as silent as it had been stormy on the previous day. After it was
over, Arden followed his father to the door and said:

"I was a boy yesterday morning, but you made me a man, and a rather
ugly one too. I learned then for the first time that you occasionally
strike my mother. Don't you ever do it again, or it will be worse for
you, drunk or sober. I am not going to college, but will stay at home
and take care of her. Do we understand each other?"

The man was in such a low, shattered condition that his son's bearing
cowed him, and he walked off muttering:

"Young cocks crow mighty loud," but from that time forward he never
offered violence to his wife or children.

Still his father's conduct and character had a most disastrous effect
upon the young man. He was soured, because disappointed in his most
cherished purpose at an age when most youths scarcely have definite
plans. Many have a strong natural bent, and if turned aside from this,
they are more or less unhappy, and their duties, instead of being
wings to help life forward, become a galling yoke.

This was the case with Arden. Farm work, as he had learned it from his
father, was coarse, heavy drudgery, with small and uncertain returns,
and these were largely spent at the village rum shops in purchasing
slow perdition for the husband, and misery and shame for his wife and
children. In respectable Pushton, a drunkard's family, especially if
poor, had a very low social status. Mrs. Lacey and her children would
not accept of bad associations, so they had scarcely any. This
ostracism, within certain limits, is perhaps right. The preventive