"This is a deadly time here in Boston,--a horrible stagnation. Every man avoids his neighbor as though he had the plague; and we have no Boccaccio to tell us stories while the dead-carts go by." "The dead-cart went through our street to-day." "You don't tell me! Who is the lucky corpse that is out of his misery?" "Mr. Lindsay. Our house is shut up, and I am a vagrant." "A pair of us! For the last month I have performed the Wandering Jew all by myself. Now I have company. What shall we do to be jolly?" "_Jolly!_"--with a tone of melancholy surprise. "When should a man be jolly, if he can't when he's nothing to do? I am the slave of gold, you understand. If any rich magician rubs his double-eagles before me, woe is me, if I don't paint! When the magicians send their eagles on other errands, I am free from their drudgery. Meanwhile, I live on air, flattened out and packed away, like a Mexican horned-frog, or a dreaming toad, in a fissure of a preadamite rock." "I am sorry I haven't your art of making misfortune comfortable." "Misfortune? My philosophical friend, there isn't any such thing. The true man is superior to circumstances or accidents. (Some old fellow, I believe, has said that; somebody always says my good things before me; but no matter.) Nothing can happen amiss to the wise and good." "Then I am neither wise nor good, for I have lost my all, and it comes confoundedly amiss to me." "Your all? That's what the shoemaker said; but he bought a new one for six-pence. But, how happened it?" "By my folly." "I knew that, of course; but I wanted to know what folly in particular." "I trusted it to a man whom I thought not only honest, but my friend, and he has proved a scoundrel." "You shouldn't have led him into temptation. You are _particeps criminis_, and the partaker is as bad as the thief. Don't trust without taking security, my friend; it's offering a premium to crime. Consider your guilt now! Think of the family into whose innocent bosom you have brought sin and remorse! Who is the luckless person?" "Sandford!" "I knew it. I expected it. He was too good by half. I didn't blame him for his widow-and-orphan business; somebody must do it; but I made up my mind some time ago that he would come to grief." "Prophets are always plenty after the event." "True, my friend. But just think! He passed by my pictures in the Exhibition, and bought the canvas of my friend Greenleaf,--a man of genius, doubtless, but young, you understand, young. Can you conceive of the wickedness? I felt sure from that moment, that, if he were not totally depraved, he at least had a moral inability, as the preachers call it, that would be his ruin." "Well, he is ruined effectually; but the worst of it is, that he has dragged innocent people down with him." "'Innocent,'--yes, you have the word. A man that cares for money at all, and trusts all he has without security to any fair-spoken financier, is an innocent, truly."