“I am confident that he will accept the situation and render you faithful service.”

“Well, then send him around tomorrow and if there is anything in him I may be able to do better by him when the fall trade opens.”

And so Charley Cooper was fortunate enough in his hour of perplexity to find a helping hand to tide him over a difficult passage in his life.  Gratefully and faithfully did he serve Mr. Hastings, who never regretted the hour when he gave the struggling boy such timely assistance.  The discipline of the life through which he was passing as the main stay of his mother, matured his mind and imparted to it a thoughtfulness past his years.  Instead of wasting his time in idle and pernicious pleasure, he learned how to use his surplus dollar and how to spend his leisure hours, and this knowledge told upon his life and character.  He was not very popular in society.  Young men with cigars in their mouths and the perfume of liquor on their breaths, shrugged their shoulders and called him a milksop because he preferred the church and Sunday school to the liquor saloon and gambling dens.  The society of P. was cut up and divided into little sets and coteries; there was an amount of intelligence among them, but it ran in narrow grooves and scarcely one[10] intellect seemed to tower above the other, and if it did, no people knew better how to ignore a rising mind than the society people of A.P.  If the literary aspirant did not happen to be of their set.  As to talent, many of them were pleasant and brilliant conversationalists, but in the world of letters scarcely any of them were known or recognized outside of their set.  They had leisure, a little money and some ability, but they lacked the perseverance and self-denial necessary to enable them to add to the great resources of natural thought.  They had narrowed their minds to the dimensions of their set and were unprepared to take expansive[11] views of life and duty.  They took life as a holiday and the lack of noble purposes and high and holy aims left its impress upon their souls and deprived them of that joy and strength which should have crowned their existence and given to their lives its “highest excellence and beauty.”

Chapter X

Two years have elapsed since we left Annette recounting her school grievances to Mrs. Lasette.  She has begun to feel the social contempt which society has heaped upon the colored people, but she has determined not to succumb to it.  There is force in the character of that fiery, impetuous and impulsive girl, and her school experience is bringing it out.  She has been bending all her mental energies to compete for the highest prize at the commencement of her school, from which she expects to graduate in a few weeks.  The treatment of the saloon-keeper’s daughter, and that of other girls of her ilk, has stung her into strength.  She feels that however despised her people may be, that a monopoly of brains has not been