Jacob Ogden enjoyed a privilege highly favorable to happiness, but not so favorable to moral or intellectual growth. He lived at peace with himself, and looking back on his life, he approved of its whole course, with the single exception of that hour of folly at Whittlecup. He felt and believed that no man could be wiser or more perfect than he was. When he humbly called his faculties "common-sense," he by no means understood the word as meaning a sense which he had in common with others, but rather a special faculty, to himself vouchsafed by the bounteous gift of nature. He lived in absolute independence of the good opinion of others, because his mind was at peace with itself--because he always manfully did to-day what he was sure to approve to-morrow, or ten years after to-morrow. Am I painting the portrait of a man of pre-eminent virtues? Not exactly, but of a man who would have been pre-eminently virtuous, or pre-eminently learned, if virtue or knowledge had been his ideal. For he had a manly resolution, a steady unflinching determination, to live up to the standard which he fixed for himself. And the inward peace which he enjoyed was due to his obedience to the laws of his own nature, which thus ever remained in harmony with itself in serene strength and efficiency. This peace had for a while been lost to him, and he had felt a strange change and diminution in the inward satisfactions. His communings with himself had lost their old sweetness, and he no longer masticated the cud of contentment in the fair pastures of reflection and imagination. To go back to those happy pastures once more--to chew that sweet cud again, after months of privation--what a deep, strengthening, cheering, encouraging, replenishing delight it was! Yet there was one drawback to the plenitude of Ogden's happiness, even though he had escaped the misery of the wedding-day. That new mansion had been begun, he had spent £400 upon it already, and spoilt a pretty meadow, and he had spent some money on presents for Margaret--not very much, for his ideas on the subject of gift-making were not very large ideas, yet still enough to plague and torment him, for the loss of a sovereign would do that. To be jilted did not trouble him much, but to have been cheated into wasting his money! that thought would not let him rest. It followed and harassed him wherever he went, and it was the cause of the following letter, which was received by Mr. Joseph Anison:--