"I set out in life with one steadfast purpose before me--the purpose of devoting myself body and soul to business and to the making of money. It was not that I was indifferent to the attractions of a profession, and still less that I was wanting in appreciation of higher things, for I liked books and pictures and music. Sometimes, too, when I was listening to my sister's singing of Herrick's lines, 'To Anthea,' or to Ben Jonson's 'Drink to me only with thine eyes,' I felt bitterly the littleness of my aims, and seemed to know, as I never knew at any other time, what it was to love a woman with that high, whole-hearted, and deathless devotion which brings redemption and ennoblement to the soul of the man to whom it comes. But I said to myself: 'Patience; first of all let me grow rich; let me make all the money I can get together, and then, when I have sufficient for all my requirements, I will forsake the money-making, and turn my thoughts to love and poetry and pictures; and through them, perhaps on to religion, for I knew even then that though love and poetry are not religion, that they yet serve, before a higher faith has been called into being, to keep the life of the soul alive, and to open up the way for holier things. "And so I became what is called a good business man. I made business the motive of my life. I thought of nothing else, and read nothing but the papers, and these I only scanned for the purpose of observing the influence of political or other passing events upon the markets. At last I became rich. And with what result? That when I no longer needed business, I found I could live no longer without it; that it had become my life, and I its slave, and that I could awaken no lasting interest in anything which did not pertain to the making of money. It is true that I had at that time a wife and children (the former of whom I had married chiefly for her fortune), and was not without a certain half-selfish love for them as part and parcel of myself; that I possessed a handsome house and gardens in which I took pride as being of my own acquirement; and that I went into society with enjoyment; and found a certain pompous pleasure in extending my patronage to Sunday-schools, bazaars and Young Men's Christian Associations. But where my treasure was, there my heart was also, and at heart I was a business man, and nothing more. I did not know myself then as I do now, and so far from being in any way dissatisfied, I had no more suspicion that I was other than one of the most enviable of men, than has the grinning savage with his handful of beads. But I know now the thing I am, and what I have missed, and I tell you that the most sorely swindled simpleton in existence is the man whose business capability is so keen, that though he has never been bested in a bargain, he has bartered away his own happiness for a bauble, and (so skilful a schemer to defraud us is old Satan) has become bankrupt of all that makes life