Let me dwell upon this contrast for a few minutes. All the sunshine appears to have been on your side, and all the shadow on his. Born of highly cultivated parents, in the highest rank in England under royalty, you have lived from the beginning amongst the most efficient aids to culture, and Nature has so endowed you that, instead of becoming indifferent to these things from familiarity, you have learned to value them more and more in every successive year. The plainest statement of your advantages would sound like an extract from one of Disraeli's novels. Your father's principal castle is situated amongst the finest scenery in Britain, and his palace in London is filled with masterpieces of art. Wherever you have lived you have been surrounded by good literature and cultivated friends. Your health is steadily robust, you can travel wherever you choose, and all the benefits of all the capitals of Europe belong to you as much as to their own citizens. In all these gifts and opportunities there is but one evil--the bewilderment of their multiplicity. My other correspondent has been less fortunately situated. "I began school," he says, "when six years old, was taken from it at eleven and sent to the mines to earn a little towards my own support. I continued there till fourteen, when through an unlucky incident I was made a hopeless cripple. At that day I was earning the noble sum of eightpence per day, quite as much as any boy of that age got in the lead mines. I suffered much for two years; after that, became much easier, but my legs were quite useless, and have continued so up to the present time. The right thigh-bone is decayed, has not got worse these nine years; therefore I conclude that I may live--say another thirty years. I should _like_, at all events, for life _is_ sweet even at this cost; not but what I could die quietly enough, I dare say. I have not been idle these years...." (Here permit me to introduce a parenthesis. He certainly had _not_ been idle. He had educated himself up to such a point that he could really appreciate both literature and art, and had attained some genuine skill in both. His letters to me were the letters of a cultivated gentleman, and he used invariably to insert little pen-sketches, which were done with a light and refined hand.) "I can do anything almost in bed--except getting up. I am now twenty-two years old. My father was a miner, but is now unable to work. I have only one brother working, and we are about a dozen of us; consequently we are not in the most flourishing circumstances, but a friend has put it in my power to learn to etch. I have got the tools and your handbook on the subject."