When I protest, however, against making a display and a grievance of the load you have to bear, I am far from maintaining that you are to keep it a profound secret, and hide it away in unsuitable places under your clothes. A man can carry a hundred-weight on his shoulders with less inconvenience than a few pounds about his heart. If you doubt this, order cold plum-pudding for luncheon, and you will be convinced! A secret, too, is always a heavy substance to take abroad with you, and your own seems to incommode you more than another’s, probably because you are less indifferent about letting it fall. As for attempting to dance lightly along with the jaunty air of an unweighted novice, be assured the effort is not only painful but ridiculous. No, never be ashamed of your burden, not even though your own folly should have clapped an additional half-hundred on the top of it. Get your shoulders well under the heaviest part, walk as upright as you may, but do not try to swagger; and if you have a friend who likes you well enough to give his assistance, let him catch hold at one end, and so between you move on with it the best way you can. Some packages grow all the lighter, like a contraband trunk at the Douane, for being weighed and examined, or, as our neighbours call it, “pierced and plumbed.” Some again gather increased proportions when we enlarge upon them; but it is only those of which we dare not speak, those which no friend must seem to see, for which no brother must offer a hand, that sink our failing strength, that crush us down humbled and helpless in the mire. There is but one place for such burdens as these, and we never lay them there till we have tried everything else in vain; just as we offer the remnants of a life from which we expect no more pleasure, where we ought to have given all the promise and vigour of our youth, or take an aching, hopeless, worn-out heart back to our only friend, as the crying child runs to its parent with a broken toy. “The ox toils through the furrow, Obedient to the goad; The patient ass up flinty paths Plods with its weary load,”