a place had gone--a home on which rested the shadow of death. These
are old, familiar scenes, acted over and over every day, and yet in
the little households where they occur there is a terrible sense of
novelty as if they then happened for the first time. The family feel
as if they were passing through a chaotic period--the old world breaking
up and vanishing, and a new formation and combination of all the
elements that make up life taking place.

Many changes followed. Their farm was sold. Part of a small house in
the village of Bankville was rented as their future residence. A very
small annuity from some property in the East, left by Mrs. Fleet's
father, was, with Dennis's labor, all the family had to depend on
now--a meagre prospect.

But Dennis was very sanguine; for in this respect he had his father's
temperament. The world was all before him, and Chicago, the young and
giant city of the West, seemed an Eldorado, where fortune, and perhaps
fame, might soon be won. He would not only place the family beyond
want, but surround them with every luxury.

Dennis, wise and apt as far as his knowledge went, was in some respects
as simple and ignorant as a child. There were many phases and conditions
of society of which he had never dreamed. Of the ways of the rich and
fashionable, of the character of artificial life, he had not the
remotest experience. He could not see or understand the distinctions
and barriers that to the world are more impassable than those of
ignorance, stupidity, and even gross immorality. He would learn, to
his infinite surprise, that even in a Western democratic city men would
be welcomed in society whose hand no pure woman or honorable man ought
to touch, while he, a gentleman by birth, education, and especially