years; and now here he is, shabby, dirty, smelling of whisky, with
bloated face and trembling hand: alas, alas, ruined! Oh, do not
give him up. Perhaps you can do something for him. Little kindness
he has known for very long. Give him the five shillings by all
means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done
to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance
for better days! I know that it may be all in vain; and that
after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass
the police-office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they
have got the corpse of the poor suicide within. And even when the
failure is not so utter as this, you find, now and then, as life
goes onward, that this and that old acquaintance has, you cannot
say how, stepped out of the track, and is stranded. He went into the
Church: he is no worse preacher or scholar than many that succeed;
but somehow he never gets a living. You sometimes meet him in
the street, threadbare and soured: he probably passes you without
recognising you. O reader, to whom God has sent moderate success,
always be chivalrously kind and considerate to such a disappointed
man!

I have heard of an eminent man who, when well advanced in years,
was able to say that through all his life he had never set his
mind on anything which he did not succeed in attaining. Great and
little aims alike, he never had known what it was to fail. What a
curious state of feeling it would be to most men to know themselves
able to assert so much! Think of a mind in which disappointment
is a thing unknown! I think that one would be oppressed by a vague
sense of fear in regarding one's self as treated by Providence in
a fashion so different from the vast majority of the race. It cannot
be denied that there are men in this world in whose lot failure