Christ's glory was his usefulness and gift for helping others; I
believe there's less quackery in our profession than any other, but it
is amazing how we bungle at it. I wonder how you will get on with your
little girl? If people didn't have theories of life of their own, or
wouldn't go exactly the wrong way, it would be easier to offer
assistance; but where one person takes a right direction of his own
accord, there are twenty who wander to and fro."

"I may as well confess to you," he continued presently, "that I have
had a _protégé_ myself, but I don't look for much future joy in
watching the development of my plots. He has taken affairs into his
own hands, and I dare say it is much better for him, for if I had
caught him young enough, I should have wished him to run the gauntlet
of all the professions, not to speak of the arts and sciences. He was
a clever young fellow; I saw him married the day before I left
England. His wife was the daughter of a curate, and he the younger son
of a younger son, and it was a love affair worth two or three
story-books. It came to be a question of money alone. I had known the
boy the year before in Bombay and chanced to find him one day in the
Marine Hospital at Nagasaki. We had been up into the interior
together. He was recommended to me as a sort of secretary and
assistant and knew more than I did about most things. When he caught
sight of me he cried like a baby, and I sat down and heard what the
trouble was, for I had let him go off with somebody who could give him
a good salary,--a government man of position, and I thought poor Bob
would be put in the way of something better. Dear me, the climate was
killing him before my eyes, and I took passage for both of us on the
next day's steamer. When I got him home I turned my bank account into
a cheque and tucked it into his pocket, and told him to marry his wife
and settle down and be respectable and forget such a wandering old