Hide and Seek

th permitted her husband to open the sittings of

eless. The lad's home-position, at this period, claims a moment's serious attention. Zack's resistance to his father's i

rill the child into premature discipline by dint of Sabbath restrictions and Select Bible Texts. When that child grew to a boy, and when the boy developed to a young man, Mr. Thorpe's educational system still resolutely pe

assailed him, the same two replies were invariably shot back at them in turn from the parental quiver. Mr. Thorpe calmly-always calmly-said, first, that he "would never compound with vice" (which was what nobody asked him to do), and, secondly, that he would, in no instance, great or small, "consent to act from a principle of expediency:"

m nine in the morning till six in the evening; to surround him with estimable examples; and, in short, to share with me the solemn responsibility of managing his moral and religious training. Persons who ask me to allow motives of this awfully important nature to be modified in the smallest degree by any considerations connected with the lad's natural disposition (which has been a source of grief to me from his

s which they had entailed on him from boyhood, made life in the open air, and the constant use of his hardy thews and sinews a constitutional necessity. He felt-and there was no self-delusion in the feeling-that he should mope and pine, like a wild animal in a cage, under confinement in an office, only varied from morning to evening by commercial walking expeditions of a miserable mile or two in close and crowded streets. These forebodings-to say nothing of his natural

to be guided by the discovery. As to outward expression, the lad's fondness for Mrs. Thorpe was a wild, boisterous, inconsiderate, unsentimental fondness, noisily in harmony with his thoughtless, rattle-pated disposition. It swayed him by fits and starts; influencing him nobly to patienc

duced in his natural appetite for the amusements and dissipations of the town. After nine hours of the most ungrateful daily labor that could well have been inflic

were directed especially to the purpose of closing up against him the forbidden entrances to theaters and public gardens-places of resort which Mr. Thorpe characterized, in a strain of devout allegory, as "Labyrinths of National Infamy." It was perfectly useless to suggest to the father (as some of Zack's maternal relatives did suggest to him), that the son was originally descended from Eve, and was consequently possessed of an hereditary tendency to pluck at fo

hen the question was asked at breakfast the next morning. This frankness of confession was always rewarded by rebukes, threats, and reiterated prohibitions, administered by Mr. Thorpe with a crushing assumption of superiority to every mitigating argument, entreaty, or excuse that his son could urge, which often irritated Zack into answering defiantly, and recklessly repeating his offen

lop flourished in his new vocation in exact proportion to the resistance offered to the exercise of his authority. He derived a grim encouragement from the wildest explosions of Zack's fury at being interfered with by a man who had no claim of relationship over him, and who gloried, professionally, in experimenting on him, as a finely-complicated case of spiritual disease. Thrice did Mr. Yollop, in his capacity of a moral surgeon, operate on his patient, and triu

house door had been bolted for the night. They saw him thus acknowledge, by every outward proof, that he was crushed into thorough submission; and the sight satisfied them to their heart's content. No men are so short-sighted as persecuting men. Both Mr. Thorpe and his coadjutor were persecutors on principle, wherever they encountered opposition; and b

ow assured him that his father was safe in bed, and invited him to descend on tiptoe-with his boots under his arm-into the hall. Here he placed his candle, with a box of matches by it, on a chair, and proceeded to open the house door with the noiseless dexterity of a practiced burglar-being always careful to facilitate the safe performance of this dangerous operation by keeping lock, bolt, and hinges well oiled. Having secured the

and to be certain of preserving his steadiness of hand and stealthiness of foot, while bolting the door and stealing up stairs for an hour or two of bed. Knowledge of his own perilous weakness of brain, as a drinker, rendered him thus uncharacteristically temperate and

t was, he well knew would not extend to viewing leniently such offenses as haunting night-houses at two in the morning, while his father believed him to be safe in bed. But one mitigating circumstance can b

. Then, in the evening, Mr. Thorpe often thought it advisable to harangue him seriously, by way of not letting the reformed rake relapse for want of a little encouraging admonition of the moral sort. Nor was Mr. Yollop at all behindhand in taking similar precautions to secure the new convert permanently, after having once caught him. Every word these two gentlemen spoke only served to harden the l

lved to set up a domestic Drawing Academy in his wife's room; with the double purpose of amusing his family c