from one of Disraeli's
novels. Your father's principal castle is situated amongst the finest
scenery in Britain, and his palace in London is filled with masterpieces
of art. Wherever you have lived you have been surrounded by good
literature and cultivated friends. Your health is steadily robust, you
can travel wherever you choose, and all the benefits of all the capitals
of Europe belong to you as much as to their own citizens. In all these
gifts and opportunities there is but one evil--the bewilderment of their
multiplicity.

My other correspondent has been less fortunately situated. "I began
school," he says, "when six years old, was taken from it at eleven and
sent to the mines to earn a little towards my own support. I continued
there till fourteen, when through an unlucky incident I was made a
hopeless cripple. At that day I was earning the noble sum of eightpence
per day, quite as much as any boy of that age got in the lead mines. I
suffered much for two years; after that, became much easier, but my legs
were quite useless, and have continued so up to the present time. The
right thigh-bone is decayed, has not got worse these nine years;
therefore I conclude that I may live--say another thirty years. I should
_like_, at all events, for life _is_ sweet even at this cost; not but
what I could die quietly enough, I dare say. I have not been idle these
years...."

(Here permit me to introduce a parenthesis. He certainly had _not_ been
idle. He had educated himself up to such a point that he could really
appreciate both literature and art, and had attained some genuine skill
in both. His letters to me were the letters of a cultivated gentleman,
and he used invariably to insert little pen-sketches, which were done
with a light and refined hand.)

"I can do anything almost in bed--except getting up. I am now twenty-two
years old. My father was a miner, but is now unable to work. I have only
one brother working, and we are about a dozen of us; consequently we are
not in the most flourishing circumstances, but a friend has put it in my
power to learn to etch. I have got the tools and your handbook on the
subject."

These extracts are from his first letter. Afterwards he wrote me others
which made me feel awed and humbled by the manly cheerfulness with which
he bore a lot so dreary, and by the firmness of resolution he showed in
his pursuits. He could not quit his bed, but that was not the worst; he
could not even sit