“What miseries of poverty, dearest mother? If you were a European talking of Europeans, I could understand your prudence; but you are an American matron talking to an American youth, and advising him not to marry the girl he loves if he has not a fortune to support her. It seems to me, mother, that in _our_ country the man or woman who refuses to marry for such a reason, wants faith, love, hope, enterprise, energy, and every thing they ought to have; and under such circumstances, it seems but right, indeed, that they should stay single.” “You do not know what you are talking about. But should India be so imprudent, do you think her father will consent to such a mad project?” “His consent to our union was long ago obtained; and if, under present circumstances, he should withdraw it—India is of age, you know!” “Mark, tell me if you have ever had any experimental knowledge of _want_?” The young man looked up with a questioning glance. “Because if you do not know, I can tell you, Mark. I know how young people think of poverty, and talk of poverty, when any strong motive like love, or any other passion, urges them to embrace it; and people who are older, and should know better, talk pretty much in the same way. They will tell you that poverty deprives you of none of the real essential blessings of life; that the riches of nature and of nature’s God are free alike to the rich and the poor; that the blessings of health, of well-doing, of sunshine, and the face of nature, are open alike to both. It is so with the rich, doubtless, and it may be so with the poor who were born in this poverty; but to the well-born and well-educated, to the refined and intellectual, poverty is a dreadful, dreadful thing. It is not only to suffer the privation of proper and sufficient food, and comfortable clothing, and dwelling—it is to be shut out of all enjoyment of the blessings of nature and of society, and at the same time be exposed to all the evils that nature and society can inflict upon you. You have no leisure, or if you have, you have no respectable clothing, in which to go out and take the air, and enjoy the genial sunshine of pleasant days, on the one hand; and on the other, no adequate protection against the freezing cold of winter, and no escape from the burning heat of summer. And for society, pride will not permit you to seek the company of your sometime peers, and delicacy restrains you from the coarse association around you. To us, Mark, poverty would be the privation of every enjoyment. To be poor, were to be maimed, blind, ill, and imprisoned, at once!”