Reader, I have no heart to proceed; I am sorry that I began at all--that I
have got thus far. I love Margaret, the beautiful and gentle--Margaret,
the heart-broken penitent. I love her as a brother; and what brother but
yearns to conceal his erring sister's frailty? The faithful historian,
however, is denied the privileges of fiction. He may not, if he would,
divert the natural course of things; he cannot, though he pines to do it,
expunge the written acts of Providence Let us go or in charity.

Michael Allcraft, in obedience to his father's wish, came home. He was in
his twenty-fourth year, stood six feet high, was handsome and
well-proportioned. He was a youth of ardent temperament, liberal and
high-spirited. How he became the son of such a sire is to me a mystery. It
was not in the affections that the defects of Michael's character were
found. These were warm, full of the flowing milk of human kindness.
Weakness, however, was apparent in the more solid portions of the edifice.
His morals, it must be confessed, were very lax--his principles unsteady
and insecure--and how could it be otherwise? Deprived of his mother at his
birth, and from that hour brought up under the eye and tutelage of a man
who had spent a life in the education of one idea--who regarded
money-making as the business, the duty, the pleasure, the very soul and
end of our existence--who judged of the worth of mankind--of men, women,
and children--according to their incomes, and accounted all men virtuous
who were rich--all guilty who were poor--whose spirit was so intent upon
accumulation, that it did not stop to choose the straight and open roads
that led to it, but often crept through many crooked and unclean--brought
up, I say, under such a father and a guide, was it a wonder that Michael
was imperfect in many qualities of mind--that reason with him was no tutor,
that his understanding failed to be, as South expresses it, "the soul's
upper region, lofty and serene, free from the vapours and disturbances of
the inferior affections?" In truth there was no upper region at all, and