been an invalid, and he had grown, as he laughingly confessed, very old-womanish.  He had been badly lamed, when a boy, by being caught in some machinery in his father’s mill, near which he was idling one afternoon, and though he had almost entirely outgrown the effect of his injury, it had not been until after many years.  He had been in college, but his eyes had given out there, and he had been obliged to leave in the middle of his junior year, though he had kept up a pleasant intercourse with the members of his class, with whom he had been a great favorite.  He was a good deal of an idler in the world.  I do not think his ambition, except in the case of securing Mary Dunn for his wife, had ever been distinct; he seemed to make the most he could of each day as it came, without making all his days’ works tend toward some grand result, and go toward the upbuilding of some grand plan and purpose.  He consequently gave no promise of being either distinguished or great.  When his eyes would allow, he was an indefatigable reader; and although he would have said that he read only for amusement, yet he amused himself with books that were well worth the time he spent over them.

The house where he lived nominally belonged to his step-mother, but she had taken for granted that Tom would bring his wife home to it, and assured him that it should be to all intents and purposes his.  Tom was deeply attached to the old place, which was altogether the pleasantest in town.  He had kept bachelor’s hall there most of the time since his father’s death, and he had taken great pleasure, before his marriage, in refitting it to some extent, though it was already comfortable and furnished in remarkably good taste.  People said of him that if it had not been for his illnesses, and if he had been a poor boy, he probably would have made something of himself.  As it was, he was not very well known by the towns-people, being somewhat reserved, and not taking much interest in their every-day subjects of conversation.  Nobody liked him so well as they liked his wife, yet there was no reason why he should be disliked enough to have much said about him.

After our friends had been married for some time, and had outlived the first strangeness of the new order of things, and had done their duty to their neighbors with so much apparent willingness and generosity that even Tom himself was liked a great deal better than he ever had been before, they were sitting together one stormy evening in the library, before the fire.  Mrs. Wilson had been reading Tom the letters which had come to him by the night’s mail.  There was a long one from his sister in Nagasaki, which had been written with a good deal of ill-disguised reproach.  She complained of the smallness of the income of her share in her father’s estate, and said that she had been assured by American friends that the smaller mills were starting up everywhere, and beginning to do well again.  Since so much of their money was invested in the factory, she had