_Mr. Fax._ This, if I remember rightly, is the cottage of which I was speaking. The cottage was ruined and uninhabited. The roof had fallen in. The garden was choked with weeds. ‘What,’ said Mr. Fax, ‘can have become of its unfortunate inhabitants?’ _Mr. Forester._ What were they? _Mr. Fax._ A couple for whom nature had done much, and fortune nothing. I took shelter in their cottage from a passing storm. The picture which you called the imagination of an extreme case falls short of the reality of what I witnessed here. It was the utmost degree of misery and destitution compatible with the preservation of life. A casual observer might have passed them by, as the most abject of the human race. But their physiognomy showed better things. It was with the utmost difficulty I could extract a word from either of them: but when I at last succeeded I was astonished, in garments so mean and a dwelling so deplorable, to discover feelings so generous and minds so enlightened. The semblance of human sympathy seemed strange to them; little of it as you may suppose could be discovered through my saturnine complexion, and the habitual language of what you call my frosty philosophy. By degrees I engaged their confidence, and he related to me his history, which I will tell you, as nearly as I can remember, in his own words. CHAPTER XIII DESMOND My name is Desmond. My father was a naval officer, who in the prime of life was compelled by wounds to retire from the service on his half-pay and a small additional pension. I was his only son, and he submitted to the greatest personal privations to procure me a liberal education, in the hope that by these means he should live to see me making my way in the world: but he always accompanied his wishes for this consummation with a hope that I should consider money as a means, and not as an end, and that I should remember the only real treasures of human existence were truth, health, and liberty. You will not wonder that, with such principles, the father had been twenty years a lieutenant, and that the son was looked on at College as a fellow that would come to nothing.