This is the pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out, because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so cruel in it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great pretender, none of those who are logically displaced from the heights they have been raised to, manifestly created to show the moral in Providence.

He was modest, retiring, humbly contented; a gentlemanly residence appeased his ambition.

Popular, he could own that he was, but not meteorically; rather by reason of his willingness to receive light than his desire to shed it.

Why, then, was the terrible test brought to bear upon him, of all men?
He was one of us; no worse, and not strikingly or perilously better; and he could not but feel, in the bitterness of his reflections upon an inexplicable destiny, that the punishment befalling him, unmerited as it was, looked like absence of Design in the scheme of things, Above.

It looked as if the blow had been dealt him by reckless chance.