It is wonderful how Nature provides for the taking off and keeping down of her monsters,—­creatures that carry things only by force or fraud:  your foxes, wolves, and bears; your anacondas, tigers, and lions; and your cunning or ferocious men of prey, of whom they are the types.  Storms may and must now and then rage and ravage, volcanoes must have their destructive fits, and the darkness must do its mean and tyrannical things while men are asleep; but calmness and sunshine triumph immeasurably on the whole.  Of the cubs of iniquity, only here and there an individual escapes the crebrous perils of adolescence, develops into the full beast, and occupies a sublime place in history; whereas the genial men of sunshine, plenty as the fair days of summer, pass quietly over from the ruby of life’s morning to the sapphire of its evening, too numerous to be written of or distinctly remembered.  There are, it is quite true, enough biographies of such in existence to read the world to sleep by for ages.  It can hardly keep awake at all, except over lives of the other sort; hence, one of great and successful villany is a prize for the scribe.  In the dearth of such, let us content ourselves with briefly noticing one of the multitude of abortive cubs, its villany nipped—­as Nature is wont to nip it—­in the promising bud of its tenderness.  Many a flourishing young rogue suddenly disappears, and the world never knows how or why.  But it shall know, if it will heed our one-story tale, how Chip Dartmouth of these parts was turned down here,—­albeit we cannot at present say whether he has since turned up elsewhere.

Our hero was baptized simply Chipworth, in compliment to a rich uncle, who was expected on that account to remember him more largely in his will,—­as he probably did; for he soon left him a legacy of twenty thousand dollars, on the express condition that it should accumulate till he was of age, and then be used as a capital to set the young man up in business.  As the inheritance of kingdoms spoils kings, so this little fortune, though Chip could not finger a mill of it during his minority, all the while acted on him like a controlling magnet, inducing a strong repellency to good advice and a general exaltation of views, so that, when he came into possession of it, he was already a fast young man in almost every respect.  He had settled it as the maxim of his life to gain fast and spend fast; and having had considerable opportunity to spend before he had any to gain, he had on becoming a business man, some secret deficits to make good before he could really be as rich as people supposed him.  As his deficits had not been made by daylight, so daylight must have nothing to do in wiping them out; and hence darkness became more congenial than its reverse to all his plans, and he studied, as he thought, with singular success, the various tricks of blinding people to the state of his finances, as well as of bettering it.  While he was supposed