While Fosdick and Dick are devoting their evenings to study, under the guidance of Mr. Layton, we will direct the reader's attention to a young gentleman who considered himself infinitely¹ superior in the social scale to either. Roswell Crawford could never forget that Dick had once been a boot-black, and looked upon it as an outrage² that such a boy should be earning a salary of ten dollars a week, while he—a gentleman's son—was only paid four, which he regarded as a beggarly pittance³. Roswell's father had once kept a small dry goods store on Broadway, but failed after being in business a little less than a year. This constituted his claim to gentility. After his failure, Mr. Crawford tried several kinds of business, without succeeding in any. His habits were not strictly⁴ temperate⁵, and he had died two years previous. His wife hired a house in Clinton Place, and took boarders, barely succeeding in making both ends meet at the end of the year. The truth was that she was not a good manager, and preferred to talk of her gentility and former wealth to looking after the affairs of the household. She was very much like her son in this respect.