to look at Fortune with
respectful recognition, as we all look at royalty,--even as though he
had sometime been presented,--not with a snobbish conceit which would
seem to defy her Highness.

Indeed, he was such a man as would find exhilaration of spirit even in
the uncertainties of his position. The sight of his banners waving from
the sign-post, showing all sorts of devices, the flags flowing round the
walls of his shop, enlivening the little dark place with their many
gorgeous colors, sufficed for his encouragement. Utter ruin could not
have ruined the man. He could not have failed with failure. Some sense
of this fact he had, and he lived like one who has had his life insured.

Not a creature looked upon him but was free to the good he might derive.
The sparkling eyes, quick smile, and manly voice, the active limbs and
generous heart, seemed at the service of every soul that breathed.
Trashy thought and base utterance could not cheat his soul of her
integrity; the vileness of Salt Lane had nothing to do with him.

And I cannot account for this by bringing his wife forward. For how came
he by this wife, except by the excellence and soundness of the virtue
which preferred her to the world, and made him preferred of her? Still,
you see the ripe cherry, one half full, beautiful, luscious, the other a
patch of skin stretched over the pit, worthless and sad to view. This,
but for his choice and hers, might have served as an emblem of Dexter.

She was her husband's partner in a twofold sense: for it was DEXTER &
CO. on the sign-board, and Jessie was represented by the Company. Of
that woman I cannot refrain from saying what was so gracefully said of
"the fair and happy milkmaid,"--"All the excellences stand in her so
silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge."

The effect of these diverse influences, his wife Jessie in the house,
and his neighbor Andrew to the opposite, kept the spirit of Silas Dexter
at work like a ploughing Pegasus. He was full of pranks as a boy, but
malice found poor encouragement of him. Andrew was his garden, and he
was Andrew's sun: he shone across the lane with a brightness and a
warmth sufficient to quicken the poorest earth; and the crops he
perfected were various, all of the kind that flourish in heavy soil, but
various and good. Do you think the good Samaritan could take the
leprosy?

The sort of connection a man is bound to make between the everlasting
spirit-world a