here, without deceiving you in false kindness, I give you the
guarantee of my experience when I bid you 'hope!' I am persuaded
that, sooner or later, the mind, thus for a time affected, will right
itself; because here, in the cause of the malady, we do but deal with
the nervous system. And that, once righted, and the mind once
disciplined in those practical duties which conjugal life
necessitates, the malady itself will never return; never be
transmitted to the children on whom your wife's restoration to health
may permit you to count hereafter. If the course of travel I
recommend and the prescriptions I conjoin with that course fail you,
let me know; and though I would fain close my days in this land, I
will come to you. I love you as my son. I will tend your wife as my
daughter."

Foreign travel! The idea smiled on me. Julius Faber's companionship,
sympathy, matchless skill! The very thought seemed as a raft to a
drowning mariner. I now read more attentively the earlier portions of
his letter. They described, in glowing colours, the wondrous country in
which he had fixed his home; the joyous elasticity of its atmosphere; the
freshness of its primitive, pastoral life; the strangeness of its scenery,
with a Flora and a Fauna which have no similitudes in the ransacked
quarters of the Old World. And the strong impulse seized me to transfer
to the solitudes of that blithesome and hardy Nature a spirit no longer at
home in the civilized haunts of men, and household gods that shrank from
all social eyes, and would fain have found a wilderness for the desolate
hearth, on which they had ceased to be sacred if unveiled. As if to give
practical excuse and reason for the idea that seized me, Julius Faber
mentioned, incidentally, that the house and property of a wealthy
speculator in his immediate neighbourhood were on sale at a price which
seemed to me alluringly trivial, and, according to his judgment, far below