The physical system adjusts itself to any permanent lesion in the body, and finally ceases even to send out its complaining messages of pain. So we in Lattimore, who a few weeks ago had been ready to sacrifice anything for the keeping of our good name; who by stealth justly foreclosed mortgages justly due, lest the world should wonder at their nonpayment; who so greatly had rejoiced in our own strength; who had felt that, surely, we who had wrought such wonders could not now fail:--even we numbly came to regard receiverships and assignments as quite the thing to be expected. The fact that, all over the country, panic, ruin, and business stagnation were spreading like a pestilence, from just such centers of contagion as Lattimore, made it easier for us. Surely, we felt, nobody could justly blame us for being in the path of a tempest which, like a tropic cyclone, ravaged a continent. This may have been weak self-justification; but, even yet, when I think of the way we began, and how the wave of "prosperity" rose and rose, by acts in themselves, so far as we could see, in every way praiseworthy; how with us, and with people engaged in like operations everywhere, the most powerful passions of society came to aid our projects; how the winds from the unknown, the seismic throbbings of the earth, and the very stars in their courses fought for us; and when, at last, these mightinesses turned upon us the cold and evil eye of their displeasure, how the heaped-up sea came pouring over here, trickling through there, and seeping under yonder, until our great dike toppled over in baleful tumult, "and all the world was in the sea"; how business, east, west, north, and south, went paralyzed with fear and distrust, and old concerns went out like strings of soap-bubbles, and shocks of pain and disease went round the world, and everywhere there was that hellish and portentous thing known to the modern world only, and called a "commercial panic": when I broadly consider these things, I am not vain enough seriously to blame myself. These thoughts are more than ever in my mind to-day, as I look back over the decade of years which have elapsed since our Waterloo at the Elk Fork trestle. I look out from the same library in which I once felt a sense of guilt at the expense of building it, and see the solid and prosperous town, almost as populous as we once saw it in our dreams. I am regarded locally as one of the creators of the city; but I know that this praise is as unmerited as was that blame of a dozen years ago. We rode on the crest of a wave, and we weltered in the trough of the sea; but we only seemed to create or control. I hold in my hand a letter from Jim, received yesterday, and eloquent of the changes which have taken place.