Roxy Hastings — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

ROXY HASTINGS. } 13 ‘in all that time been allowed to feel that his presence was a burden. The widow’s oldest son, Alfred, who was a couple of years the senior of Charles, was in the army, having volunteered soon after his father’s death, under circumstances which will appear more fully hereafter. Like Charles, he had been thoroughly educated, and for a short time before his father’s retirement from business, he had been a partner in the house. Alfred was a little taller and fine gray eyes, and an ample forehead, might be considered a fair specimen of manly beauty. Charles was at this time nearly twenty years old, and had returned from Yale only about three months before the death of his father, who would not let his altered for- tunes interfere with the completion of his son’s education. He had been designed for a profession, but the emer- gency which was now so close upon his family no longer permitted him to entertain such aspirations; and he was too happy to be able to add a little to his widowed mother’s means by entering a bank on a small salary. From this position he had soon risen to the better one in which the opening of our narrative finds him; but during this period the Lees had fallen from one depth of poverty to another, until all their scant means being exhausted, they had no dependence beyond the earnings of Charles, and some trifling avails of the needle of both mother and daughter. The respectable boarding-house in which the reduced merchant had taken rooms had been exchanged for an ob- scure home on the east side of the city, where, in a hired half house, which they had scantily furnished, they ceased. to make any claims to their former gentility. Into this obscurity their more prosperous friends per- mitted them to subside without much inquiry after them, a circumstance which the charitable widow considered quite a proof of their good nature. “They do not want to annoy us by finding us in such a place as this, Laura,” she would say to her daughter; “and it is really quite considerate of them.” Laura Lee deserves some description at our hands, not so much because she possessed unusual personal attrac- tions, being a slight, graceful, black-eyed girl—such. soft, large, lustrous eyes they were, too—as for her filial and sisterly love, for the contented spirit with which she ac- cepted her new position, and for her earnest, cheerful dis- charge of the onerous duties which it devolved upon her, Comicbooks _ stouter than his brother, and having curling chestnut hair, — (ee)