heart he knew that the prosperity
of Gershom was a very secondary consideration with him at the moment.

For Jacob was in trouble, had been in trouble a long time, though he was
only just beginning to confess it to himself. To no one else would he
confess it, till nothing else could be done. He ought never to have
come to any such determination. He was not strong enough to bear the
weight of such trouble alone, and he was not wise enough to see the
right means of getting through it.

There were times when he owned this to himself. He had not nerve for
great ventures. It made him sick to think of one or two transactions,
out of which he might have come triumphant as others had done, only that
his courage had failed to carry him through to the end. He needed more
courage, and less conscientiousness, he liked to add in his thoughts,
and perhaps he was not altogether without warrant in doing so. At any
rate, something had come between him and success where other men had
succeeded.

Mr Green and his friends were right in their opinion that he was not
such a man as his father. Even in conducting his Gershom business,
which had almost come to be mere routine with him, they could see that
he sometimes made mistakes. His persistent way of standing out against,
or apart from, any movement that was to benefit the whole community,
unless it was made in his way or to his evident advantage, was very
unlike his father. It is true, that in his father's day there had been
fewer men in Gershom to share either responsibility or power. But the
squire had known when to yield, and by judicious yielding it frequently
happened that he was allowed to hold all the faster to his own plans.

Jacob had to yield his own will also now and then, but at such times he
could not help seeing that his fellow-townsmen looked upon him as having
been beaten, and that they rather enjoyed it. Even when he succeeded in
getting his own way in some matters, it often happened that his success
was more in appearance than in reality. Still, if he had kept to his
legitimate business, he might have done well in it, and kept the
confidence of the community as being a man "who knew what he was about,"
and certainly he would have had an easier mind.

It was a little before this time that the discovery of the existence of
mineral wealth, and the speculation in mining property which has since
made a curious chapter in the history of this part of Canada, we