening the terror of it which their own
wretched experience had implanted in their minds, that during
Ascott's childhood and youth his very fractiousness and roughness,
his little selfishness, and his persistence in his own will against
theirs, had been hailed by his aunts as a good omen that he would
grow up "so unlike his poor father."

If the two unhappy Henry Leafs--father and son--could have come out
of their graves that night and beheld these three women, daughters
and sisters, sitting with Ascott's letter on the table, planning how
the household's small expenses could be contracted, its still smaller