Roxy Hastings — page 21: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

12 ROXY HASTINGS. “He ought to have known better,” was all the reply that the young man heard as the father and daughter went out together; but there was a radiant look of kindness thrown back to him from the fair child, which more than compen- sated for the churlishness of her parent. CHAPTER II. A DESPAIRING HOUSEHOLD. Charley Lee’s position in the bank was one of small pecuniary value, yet it was nearly the whole support of a family of four persons. His father had been a merchant in good standing, who had emerged from the crisis of ’57 without failing, but with such heavy losses as ought to have induced him to ae up his business at once and save something from its ebris. Unfortunately he struggled on about three years, main- taining his credit, but not regaining his lost ground, and when at last he resolved to stop, although he paid his debts, he saved nothing but his good name, his household furni- ture—his house was mortgaged too deeply to save anything from that—and a Pennslyvania farm of a couple of hun- dred acres, which no creditor could be coaxed to take. He sold his furniture, excepting so much of it as was necessary to furnish a few rooms at a boarding-house, and afew months later, while diligently struggling to find some way of beginning life anew, he was saved further trouble on that score by a brain fever, which terminated his existence, and left his little family whelmed in a deeper grief than any which mere poverty could produce. A life insurance tantalized the afflicted family for a while with the prospect of pecuniary relief, but the company which had issued it kept a very sharp attorney employed to pick flaws in its policies, and evade the payment of them when possible; and some irregularity was discovered which vitiated this solemn contract with the dead. Mrs. Lee was not a lady of resources, and she quailed beneath these successive blows, and looked hopelessly for- ward to the future of herself, her three children and her father—a destitute old gentleman of more than seventy- seven years, who for more than a decade had been a mem- — ber of her husband’s family, and had never for a moment — comicbooks.cor