Moreover, to see one's dearest friends escaping from some black distress, and coming back to their usual cheer, and jokes, and pleasure in the world around, takes or ought to take a lot of lead out of our own handicap. Although my sister had never been by any means painfully sympathetic with my misfortunes in the way of love, I was candid enough to feel that this might be because I had never asked her. Such an affection as mine was far beyond her understanding, a thing too holy to be discussed by any girl with yellow hair in love with a member of the Stock Exchange. But I quite forgave her all short-comings, the moment she fell into real trouble, and I wiped her eyes almost as softly as if they had been Dariel's. And this renewed our deep attachment, which had lost perhaps some little of its warmth, when she took to finding virtues in that marvellous Jackson Stoneman, which she had pronounced a hundred times to be sadly deficient in her brother. However they revived and flourished now; and I was not so mean as to ask how they came back, but was proud of their possession. Let us take all the credit we can get, from people who are fond of us; there will scarcely be enough to plug the holes our other brethren pick in us. Stoneman, too, having turned the corner by the narrowest of shaves, with the paint shorn from his shaft and felly, but his box and axle as sound as ever, was much improved for the present by the increase of humility. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say, by the birth of that quality within him; for if it had existed heretofore, it had been so true to itself as to recoil from all recognition. Except of course in his first love-time; for if a man cannot be humble then, Lucifer is no match for him. It is needless to say that the losses of the firm were spread from mouth to mouth at any figure that occurred to the imagination, long before the senior partner himself could lay a loose measure along them. But he managed to stick to the Hall and the Park; though he gave up his yacht, and the hounds, and other enjoyments now too costly, and at Grace's urgent order clave to money-making all the week, and left the love for Sundays. There was even some little talk about my throwing up the plough, and harrow, pitchfork, flail, and stable-bucket, and quitting in despair the land that had now become too honest to maintain mankind. To wit, I was to join our Jackson, not as a partner (for the solid reason that I had no capital), but as an agent, an assessor, or I forget what they called it. My father wished it, and so did my mother, and every one except myself; and I was doubting whether the sense of duty to my relatives ought not to outweigh my own tastes and wishes, when all my thoughts were upset again, and all my mind unsettled, by a letter just as follows:--