profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily devouring
stolen goods? The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who had
worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by
what justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet,
done nothing but help to squander it? A more sturdy honesty,
joined to a more even and impartial temperament, would have drawn
from these considerations a new force of industry, that this
equivocal position might be brought as swiftly as possible to an
end, and some good services to mankind justify the appropriation of
expense. It was not so with my friend, who was only unsettled and
discouraged, and filled full of that trumpeting anger with which
young men regard injustices in the first blush of youth; although
in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in their existence, and
knowingly profit by their complications. Yet all this while he
suffered many indignant pangs. And once, when he put on his boots,
like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was his
best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free
himself from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his,
and do battle equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his
perplexities were thickest. When he thought of all the other young
men of singular promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who
must remain at home to die, and with all their possibilities be
lost to life and mankind; and how he, by one more unmerited favour,
was chosen out from all these others to survive; he felt as if
there were no life, no labour, no devotion of soul and body, that
could repay and justify these partialities. A religious lady, to
whom he communicated these reflections, could see no force in them