erratic life,--we were friends when he died. Poor, poor fellow! Well,
he is at peace."

The stern voice had saddened, and was almost tremulous. The spectral
form was still.

"How did he die, father?"

"A long story, darling," he replied, gravely, "and a sad one. He was
very poor and proud. He was a genius,--that is, a person without an
atom of practical talent. His parents died, the last, his mother, when
he was near manhood. I was in college then. Thrown upon the world, he
picked up a scanty subsistence with his pen, for a time. I could have
got him a place in the counting-house, but he would not take it; in
fact, he wasn't fit for it. You can't harness Pegasus to the cart, you
know. Besides, he despised mercantile life, without reason, of course;
but he was always notional. His love of literature was one of the rocks
he foundered on. He wasn't successful; his best compositions were too
delicate, fanciful, to please the popular taste; and then he was full
of the radical and fanatical notions which infected so many people at
that time in New England, and infect them now, for that matter; and
his sublimated, impracticable ideas and principles, which he kept till
his dying day, and which, I confess, alienated me from him, always
staved off his chances of success. Consequently, he never rose above
the drudgery of some employment on newspapers. Then he was terribly
passionate, not without cause, I allow; but it wasn't wise. What I mean
is this: if he saw, or if he fancied he saw, any wrong or injury done
to any one, it was enough to throw him into a frenzy; he would get black
in the face and absolutely shriek out his denunciations of the
wrong-doer. I do believe he would have visited his own brother with the