It was strong hospitality, and quick heart now, which had brought him to this sad extreme. Throughout the day, he had been doing too much for a man of his legs, and years, and weight, as several persons told him. But the old man kept up to the height of young time; and when Sir Benjamin Box (an alderman of substantial yet melancholy order) entreated him not to dance so much, stout Mr. Erricker challenged him, though Box was ten years his junior, to jump over a dining-room chair with him! And thus he carried on for hour after hour, dancing, and slapping old friends on the back, and running about among the pretty girls, like a waiter who has to subsist upon tips; and ever so much rasher than that man is, because he was stirring up his intellect, to the same high scale as his body. What wonder then--with his doctor called away to a wealthy confinement, and his good wife too busy to frown at him--that he verified the warnings of those who knew, but could not at such a time remind him, that he had all but created a vacancy in the Town Council last Easter Monday, through juvenile impetuosity? What an awful crash of buffers, in the midst of headlong gaiety! Even to me, so new a friend, it seemed to sweep aside all thoughts of self, and plunge it in the great tide of human fate, that pitiless gulf-stream, in which we cannot even endeavour a course of our own, but are whirled along like a dollop of froth, or a shred of pop-weed among other weeds. Being (as a young man ought to be) entirely without experience of the sudden tragedies of life, perhaps I overdid my sense of duty in a case like this. If so, I erred on the better side; and in spite of all the sad home results I say that I would do the like again, whether others would do as much for me, or not. Right or wrong, I could not bring myself to leave these unhappy people without any friend to help them. My services were but small of course; and yet as it happened there was no one in the house to be more efficient. The family lawyer had left the town, after seeing to the marriage-settlement; the execution of the will was committed to Tom and his mother. Tom was away on his wedding-trip; and his mother, in delicate health for some years, had now broken down entirely, and left her daughter to do the best she could. Only on one point the widowed mother still had the courage to insist. Whatever came of it, her son should not be called back from his honeymoon to the coffin of his father. He had set off for Italy, or the South of France--I forgot which it was for the moment--nothing but a telegram could stop him; and no telegram should be sent.