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-disgui