losses in the Life and Trust.' As it is I shall neighborhood Kitty watched all these fine peo

get through. But the same spirit which has brought me into this difficulty is going to spread the ruin far and wide to every commercial circle under the sun. It is but the beginning of sorrows; and those who have withheld the aid will, in the end, suffer most. I may yet be obliged to accept your kindly offer of shelter for myself and family. Heaven only knows where it will all end! If the worst comes to the worst, I shall turn to you with the same hearty sincerity with which you have asked me to come."

It was the one bright gleam of the banker's day. All else was toil and disappointment, weary heart and brain, striving to resolve the Gordian knot of commercial disaster-until he turned homeward, spent and harassed still, to meet guests with whom he had little or no sympathy, and who would not care a jot if they heard, next day, that he had gone down with the tide, a hopeless wreck.

There was one exception-Henry Jordanwhom he had himself introduced at his house, and had once hoped would be as a son to him. Kitty, feeling very odd and uncomfortable in a pale-colored silk of her aunt's, which Helen had insisted on her wearing, forgot the short sleeves and square Vandyke corsage, which revealed more of her pretty neck than any one save herself had ever seen before, in her interest in the conversation going on between him and her uncle, and her deep sympathy for his great disappointment through her cousin.

ple with rustic earnestness, wondering if they really meant what they said-especially Miss Rosa Brevort, who threw out startling assertions and unguarded criticisms in the most reckless manner. She thought of her mother planning an invasion into Ann's dominions to accommodate the elegant hostess, who was dispensing soup and smiles with the utmost serenity and self-possession. She noted the costly appointments of the table-the crystal—the china-the silver-the rich viands that came and went in such profusion, almost untouched, through the many courses-the sparkling wines and rare devices of the dessert-yet it was only yesterday that she had feared being a burden though coming on her kindly errand. As Helen had said, a suspension must be a very different thing from a failure, and she only wished that her mother could, at once, be comforted by the knowledge. But Mrs. Small was "drawing out" Mr. Jordan on her favorite topic, and she ceased to wonder wherein the difference consisted to listen to his earnest, enthusiastic replies, and watch the animated expression of his fine face amidst so much dull commonplace of manner and conversation.

"Charming young man, Mr. Jordan!" remarked Mrs. Small to Miss Brevort, as the ladies left the dining-room. "It is really refreshing to meet with such a philanthropic spirit. So rare!"

"Very," responded Miss Brevort, shortly. "It is such a privilege to be allowed to deny ourselves for the sake of suffering humanity. Don't you think so, Mrs. Lane?"

strance," as she presently informed Mrs. Groton-clasped her jeweled hands with impressive fervor. "Such a great privilege!" for Mrs. Small had always made subscription-books almost as fashionable as the Opera.

"One that we are remarkably slow to avail ourselves of," remarked Miss Brevort.

Helen, radiant in a gauzy evening dress, at the other end of the table, laughed, and very nearly flirted, with young Ludlam White, whose "Oh, great!" and our old acquaintance, Sechief attractions were his mustache and his ex-rena-who had kept her nurse from watching a pectations of acres in sea-island cotton. Lud- dying mother that night, and whose "nerves" lam White, Esq., present proprietor of the plant- had not yet quite recovered from the discomations aforesaid, was expansive in a white waist-posure attending the girl's "insolent remoncoat and double chin; while his wife appeared to have become reduced, proportionally, in size and stature, and to have nothing whatever to say in self-defense. Besides this united family, there was a bright-eyed, sharp-voiced, old young lady, who, however, made no pretensions to undue youthfulness in dress or demeanor. Mr. and Mrs. Mark Lane, though married two years, and the parents of a remarkably fine child, as the reader of "Pomps and Vanities" may chance to recollect, were still devoted to each other, and added very little to the general instruction and entertainment; and, in addition to them, Jonas Small, Esq., a leading man down town, had been invited to keep Mr. White, Senior, in countenance, with his stylish wife, who had, of late, taken to fashionable charities, and, therefore, addressed her conversation chiefly to Mr. Jordan, whom she recognized in his official capacity-Secretary to the "Association for Ameliorating the Condition of the Poor" and, for the time, ignored his social standing as book-keeper to Jones and Lutterell, French importers.

Under the protection of her uncle's near

"For my part"—and Mrs. Small languidly dropped into a comfortable chair-"I am perfectly exhausted with committee meetings and consultations. Mr. Small declares that I am absolutely killing myself, there is such a constant demand on one's sympathies."

"Really, you ought not to do so much," said Mrs. Groton; "the claims of one's own family ought to be remembered-don't you agree with me, Mrs. White? We certainly owe the first duty to ourselves."

"It's first and last in most instances;" and Miss Brevort glanced coolly around the little circle, while Kitty thought of her mother leaving her comfortable fireside-corner to concoct broths in the kitchen for the Doctor's penniless patients, and then going with him, a dreary ride of miles, perhaps, to administer them.

"But Christian self-denial!" interposed Mrs. | panic," repeated Miss Brevort, energetically, as Small. she moved away.

It was doubtless "the crying sin of the age," according to Miss Brevort's definition, which moved Mr. Jordan to monopolize our little friend Kitty throughout the evening, and he was probably actuated by the same motive when, a few months later, he visited Groton Four Corners,

"Has died a natural death," said Miss Brevort. "Show me one symptom of pure, unmitigated benevolence. I'm not one of your good people you know, I don't pretend to it; but the papers insist so on the perishing condition of the poor as the season advances, that I entered on a little calculation relative to hoops this morn-armed with a cordial letter of introduction to ing. We've lived to see the old proverb verified, 'No house without a skeleton in the closet;' no room, in my boarding-house at any rate. And suppose there are four thousand ladies in this city alone who wear them-that's moderate and one must have at least two a year."

“Oh yes, they soil and get out of shape so soon," said Helen.

And rip," added Serena, settling hers, with

a little twitch and pat.

"You can't get one that's to be trusted under five dollars, though they must be cheaper before the winter is out, if all necessaries of life are to come down; but two a year is ten dollars apiece for my four thousand, suppose they agreed to give them up. I instance hoops because they don't add to comfort or warmth; and that's what the poor wretches are to need. Well, in that item of Christian self-denial' alone, you have $40,000, which might do something toward flannel petticoats."

the Doctor from his brother-in-law; who added the satisfactory information that his affairs were once more in tolerable order, and that "he should not regret some losses, if they were the means of securing his little Kitty an excellent husband."

OUR SONS.

PROBABLY in every age, since the time of poor Adam and Eve's trouble with their willful son, the world has been supposed to be near its end on account of the naughtiness of boys. We confess that, for ourselves, in moments of wrath at the impish perversity, or of sorrow at the precocious wickedness of noted specimens of American boyhood, we have sometimes been tempted to that supposition, and certainly we could not much wonder if Young America furnished more food for the Prophet's avenging bears than Young Israel supplied. Yet the world has continued to be, and genera

“Oh, but we couldn't exist without them, Miss tion after generation has risen from petticoats Brevort."

"We managed it tolerably well, Mrs. Lane, two years ago. And there's flounces; there's another nice question-not that I intend to deny myself a button for any one; but five yards left off of every silk dress made up in New York this winter would furnish a few pairs of blankets."

to jackets and trowsers, and from jackets and trowsers to coats and pantaloons, without any utter extinction of the line of masculine succession. That succession will probably be kept up in this hemisphere, and here, as of old, the folly of youth will in due time be subdued by the wisdom of age. All the more earnestly, because of our good hope for the ultimate welfare of our country, we are disposed to look carefully and seriously at the tendencies of our sons, desirous at once of discovering their peculiar temptations and advantages. Some time ago we wrote upon the welfare of our daughters, not without response from many parents and friends, "Something quite novel-the extravagance and this present article aims at the same pracof the day."

"Really, the ladies appear to be quite absorbed," remarked the ponderous Mr. White, who had been Miss Brevort's neighbor at dinner, and advanced toward the little knot of ladies as the gentlemen entered the room. "Might I inquire the subject under discussion?"

tical purpose in the education of the family.

Our daughters are constitutionally more marked by sensibility, and our sons are more marked by willfulness. The consequence is that we are more anxious what will happen to our daugh

"Ah, just as we were remarking up stairs, you ladies have all the blame on your shoulders for once. These French silks and muslins; the enormous importations are at the bottom of it, Sir"-for he had caught Mr. Jordan's glance-ters, and what will happen from our sons—the "drained the country of specie."

"Exactly" said Miss Brevort, surveying his expansive person, heaving benevolently beneath the white vest-" of Champagne and Madeira, cigars, and English grouse."

"Extravagance, extravagance!" continued Mr. White; "as I remarked to my young friend here, it's the crying sin of the age. What else is at the bottom of all this panic ?"

"Selfishness; that's the root of the whole matter. Extravagance grows out of it, so does reckless speculation. Where we have the one vice of dress, you have that and the table to balance the account. Selfishness is at the bottom of the

daughter's sensitiveness exposing her to receive harm, and the son's willfulness exposing him to do harm. We are not wise to quarrel with Nature, and we must expect that boys will be more noisy and mischievous than girls; nay, we may count it a good sign of a lad's force of character if there is a good share of aggressive, fun-loving pluck in his composition. Well managed, his animal spirits will give him all the more manly loyalty, and, when true to the right cause, he will be all the more true because so much living sap has gone up into the fruit of his obedience. Yet what is more sad than force of will perverted to base uses, and the strength of

ly old enough to go out without his mother, puffing huge volumes of smoke from a monstrous cigar, and, in his pale face and affected swagger, presenting in himself those two fearful and frequent traits of our Young America-the union of puny health with braggart insolence. We had a strong specimen of this union at an academic assembly in this city not long since, where the exercises were often rudely interrupted by a score or two of precocious striplings, who solaced themselves in the intervals of their stampedes by stimulating their courage with plugs of tobacco, in the absence of other stimulus. The worthy President rebuked them; and a sound flogging would have been no more than their due.

The first crisis in the career of our sons is probably at school, where they must run the gauntlet between two ranks of tempters-the pattern good boys, who slave themselves, mind and body, to the reigning spirit of emulation; and, on the other hand, the great company of idlers, whose truancy and mischief-making sometimes have a chivalrous fascination to young blood beyond the attractions of the more demure book-worms. He may consider himself a favored father whose son escapes the ordeal with health unbroken and principles intact, and who bids adieu to his school-days with good scholarship not purchased by feebleness of limb, and a good constitution, indebted for its robustness to better sport than robbing hen-roosts or giving bloody noses.

dashing youth in dress, amusements, etc., would not be amply sufficient to maintain an old-fashioned family in comfortable frugality. We have been told, on good authority, that our merchants object to taking the sons of their own associates in gentility into their counting-rooms, on account of their self-indulgence and prodigality; and that something of the same preference for foreign service is appearing in merchandise which is already an established fact in our housekeeping. Some leading firms give the preference decidedly to English, French, or German assistants in their counting-houses, and are weary of trying to teach dainty young gentlemen the importance of learning how to take care of themselves, as a more important accomplishment than to drive a fast horse or parade the newest fashions of a coat or hat. The whole field of dissipation here opens upon us, and grave questions arise as to the obvious disposition to provide pleasures beyond the domestic circle, especially to separate young men from their fitting feminine associates, and gather them together by themselves in clubs, where man only rules, or else drive them to dens of infamy, where woman is seen only in her degradation. The whole subject of club-life, in its various forms, needs to be stud ied seriously, and we shall probably be startled at the vastness of the arrangements for keeping young men by themselves, too often to their disadvantage. Not only the establishments known as clubs, and some of which are wholly reputable, but many establishments not thus known, and bearing very innocent names, would swell the list. The engine-houses sometimes fan worse fires than those which their brave champions extinguish; and we have heard of little coteries of youth in cities and villages hiring rooms (each coterie for its own uses) in order to have free access to the games and liquors that parental rule and feminine delicacy do not allow under the household roof. The examination of such errors would bring new blessings upon the Mercantile Library, and other like associations, that band young men together for their good, and call them from their homes for a season, only to send them back better sons, brothers, and lovers. We are in advance of our subject, we are aware, in these remarks, since we have been dealing more with the schooling and apprenticeship of our sons than with their direct business career.

We need not enter into the private history of college life, or say what hosts of trials and temptations every collegian must conquer or subdue, for comparatively a small class of our youth enter college; and, moreover, it is the lot of the great multitude of our sons who are in stores and counting-rooms to be exposed to many of the same dangers as beset such students, so that it is best to say a word especially of those who are in training for business. The life of clerks and young salesmen in our cities is a curious and unwritten chapter of our American life, and few volumes would be more instructive than a catalogue of the hundred thousand youth in this city who are under some form of business training, and looking forward to a time of independence and competence. It would be sometimes pathetically and sometimes repulsively interesting to know how much compensation these young men receive for their labor or At school, however, and often long before the attendance, and how much money they spend youth enters his teens, the second crisis of his yearly, and for what purposes. The account career casts its ominous shadow before, and the would vary from touching instances of self-sac- American boy is called to think, perhaps to derificing frugality to monstrous cases of prodi- cide, upon the business that he shall pursue. gality, fraud, and dissipation. How poor boys Here is a great and fearful question, and one live, and how rich boys live, it would be well that, in some respects, is becoming more embarfor us to know-well for us also to see that poor rassing in the changes of fortune and the revboys, or so regarded, mysteriously spend some-olutions in social ideas. The old idea was that times more money than the sons of our merchant a boy should, if there were no reason for the princes. It would be important to ascertain whether it is not true that, as a general rule, the young men of our cities are very exacting in their expenses, and if the cost of keeping a

contrary course, follow his father's calling, and be farmer, mechanic, merchant, lawyer, or what not, according to the paternal precedent. But now the tendency is quite otherwise, and it is the

facilities the difficulties of success have also increased; and the young American who starts in the race of fortune with the fond dream of a golden goal, finds himself between two sets of rivals, one of whom snatch after the small prizes and the other after the high prizes. He finds the retail business crowded with a host of foreigners, who can live on next to nothing and undersell fair competitors; and, on the other hand, the strong-holds of wholesale traffic are held by mighty monopolists, who are as formidable from their marble or iron warehouses, to aspirants without friends or fortune, as the Malakoff, with its guns and soldiery, would be to a squad of assailants without guns or intrenchments to back them in their advance.

general disposition of our young people to press | can give a picture as startling as true of the upward (as they consider it) into the occupa- present trials of all young aspirants to fortune tions that demand the least manual labor, and as compared with the trials of the old times. seem to offer the greatest prestige of what is There is always, of course, an opening for sacalled gentility. The consequence is, that farm-gacity and energy, but with the increase of ing and the mechanic arts have lost much of their old attractiveness to the sons of farmers and mechanics, and the ranks of trade and the professions are overstocked with aspirants. The number of youth in our cities who are seeking some kind of employment that allows them to have a delicate hand, and wear kid gloves and polished boots, is enormous, and furnishes a fearful number of recruits to the army of vice and crime. What the cause of the disinclination to the manual arts is, it is not always easy to say; and certainly, in the nature of things, there | is far more demand for intellect, and far more exercise of manly power, in tilling the soil or building houses and ships than in selling silks or calicoes behind the counter. It would be a great gain if ten thousand clerks could at once go into the fields and work-shops, where they are wanted, and leave their places to ten thousand young women, who have nothing to do but to make their poor fingers the hopeless rivals of the sewing-machine, and to anticipate the uncertain time when some young man, not yet able to pay for his own board and clothes, shall venture upon the enterprise of taking a wife less thrifty than himself. It is partly from the false feminine notions of gentility that much of the rising aversion to manual labor springs, and much harm comes from the frequent preference of the dainty swain of the counter over the far abler worker at the plow or plane by sentimental maidens, who have studied out their ideas of the gentleman from trashy novels and not from the good old Bible and its noble standard of the gentle heart.

It would be very interesting and instructive if we could have a census of the boys who annually leave the public schools, with a full statement of their purposes for the future. It would be found, we think, far more illustrative of vain ambition than of republican industry and simplicity. It might appear that, with all our theoretic assertion of the dignity of labor, nowhere on earth are the sons of the laboring classes so desirous of escaping their fathers' lot as here, and nowhere are there so many aspirants for dainty gentility as here. Undoubtedly the changes that have lately taken place in the position of labor has had much to do with the tendency to overcrowd trade and the professions. Hosts of foreigners now throng our work-shops, and underbid natives in prices, and often scandalize them by profligacy. But the same inundation threatens many forms of trade. In many towns and cities the retail business is fast falling into the hands of foreigners, and the number of Irish and German grocers is becoming enormous, while many branches of dry-goods traffic are in the hands of Jews. We believe that any practical man who will compare the promise of trade now with its promise thirty or forty years ago,

With the increase in the difficulties of doing a successful business there is no corresponding diminution in the demands of living-surely no corresponding increase in the social alleviations of ill success. Society is constantly becoming more exacting, and he is a bold man who dares to begin a moderate business with the habits of household simplicity that were thought fifty years ago not unworthy the family of a prosperous merchant and a distinguished lawyer. Here comes in a potent element in the welfare of our sons-the present condition of household life, and the standard of expectation among those who are to be their wives, if any wives they are to have. It is a very serious question whom our son shall marry, and it is a serious question to him even if he never marries at all; for, as our nature is constituted, a young man thinks much of pleasing his female friends, and his standard of manly conduct and independent position is largely decided by the reigning feminine code of expectation. Now there are certainly very grave difficulties in reconciling the average promise of any moderate business with the average standard of household expenditure; and the question which Mr. Punch jocularly discusses, "Can a man marry on three hundred pounds a year?" is with many of our young men far from a joking matter. Many families, indeed, do live on less than three hundred pounds a year in America, and many must live on three hundred dollars a year, if they live at all. But the cases of frugal living most frequently adduced among people of comfortable homes are from country life, where many articles that cost high in the city are regarded as costing no more than air and water, being treated almost as much like gifts of nature. Let a fair money price be set to the potatoes, corn, milk, eggs, apples, pork, etc., consumed by the plain farmer, and his outlay thus estimated rises into figures somewhat formidable. But take the most modest standard of city gentility as our guide, and Mr. Punch's three hundred pounds sink into insignificance. No man ought to pay more than one