"Not gone in his undying gratitude to you, sir," said Tom, with great
emotion. "Your Tom Bowles would give up all his dreams of wealth or
of rising in life, and go through fire and water to serve the friend
who first bid him be a new Tom Bowles! Don't despise me as your own
work: you said to me that terrible day, when madness was on my brow
and crime within my heart, 'I will be to you the truest friend man
ever found in man.' So you have been. You commanded me to read; you
commanded me to think; you taught me that body should be the servant
of mind."

"Hush, hush, times are altered; it is you who can teach me now. Teach
me, teach me; how does ambition replace love? How does the desire to
rise in life become the all-mastering passion, and, should it prosper,
the all-atoning consolation of our life? We can never be as happy,
though we rose to the throne of the Caesars, as we dream that we could
have been, had Heaven but permitted us to dwell in the obscurest
village, side by side with the woman we love."

Tom was exceedingly startled by such a burst of irrepressible passion
from the man who had told him that, though friends were found only
once in a life, sweethearts were as plentiful as blackberries.

Again he swept his hand over his forehead, and replied hesitatingly: I
can't pretend to say what maybe the case with others. But to judge by
my own case, it seems to me this: a young man who, out of his own
business, has nothing to interest or excite him, finds content,
interest, and excitement when he falls in love; and then, whether for
good or ill, he thinks there is nothing like love in the world, he
don't care a fig for ambition then. Over and over again did my poor
uncle ask me to come to him at Luscombe, and represent all the worldly