evident injustice of Fate. How had he deserved that life should present
so dismal and forbidding an aspect to him? He had had none of the joys
of infancy; his youth had been spent wearily under the peevish discipline
of a cloister; he had entered on his young manhood with all the
awkwardness and timidity of a night-bird that is made to fly in the day.
Up to the age of twenty-seven years, he had known neither love nor
friendship; his time had been given entirely to earning his daily bread,
and to the cultivation of religious exercises, which consoled him in some
measure for his apparently useless way of living. Latterly, it is true,
Fortune had seemed to smile upon him, by giving him a little more money
and liberty, but this smile was a mere mockery, and a snare more hurtful
than the pettinesses and privations of his past life. The fickle
goddess, continuing her part of mystifier, had opened to his enraptured
sight a magic window through which she had shown him a charming vision of
possible happiness; but while he was still gazing, she had closed it
abruptly in his face, laughing scornfully at his discomfiture. What
sense was there in this perversion of justice, this perpetual mockery of
Fate? At times the influence of his early education would resume its
sway, and he would ask himself whether all this apparent contradiction
were not a secret admonition from on high, warning him that he had not
been created to enjoy the fleeting pleasures of this world, and ought,
therefore, to turn his attention toward things eternal, and renounce the
perishable delights of the flesh?

"If so," thought he, irreverently, "the warning comes rather late, and it
would have answered the purpose better had I been allowed to continue in
the narrow way of obscure poverty!" Now that the enervating influence of
a more prosperous atmosphere had weakened his courage, and cooled the
ardor of his piety, his faith began to totter like an old wall. His
religious beliefs seemed to have been wrecked by the same storm which had