After a wearisome passage of near eleven weeks, the ship arrived at Philadelphia, where Ben met the perfidious Keith, walking the street alone, and shorn of all the short-lived splendours of his governorship. Ben's honest face struck the culprit pale and dumb. The reader hardly need be told, that Ben was too magnanimous to add to his confusion, by reproaching or even speaking to him. But as if to keep Ben from pride, Providence kindly threw into his way his old sweetheart, Miss Read. Here his confusion would have been equal to Keith's, had not that fair one furnished him with the sad charge against herself--of marrying during his absence. Her friends, after reading his letter to her, concluding that he would never return, had advised her to take a husband. But she soon separated from him, and even refused to bear his name; in consequence of learning that he had another wife. Denham and Ben took a store-house, and displayed their goods; which, having been well laid in, sold off very rapidly. This was in October, 1726. Early in the following February, when the utmost kindness on Denham's part, and an equal fidelity on Ben's, had rendered them mutually dear, as father and son; and when also, by their extraordinary success in trade, they had a fair prospect of speedily making their fortunes, behold! O, vanity of all worldly hopes! they were both taken down dangerously ill. Denham, for his part, actually made a die of it. And Ben was so far gone, at one time, that he concluded it was all over with him; which afforded a melancholy kind of pleasure, especially when he was told that his friend Denham, who lay in the next room, was dead. And when he reflected that now, since his good patron had left him, he should be turned out again upon the world, with the same hard struggles to encounter, and no prospect of ever being able to do any thing for his aged father, he felt a secret regret, that he was called back to life again. CHAPTER XXXI. Some people there are who tell us that every man is born for a particular walk in life, and that whether he will or not, in that walk he must go; and can no more quit it than the sun can quit his course through the skies.