Mr. Neuchamp returned to his cottage in a very different frame of mind from that which characterised his pre-matutinal discipline in the garden. How short a time, how trifling an incident, occasionally suffices to turn the scale from anxiety to repose, from despair to glowing hope. This last cheering mental condition was indispensably necessary to Mr. Neuchamp’s acceptation of burdens, even to his very life. He had gone forth in the clear dawnlight a miserable man, racked by presentiments of scorn unalterable to come, gazing on ‘Ruin’s red letters writ in flame,’ and associated with the hitherto untarnished fame and sufficing fortune of Ernest Neuchamp; he had heard in imagination the laugh of scorn, the half-contemptuous, pitying condolence. Now, though much remained uncertain and unsafe, the blessed flower of Hope had recommenced to bloom. Its fragrance was once more shed over the soul of the fainting pilgrim through life’s desert, and the wayfarer arose refreshed and invigorated, free once more to turn his brow erect and undaunted towards the Mecca of his dreams. This particular morning happened to be that of the bi-weekly post-day, a day to which Mr. Neuchamp had looked forward of late with considerably more apprehension than interest. How wonderfully different, as the years roll on, are the feelings with which that humble messenger of fate, the postman, is greeted! In life’s careless spring he is the custodian of friendship’s offering, the distributor of the small sweet joys of childhood, the dawning intellectual pleasures of youth, the rose-hued, enchanting flower-tokens of love. As the days of the years of our pilgrimage roll on, ‘the air is full of farewells to the dying and mournings for the dead.’ How altered is the character of the missives which lie motionless, but charged with subtle, terrible forces!—electric agents they!—thrilling or rending the vital frame from that overcharged battery, the heart! To this undesirable tenor and complexion had much of Mr. Neuchamp’s correspondence, drought-leavened and gloomy, arrived. Many of his smaller accounts were of necessity left unpaid. The cruel season, unchanged in the more vital characteristic of periodic moisture, seemed to be culminating in an apparently fixed and fatal determination on the part of Messrs. Oldstile and Crampton to let him have no more money on account. But several minor matters, on this particular day, besides the visit of Mr. Levison, seemed to point to Fortune’s more indulgent mood. The pile of letters and papers was pleasantly, if not hopefully, variegated by those periodicals and peculiarly stamped envelopes which denote the delivery of the European mail. Upon these Ernest dashed with unconcealed eagerness, and tearing open a letter in his brother Courtenay’s delicate Italian handwriting, utterly devoid of linear emphasis, read as follows: NEUCHAMPSTEAD, _6th March 18—_.