"Worse things than poverty! Why, my boy, what are you thinking of? Do
you not know that it is written in the largest efforts upon the hearts
of all Americans, 'Resist poverty, and it will flee from you?' If you
do not begin by considering poverty the root of all evil, where on
earth do you expect to end? Cease to be poor, learn to be rich. I'm
afraid you don't read the good book. So your father has health"--the boy
nodded--"and a whole body, a good temper, an affectionate family,
generous and refined tastes, pleasant relations with others, a warm
heart, a clear conscience"--the boy nodded with an increasing enthusiasm
of assent--"and yet you call him unfortunate--ruined! Why, look here, my
son; there's an old apple-woman at the corner of Burling Slip, where I
stop every day and buy apples; she's sixty years old, and through thick
and thin, under a dripping wreck of an umbrella when it rains, under the
sky when it shines--warming herself by a foot-stove in winter, by the sun
in summer--there the old creature sits. She has an old, sick, querulous
husband at home, who tries to beat her. Her daughters are all out at
service--let us hope, in kind families--her sons are dull, ignorant men;
her home is solitary and forlorn; she can not read much, nor does she
want to; she is coughing her life away, and succeeds in selling apples
enough to pay her rent and buy food for her old man and herself. She told
me yesterday that she was a most fortunate woman. What does the word
mean? I give it up."

The lad looked around the spacious office, on every table and desk and
chair of which was written Prosperity as plainly as the name of Lawrence
Newt upon the little tin sign by the door. Except for the singular
magnetism of the merchant's presence, which dissipated such a suggestion
as rapidly as it rose, the youth would have said aloud what was in his
heart.