It may seem a hardship, but not improbably it is in its way an alleviation, that we are never involved in any of the great trials in life without having to deal with certain material embarrassments, questions of vulgar interest which concern our pockets and affect our finances. Poor Lendrick's was a case in point. He was about to leave his country,--to tear himself from a home he had embellished,--to separate from his children that he loved so dearly, to face a new life in a new land, friendless and alone; and with all these cares on his heart, he had creditors to satisfy, debts to insure payment of by security, and, not least of his troubles, his house to relet. Now, the value the world sets on that which is not for sale is very unlike its estimate for the same commodity when brought to market. The light claret your friend pronounced a very pleasant little wine at your own table, he would discover, when offered for purchase, to be poor, washy, and acrid. The horse you had left him, and whose performance he had encomiumized, if put up to auction, would be found spavined, or windgalled, or broken-down. Such a stern test is money, so fearfully does its coarse jingle jar upon all the music of flattery, and make discord of all compliment. To such a pitch is the process carried, that even pretty women, who as wives were objects of admiration to despairing and disappointed adorers, have become, by widowhood, very ordinary creatures, simply because they are once more “in the market.” It is well for us that heaven itself was not in the “Price Current,” or we might have begun to think lightly of it. At all events we 'd have higgled about the cost, and tried to get there as cheaply as might be. From the day that the Swan's Nest appeared in the Dublin papers “to be let furnished, for the three years of an unexpired term,” Lendrick was besieged by letters and applications. All the world apparently wanted the place, but wanted it in some way or other quite out of his power to accord. One insisted on having it unfurnished, and for a much longer period than he could give. Another desired more land, and the right of shooting over several hundred additional acres. A third would like the house and garden, but would not burden himself with the lawn, and could not see why Lendrick might not continue to hold the meadow-land, and come back from the Cape or anywhere else to mow the grass and rick it in due season. A schoolmistress proposed he should build a dormitory for thirty young ladies, and make the flower-garden into a playground; and a miller from Limerick inquired whether he was willing to join in a suit to establish a right of water-power by diverting a stream from the Shannon through the dining-room to turn an undershot wheel.