CHAPTER II.


"At first, he, busy, plodding poor,
Earned, saved, and daily swelled his store;
But soon Ambition's summits rose,
And Avarice dug his mine of woes."

For the better understanding of some of the allusions of the preceding
chapter, and of others that may yet appear in different parts of our tale,
as well, indeed, as for a better appreciation of the whole, we will here
turn aside from the thread of the narrative just commenced, to take a brief
retrospect of the leading events and circumstances with which the previous
lives of the several personages we have introduced had been connected, and
among which their characters had been shaped and their destinies
determined.

Some twenty two or three years previous to the juncture we have been
describing, Arthur and Mark Elwood, by the fruits of their unremitting
industry as laborers on a farm in summers, and as pedlars of what they
could best buy and sell in winters, added to the few hundred dollars
patrimony they each inherited, were enabled, in a few years, to realize the
object of their early ambition, in the opening of a small retail store, in
one of the little outskirt villages of northern New-Hampshire.

Such, like that of hundreds of others among us who now count their wealth