down his love of muscular victory, and only allowed himself an
outbreak every now and then, when he felt he could afford the
indulgence. Put early into an accountant's office, and losing his
father about the same time (the parent, who had a diseased heart,
was killed by an outburst of fury to which Abraham gave way on some
trivial occasion), he had henceforth to fight his own battle, and
showed himself very capable of winning it. In many strange ways he
accumulated a little capital, and the development of commercial
genius put him at a comparatively early age on the road to fortune.
He kept to the business of an accountant, and by degrees added
several other distinct callings. He became a lender of money in
several shapes, keeping both a loan-office and a pawnbroker's shop.
In middle age he frequented the race-course, but, for sufficient
reasons, dropped that pursuit entirely before he had turned his
fiftieth year. As a youth he had made a good thing of games of
skill, but did not pursue them as a means of profit when he no
longer needed the resource.

He married at the age of thirty. This, like every other step he
took, was well planned; his wife brought him several thousand
pounds, being the daughter of a retired publican with whom Woodstock
had had business relations.

Two years after his marriage was born his first and only child, a
girl whom they called Lotty. Lotty, as she grew up, gradually
developed an unfortunate combination of her parents' qualities; she
had her mother's weakness of mind, without her mother's moral sense,
and from her father she derived an ingrained stubbornness, which had
nothing in common with strength of character. Doubly unhappy was it
that she lost her mother so early; the loss deprived her of gentle