Andrew was growing old fast in those days, though not so old as to years.  Though he was far from old, his hair was gray, his back bent.  He moved with a weary shuffle.  The men in the shop began to eye him furtively.  “Andrew Brewster will get fired next,” they said.  “The boss ’ain’t no use for men with the first snap gone.”  Indeed, Andrew was constantly given jobs of lower grades, which did not pay so well.  Whenever the force was reduced on account of dulness in trade, Andrew was one of the first to be laid aside on waiting orders in the regular army of toil.  On one of these occasions, in the spring after Ellen was fifteen, his first fit of recklessness seized him.  One night, after loafing a week, he came home with fever spots in his cheeks and a curiously bright, strained look in his eyes.  Fanny gazed sharply at him across the supper-table.  Finally she laid down her knife and fork, rested her elbows on the table, and fixed her eyes commandingly upon him.  “Andrew Brewster, what is the matter?” said she.  Ellen turned her flower-like face towards her father, who took a swallow of tea without saying a word, though he shuffled his feet uneasily.  “Andrew, you answer me,” repeated Fanny.

“There ain’t anything the matter,” answered Andrew, with a strange sullenness for him.

“There is, too.  Now, Andrew Brewster, I ain’t goin’ to be put off.  I know you’re on the shelf on account of hard times, so it ain’t that.  It’s something new.  Now I want to know what it is.”

“It ain’t anything.”

“Yes, it is.  Andrew, you ought to tell me.  You know I ain’t afraid to bear anything that you have to bear, and Ellen is getting old enough now, so she can understand, and she can’t always be spared.  She’d better get a little knowledge of hardships while she has us to help her bear ’em.”

“This ain’t a hardship, and there ain’t anything to spare, Ellen,” said Andrew; and he laughed with a hilarity totally unlike him.

That was all Fanny could get out of him, but she was half reassured.  She told Eva that she didn’t believe but he had been buying some Christmas present that he knew was extravagant for Ellen, and was afraid to tell her because he knew she would scold.  But Andrew had not been buying Christmas presents, but speculating in mining stocks.  He had resisted the temptation long.  Year in and year out he had heard the talk right and left in the shop, on the street, and at the store of an evening.  “I’ll give you a point,” he had heard one say to another during a discussion as to prices and dividends.  He had heard it all described as a short cross-cut over the fields of hard labor to wealth and comfort, and he had kept his face straight ahead in his narrow track of caution and hereditary instincts until then.  “The savings bank is good enough for me,” he used to say; “that’s where my father kept his money.  I don’t know anything about your stocks.  I’d rather have a little and have it safe.”  The men could not reason him out of his position, not even when Billy Monroe made fifteen hundred dollars on a Colorado mine which had cost him fifteen cents per share, and left the shop, and drove a fast horse in a Goddard buggy.