you?"

"No one can befriend me, who has not confidence."

"But I--I have--at least to that degree--I mean that----"

"Nay, nay, you have none--none at all. Pardon, I see it. No confidence.
Fool, fond fool that I am to seek it!"

"You are unjust, sir," rejoins the good lady with heightened interest;
"but it may be that something untoward in your experiences has unduly
biased you. Not that I would cast reflections. Believe me, I--yes,
yes--I may say--that--that----"

"That you have confidence? Prove it. Let me have twenty dollars."

"Twenty dollars!"

"There, I told you, madam, you had no confidence."

The lady was, in an extraordinary way, touched. She sat in a sort of
restless torment, knowing not which way to turn. She began twenty
different sentences, and left off at the first syllable of each. At
last, in desperation, she hurried out, "Tell me, sir, for what you want
the twenty dollars?"

"And did I not----" then glancing at her half-mourning, "for the widow
and the fatherless. I am traveling agent of the Widow and Orphan Asylum,
recently founded among the Seminoles."

"And why did you not tell me your object before?" As not a little
relieved. "Poor souls--Indians, too--those cruelly-used Indians. Here,
here; how could I hesitate. I am so sorry it is no more."

"Grieve not for that, madam," rising and folding up the bank-notes.
"This is an inconsiderable sum, I admit, but," taking out his pencil and
book, "though I here but register the amount, there is another register,
where is set down the motive. Good-bye; you have confidence. Yea, you
can say to me as the apostle said to the Corinthians, 'I rejoice that I
have confidence in you in all things.'"

CHAPTER IX.

TWO BUSINESS MEN TRANSACT A LITTLE BUSINESS.

----"Pray, sir, have you seen a gentleman with a weed hereabouts, rather
a saddish gentleman? Strange where he can have gone to. I was talking
with him not twenty minutes since."

By a brisk, ruddy-cheeked man in a tasseled traveling-cap, carrying
under his arm a ledger-like volume, the above words were addressed to
the collegian before introduced, suddenly accosted by the rail to which
not long after his retreat, as in a previous chapter recounted, he had
returned, and there remained.

"Have you seen him, sir?"

Rallied from his apparent diffidence by the genial jauntiness of the
stranger, the youth answered with unwonted promptitude: "Yes, a person
with a weed was here not very lo