“Abel, your Uncle Lawrence is a singular man.  He’s a sort of exception to general rules.  I don’t understand him, and he doesn’t help me to.  When he was a boy he went to India and lived there several years.  He came home once and staid a little while, and then went back again, although I believe he was rich.  It was mysterious, I never could quite understand it—­though, of course, I believe there was some woman in it.  Neither your mother nor I could ever find out much about it.  By-and-by he came home again, and has been in business here ever since.  He’s a bachelor, you know, and his business is different from mine, and he has queer friends and tastes, so that I don’t often see him except when he comes to the house, and that isn’t very often.”

“He’s rich, isn’t he?” asked Abel.

“Yes, he’s very rich, and that’s the curious part of it,” answered his father, “and he gives away a great deal of money in what seems to me a very foolish way.  He’s a kind of dreamer—­an impracticable man.  He pays lots of poor people’s rents, and I try to show him that he is merely encouraging idleness and crime.  But I can’t make him see it.  He declares that, if a sewing-girl makes but two dollars a week and has a helpless mother and three small sisters to support besides rent and fuel, and so on, it’s not encouraging idleness to help her with the rent.  Well, I suppose it is hard sometimes with some of those people.  But you’ve no right to go by particular cases in these matters.  You ought to go by the general rule, as I constantly tell him.  ‘Yes,’ says he, in that smiling way of his which does put me almost beside myself, ’yes, you shall go by the general rule, and let people starve; and I’ll go by particular cases, and feed ’em.’  Then he is just as rich as if he were an old flint like Van Boozenberg.  Well, it is the funniest, foggiest sort of world.  I swear I don’t see into it at all—­I give it all up.  I only know one thing; that it’s first in first win.  And that’s extremely sad, too, you know.  Yes, very sad!  Where was I?  Ah yes! that we are all dirty scoundrels.”

Abel had relighted his cigar, after Mr. Van Boozenberg’s departure, and filled the office with smoke until the atmosphere resembled the fog in which his father seemed to be floundering.

“Abel, merchants ought not to smoke cigars in their counting-rooms,” said his father, in a half-pettish way.

“No, I suppose not,” replied Abel, lightly; “they ought to smoke other people.  But tell me, father, do you know nothing about the woman that you say was mixed up with Uncle Lawrence’s affairs?”

“Nothing at all”

“Not even her name?”

“Not a syllable.”

“Pathetic and mysterious,” rejoined Abel; “a case of unhappy love, I suppose.”

“If it is so,” said Mr. Newt, “your Uncle Lawrence is the happiest miserable man I ever knew.”

“Well, there’s a difference among men, you know, father.  Some wear their miseries like an order in their button-holes.  Some do as the Spartan boy did when the wolf bit him.”