window open, thinking
she had shut it, and North Wind had wound a few of her hairs round the
lady's throat. She was considerably worse the next morning. Again, the
ship which North Wind had sunk that very night belonged to Mr. Coleman.
Nor will my readers understand what a heavy loss this was to him until
I have informed them that he had been getting poorer and poorer for some
time. He was not so successful in his speculations as he had been,
for he speculated a great deal more than was right, and it was time he
should be pulled up. It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor;
but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of
speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is
about. Poverty will not make a man worthless--he may be worth a great
deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty
goes very far indeed to make a man of no value--a thing to be thrown
out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of a broken basin, or a
dirty rag. So North Wind had to look after Mr. Coleman, and try to make
an honest man of him. So she sank the ship which was his last venture,
and he was what himself and his wife and the world called ruined.

Nor was this all yet. For on board that vessel Miss Coleman's lover was
a passenger; and when the news came that the vessel had gone down, and
that all on board had perished, we may be sure she did not think
the loss of their fine house and garden and furniture the greatest
misfortune in the world.

Of course, the trouble did not end with Mr. Coleman and his family.
Nobody can suffer alone. When the cause of suffering is most deeply
hidden in the heart, and nobody knows anything about it but the man
himself, he must be a great and a good man indeed, such as few of us
have known, if the pain inside him does not make him behave so as to
cause all about him to be more or less uncomfortable. But when a man
brings money-troubles on himself by making haste to be rich, then
most of the people he has to do with must suffer in the same way with
himself. The elm-tree which North Wind blew down that very night, as
if small and great trials were to be gathered in one heap, crushed Miss
Coleman's pretty summer-house: just so the fall of Mr. Coleman crushed
the little family that lived over his coach-house and stable. Before
Diamond was well enough to be taken home, there was no home for him
to go to. Mr. Coleman--or his creditors, f