ht and
justice would give me. Keep all, every farthing.

"It was for charity I asked the few shillings; you know it. You
know from whom I imbibed whatever I possess of the blessed
spirit of charity. I was as hard and unpitying as even your
wife before your mother taught me to feel and relieve the
demands of poverty. Yes, and she taught you; you can not forget
it. She taught you to give food to the starving, in your
earliest days. She strove to impress your infant mind with the
very soul of charity; and yesterday she looked down from the
heaven of the holy departed, and saw you refusing me, your
father, a few shillings to bestow on charity.

"Henry, I can live with you and your wife no more. I should
grow avaricious in my old age, were I to remain with you. I
should long for money to call my own. Those doled out shillings
which I received wakened within me feelings of a dark
nature--covetousness, and envy, and discontent--which must have
shadowed the happiness of your mother in heaven to look down
upon. I must go and seek out an independent living for myself,
even yet, though I am fifty-two. Though my energies for
struggling with the world died, I thought, when your mother
died, and, leaving my active business to you, I retired to live
in the country, I must go forth again, as if I were young, to
seek for the means of existence, for I feel I was not made to
be a beggar--a creature hanging on the bounty of others; no,
no, the merciful God will give me strength yet to provide for
myself, though I am old, and broken down in mind and body.
Farewell; you who were once my beloved son, may God soften and
amend your heart."

When Henry perused this letter, he would immediately have gone in search
of his father, in order to induce him to return home; but Mrs. Lawson
was at his side, and succeeded in persuading him to allow his father to
act as he pleased, and remain away as long as he wished.

* * * * *

Ten years rolled over our world, sinking millions beneath the black
waves of adverse fortune and fate, and raising the small number who, of
the innumerable aspirants for earthly good, usually succeed. Henry
Lawson was one of those whom time had lowered in fortune. His business
speculations had, for a lengthened period, been rather unsuccessful,
while Mrs.