Thenceforth, uncheck’d, amusements he partook,
And (save his ledger) saw no decent book;
Him found the merchant punctual at his task,
And that performed, he’d nothing more to ask;
He cared not how old Abel play’d the fool,
No master he, beyond the hours of school: 
Thus they proceeding, had their wine and joke,
Till merchant Dixon felt a warning stroke,
And, after struggling half a gloomy week,
Left his poor clerk another friend to seek. 
   Alas! the son, who led the saint astray,
Forgot the man whose follies made him gay;
He cared no more for Abel in his need,
Than Abel cared about his hackney steed: 
He now, alas! had all his earnings spent,
And thus was left to languish and repent;
No school nor clerkship found he in the place,
Now lost to fortune, as before to grace. 
   For town-relief the grieving man applied,
And begg’d with tears what some with scorn denied;
Others look’d down upon the glowing vest,
And frowning, ask’d him at what price he dress’d? 
Happy for him his country’s laws are mild,
They must support him, though they still reviled;
Grieved, abject, scorn’d, insulted, and betray’d,
Of God unmindful, and of man afraid, —
No more he talk’d; ’twas pain, ’twas shame to speak,
His heart was sinking, and his frame was weak. 
His sister died with such serene delight,
He once again began to think her right;
Poor like himself, the happy spinster lay,
And sweet assurance bless’d her dying-day: 
Poor like the spinster, he, when death was nigh,
Assured of nothing, felt afraid to die. 
The cheerful clerks who sometimes pass’d the door,
Just mention’d “Abel!” and then thought no more. 
So Abel, pondering on his state forlorn,
Look’d round for comfort, and was chased by scorn. 
And now we saw him on the beach reclined,
Or causeless walking in the wintry wind;
And when it raised a loud and angry sea,
He stood and gazed, in wretched reverie: 
He heeded not the frost, the rain, the snow,
Close by the sea he walk’d alone and slow: 
Sometimes his frame through many an hour he spread
Upon a tombstone, moveless as the dead;
And was there found a sad and silent place,
There would he creep with slow and measured pace;
Then would he wander by the river’s side,
And fix his eyes upon the falling tide;
The deep dry ditch, the rushes in the fen,
And mossy crag-pits were his lodgings then: 
There, to his discontented thought a prey,
The melancholy mortal pined away. 
   The neighb’ring poor at length began to speak
Of Abel’s ramblings—­he’d been gone a week;
They knew not where, and little care they took
For one so friendless and so poor to look. 
At last a stranger, in a pedlar’s shed,
Beheld him hanging—­he had long been dead. 
He left a paper, penn’d at sundry times,
Entitled thus—­“My Groanings and my Crimes!”
   “I was a Christian man, and