_Dear Tom_,--I have just received your letter, asking if you could bring a
pony back from Colorado. I answer most assuredly, "Yes"; that is, if you
want to! But do you want to? This question having occurred to my mind, and
perhaps not to yours, you must excuse my becoming a little long-winded if
I launch out on a train of ideas which has presented itself to my mind.

Let me briefly serve up the circumstances that surround you, and perhaps I
can paint them so that you will look at them from a new point of view.

You are eighteen years of age. You have lived surrounded by wealth and a
good deal of luxury; but the luxury in which you were lapped was the
comfort with which a man of great working brain, who has well earned the
right to spend freely, chose to take for his own rest and amusement,
knowing well the value of every cent he has spent or given away.

As the youngest of many sons, you have never had any responsibility; and
yet your parents have left you with a taste for all kinds of expensive
things, although, when you come to your money in a few years, you will
have enough to gratify only a small part of the tastes which you have
acquired. Nevertheless, the money to which you are heir, while
necessitating a lower rate of expenditures than that of the household you
have been brought up in, is sufficient to enable you to live under much
easier circumstances than most of your neighbors.

In fact, if many of your friends started life with the income that will be
yours, they would consider themselves decidedly rich, and would become,
for a time at least, very much happier.

It seems to me that the Declaration of Independence has put it pat when it