hom he gave his whole heart not only is not the
woman that he supposed her to be, but never in any future time, nor
by any change of circumstances, will become that woman; for then the
difficulty seems radical and final and hopeless.

In "The Pilgrim's Progress," we read that the poor man, Christian,
tried to persuade his wife to go with him on the pilgrimage to the
celestial city; but that finally he had to make up his mind to go
alone without her. Such is the lot of the man who is brought to the
conclusion, positively and definitely, that his wife is always to be
a hinderance, and never a help to him, in any upward aspiration; that
whatever he does that is needful and right and true must be done, not
by her influence, but in spite of it; that, if he has to swim against
the hard, upward current of the river of life, he must do so with her
hanging on his arm, and holding him back, and that he cannot influence
and cannot control her.

Such hours of disclosure to a man are among the terrible hidden
tragedies of life,--tragedies such as are never acted on the stage.
Such a time of disclosure came to John the year after Grace's
marriage; and it came in this way:--

The Spindlewood property had long been critically situated. Sundry
financial changes which were going, on in the country had depreciated
its profits, and affected it unfavorably. All now depended upon the
permanency of one commercial house. John had been passing through an
interval of great anxiety. He could not tell Lillie his trouble. He
had been for months past nervously watching all the in-comings and
outgoings of his family, arranged on a scale of reckless expenditure,
which he felt entirely powerless to control. Lillie's wishes were
importunate. She was nervous and hysterical, wholly incapable of
listening to reason; and the least attempt to bring her to change any
of her arrangements, or to restrict any of her pleasures, brought
tears and faintings and distresses and scenes of domestic confusion
which he shrank from. He often tried to set before her the possibility
that they might be obliged, for a time at least, to live in a
different manner; but she always resisted every such supposition as so
frightful, so dreadful, that he was utterly discouraged, and put off
and off, hoping that the evil day never might arrive.

But it did come at last. One morning, when he received by mail the
tidings of the failure of the great house of Clapham & Co., he knew
t