It will be remembered that when Ward Glazier left the Homestead, he removed to a neighboring farm known as the Goodrich Place,--a fine, comfortable, well-stocked and well-tilled farm, presenting an appearance of prosperity to the eye of the observer and calculated to make the impression that its owner must be well-to-do in the world. As we have heretofore hinted, however, Ward Glazier failed to prosper there. Why this was the case it is hard to tell. A late writer has suggested that "not only the higher intellectual gifts but even the finer moral emotions are an incumbrance to the fortune-hunter." That "a gentle disposition and extreme frankness and generosity have been the ruin in a worldly sense of many a noble spirit;" and he adds that "there is a degree of cautiousness and distrust and a certain insensibility and sternness that seem essential to a man who has to bustle through the world and engineer his own affairs,"--and if he be right, the matter may be easily understood.
However that may be, he failed to prosper, and as business misfortunes began to fall thick and fast upon his head, he gave up the farm to his creditors, together with all his other effects, and took up his abode at the Davis Place.
Who the particular Davis was whose name clung to the place we have been unable to ascertain, but when Ward Glazier moved there, the house seemed fairly to scowl upon the passer-by--so utterly unprepossessing was its appearance. A rude, capacious wooden structure, it stood fronting the highway, and was a place where the beautiful had no existence. The very soil looked black and rough--the vegetation rugged. Every inclosure was of stone or knotted timber, and even a dove-cot which in its fresher days some hand had placed upon the lawn, was now roofless and shattered, and lay prone upon the ground, a shapeless mass of collapsed boards. The lawn--if such it could be named--resembled a bleak shore, blackened with stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers had long years before gone down at sea. The broken windows in the dormitories were festooned with cobwebs that had housed long lines of ancestral spiders, and where a pane or two of glass remained among the many empty frames, one fancied a gibbering spectre might look out from the gloomy depths behind.