Martha, the youngest, was a sweet tempered girl, who had managed to keep, as a general thing, beyond the sphere of antagonism that marked the intercourse of the other children.  To her mother, as she grew up, she proved a source of comfort; and she could, at almost any time, dispel by her smiles the cloud that too often rested on the brow of her morose father.

On reaching his seventeenth year, Edward had been placed in a store by his father, for the purpose of acquiring knowledge of mercantile affairs.  A young man in this position, if he has any ambition to make his way in the world, soon gets his mind pretty well filled with money-making ideas, and sees the way to wealth opening in a broad vista before him.  Every day he hears about this, that, and the other one, who started in business but a few years before, with little or no capital, and who are now worth their tens of thousands; and he thus learns to aspire after wealth, without being made to feel sensibly the fact, that the number who grow rich rapidly are as one to a hundred compared with those who succeed as the result of small beginnings united with long continued and untiring application.  Long before Edward reached his twenty-first year, he had so fully imbibed the spirit of the atmosphere in which he breathed, that his mind was made up to go into business for himself as soon as he attained his majority.  This idea Mr. Howland sought to discourage in his son; but Edward never gave it up.  Soon after he was twenty-one, an offer to go into a business, that promised a large return was made, provided a few thousand dollars capital could be furnished.  Not a moment did Edward rest until he had prevailed upon his father, ever too ready to yield a weak compliance to the wishes of this son, to place in his hands the amount of money required.  To do this, was, at the time, no easy matter for Mr. Howland, whose own business was far from being as good as usual and whose pecuniary affairs were not in the most easy condition.  Six thousand dollars was the amount of capital he was obliged to raise, and it was not accomplished without considerable sacrifice.

Edward and his partner were what are usually called “enterprising young men,” and they drove ahead in the business they had undertaken at a kind of railroad speed, calculating their profits at an exceedingly high range.  It is not surprising that, by the end of the first year, they required a little more capital to help them through with their engagements, the furnishing of which fell upon Mr. Howland; who, in this emergency, passed his notes to the new firm for several (sic) thonsand dollars.