sure that if I should be so blessed as to marry Miss Oldcastle—­which at the time whereof I now write, seemed far too gorgeous a castle in the clouds ever to descend to the earth for me to enter it—­the poor of my own people would be those most likely to understand my position and feelings, and least likely to impute to me worldly motives, as paltry as they are vulgar, and altogether unworthy of a true man.

So the time went on.  I called once or twice on Mr Stoddart, and found him, as I thought, better.  But he would not allow that he was.  Dr Duncan said he was better, and would be better still, if he would only believe it and exert himself.

He continued in the same strangely irritable humour.

CHAPTER XX.

Mood and will.

Winter came apace.  When we look towards winter from the last borders of autumn, it seems as if we could not encounter it, and as if it never would go over.  So does threatened trouble of any kind seem to us as we look forward upon its miry ways from the last borders of the pleasant greensward on which we have hitherto been walking.  But not only do both run their course, but each has its own alleviations, its own pleasures; and very marvellously does the healthy mind fit itself to the new circumstances; while to those who will bravely take up their burden and bear it, asking no more questions than just, “Is this my burden?” a thousand ministrations of nature and life will come with gentle comfortings.  Across a dark verdureless field will blow a wind through the heart of the winter which will wake in the patient mind not a memory merely, but a prophecy of the spring, with a glimmer of crocus, or snow-drop, or primrose; and across the waste of tired endeavour will a gentle hope, coming he knows not whence, breathe springlike upon the heart of the man around whom life looks desolate and dreary.  Well do I remember a friend of mine telling me once—­he was then a labourer in the field of literature, who had not yet begun to earn his penny a day, though he worked hard—­telling me how once, when a hope that had kept him active for months was suddenly quenched—­a book refused on which he had spent a passion of labour—­the weight of money that must be paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the coffin-lid that had lately covered the only friend to whom he could have applied confidently for aid—­telling me, I say, how he stood at the corner of a London street, with the rain, dripping black from the brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about him in the closing afternoon of the City, when the rich men were going home, and the poor men who worked for them were longing to follow; and how across this waste came energy and hope into his bosom, swelling thenceforth with courage to fight, and yield no ear to suggested failure.  And the story would not be complete—­though it is for the fact of the arrival of unexpected and