"It is good to bear the yoke in our youth: I find it discipline to paint pot-boilers," rejoined little Christie mildly. "You must write pot-boilers for the magazines. The best authors do it." "It is not easy to get a footing in a magazine where one would care to appear. There are not many authors whose sole dependence is a goose-quill. Call over the well-known men; they are all something else before they are authors. Your pot-boilers are sure of a market; pictures have become articles of furniture, indispensable to people of taste, and everybody has a taste now-a-days. But rejected papers are good for nothing but to light one's fire, if one can keep a fire. Look at Stamford! Stamford has done excellent work for thirty years; he has been neither idle nor thriftless, and he lives from hand to mouth still. He is one of the writers for bread, who must take the price he can get, and not refuse it, lest he get nothing. And that would be my case--is my case--for, as you know, my pen provides two-thirds of my maintenance. I cannot tax my father further. If I had not missed that fellowship! The love of money may be a root of evil, but the want of it is an evil grown up and bearing fruit that sets the teeth on edge." "My dear Musgrave, that is the voice of despair, and for such a universal _crux_!" "I don't despair, but I am tried, partly by my hard lines and partly by the anxieties at home that infect me. To think that with this frame," striking out his muscular right arm, "even Carnegie warns me as if I were a sick girl! The sins of the fathers are the modern Nessus' shirt to their children. I shall do my utmost to hold on until I get my call to the bar and a platform to start from. If I cannot hold on so long, I'll call it, as my mother does, defeat by visitation of God, and step down to be a poor fellow amongst other poor fellows. But that is not the life I planned for." "We all know that, Musgrave, and there is no quarter where you won't meet the truest sympathy. Many a man has to come down from the tall pedestal where his hopes have set him, and, unless it be by his own grievous fault, he is tolerably sure to find his level of content on the common ground. That's where I mean to walk with my Janey; and some day you'll hold up a finger, and just as sweet a companion will come and walk hand in hand with you." Harry smiled despite his trouble; he knew what Christie meant, and he believed him. He parted with his friend there, and turned back in the soft gloom towards home, thinking of her all the way--dear little Bessie, so frank and warm-hearted. He remembered how, when he was a boy and lost a certain prize at school that he had reckoned on too confidently, she had whispered away his shame-faced disappointment with a rosy cheek against his jacket, and "Never mind, Harry, I love you." And she would do it again, he knew she would. The feeling was in her--she could not hide it.