MY DEAR BOY:--John is sincere. Thee can trust him. He has told me _all_. He will do the right thing. Come on with the lad as soon as thee can. Love to Kate. Thy old friend, DAVID. After conferring with my wife, I sent the following reply to these communications: NEW YORK, _September 22d, 185-._ DAVID OF OLD;--Thou man after the Lord's own heart. I have Hallet's letter, seasoned with your P.S. He is shrewd; he knew that nothing but your old-fashioned hand would draw a reply from _me_, to anything written by _him_. I've no faith in sick-bed repentances; and none in John Hallet, sick or well: 'When the devil was sick, The devil a monk would be; When the devil got well, The devil a monk was he.' However, as Hallet is capable of cheating his best friend, even the devil, I will take his letter into consideration; but it having taken him sixteen years to make up his mind to do a right action, it may take me as many days to come to a decision on this subject. Frank is everything to us, and nothing but the clearest conviction that his ultimate good will be promoted by going to his father, will induce us to consent to it. I do not write Hallet. You may give him as much or as little of this letter as you think will be good for him. Kate sends love to you and to Alice; and dear David, with all the love I felt for you when I wore a short jacket, and sat on the old stool, I am your devoted friend. * * * * * It was a dingy old sign. It had hung there in sun and rain till its letters were faint and its face was furrowed. It had looked down on a generation that had passed away, and seen those who placed it there go out of that doorway never to return; still it clung to that dingy old warehouse, and still Russell, Rollins & Co. was signed in the dingy old counting room at the head of the stairway. It was known the world over. It was heard of on the cotton fields of Texas, in the canebrakes of Cuba, and amid the rice swamps of Carolina. The Chinaman spoke of it as he sipped his tea and plied his chopsticks in the streets of Canton, and the half-naked negro rattled its gold as he gathered palm oil and the copal gum on the western coast of Africa. Its plain initials, painted in black on a white ground, waved from tall masts over many seas, and its simple 'promise to pay,' scrawled in a bad hand on a narrow strip of paper, unlocked the vaults of the best bankers in Europe. And yet it was a dingy old sign! Men looked up to it as they passed by, and wondered that a cracked, weather-beaten board, that would not sell for a dollar, should be counted 'good for a million.'