The mother, too, saw beneath the false exterior assumed by her son, who treated her, except when his father was present, with little respect or affection.
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.