While I!—well, I shall just plod on in the old way, teaching school one half the year to pay my college expenses for the other, until I find myself in some lawyer’s shop, in arrears with my landlady, in debt to my washerwoman—detesting to walk up the street, because I should pass the tailor’s store—abhorring to walk down it, because I should be sure to see the shoemaker standing in his door. With no more comfort or convenience in my life than can be enjoyed between my little back-chamber, up four pair of stairs in a cheap boarding-house, and the straight-backed chair and high-topped desk of the law shop. And no more love, or hope, or poetry, in my life, than may be found bound up between the covers of Coke upon Lyttleton. Or perhaps I shall turn private tutor, and advertise, ‘A highly respectable young gentleman, a graduate of Yale College, wishes to obtain,’ &c.; and you, who will be by this time the grave head of a family, with several little domestic liabilities, will probably answer the advertisement; and I shall find myself teaching the names of the keys of knowledge to young Mark and his brothers. Oh!”—— “Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!” laughed Sutherland. “Oh, _you’ll_ patronise me, rather! _You’ll_ be kind to me; for you’ll say to yourself and friends, ‘He was a college friend of mine, poor fellow.’ I fancy I hear and see you saying it now, with that careless, cordial, jolly condescension of yours.” “Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! My _dear_ Lincoln! My _dear_ fellow, why should that be? Why should you be pettifogger or pedagogue, unless you have a vocation for it? Why should anybody do what they don’t want to do? Life is rich—full of wealth, and love, and joy, and glory. Enter and take possession.” “Enter and take possession! Yes, that is what _you_ can do. Life is full of wealth, and love, and joy, and glory, for _you_, indeed; and you can afford to mock me with those words! But, never mind, my fine flamingo! I have heard the wise say that happiness is not so unequally distributed, after all. And I, for one, don’t believe this cake of comfort is going to be so very unjustly divided between us, or that you will have all the white sugar on the top, and I all the burnt paper at the bottom.” “See here, my friend, remember that we good-for-nothing Mississippians are not initiated into the mysteries of the kitchen, and therefore I don’t understand your culinary figure of speech at all.” “Oh, go on! go on! You’re a young bear!” “A young bear! Comrades! Oh, they are all gone! A young bear? Oh, I suppose he alludes to my black whiskers and hair, and my shag over coat!” “I mean _your_ trouble is all before you!”