all.

"Indeed, my son," wrote the sorrowful Richard, "I do not see how with
honesty to send you a shilling more! If you have exhausted the proceeds
of my last check, and can not earn a sufficiency, come home. Thank God,
the land yet remains!--so long as I can pay the rent."

In the heart of Walter woke a new impulse. He drew himself up for combat
and endurance. I am afraid he did not feel much trouble for his father's
trouble, but he would have scorned adding to it. He wrote at once that
he must not think of him in the affair; he would do very well. It was
not a comforting letter exactly, but it showed courage, and his father
was glad.

He set himself to find employment in some one of the mechanical
departments of literature--the only region in which he could think to do
anything. When the architect comes to necessity, it is well if stones
are near, and the mason's hammer: if he be not the better mason that he
is an architect, alas for his architecture! Walter was nothing yet,
however, neither architect nor mason, when the stern hand of necessity
laid hold of him. But it is a fine thing for any man to be compelled to
work. It is the first divine decree, issuing from love and help. How
would it have been with Adam and Eve had they been left to plenty and
idleness, the voice of God no more heard in the cool of the day?

But the search for work was a difficult and disheartening task. He who
has encountered it, however, has had an experience whose value far more
than equals its unpleasantness. A man out of work needs the God that
cares for the sparrows, as much as the man whose heart is torn with
ingratitude, or crushed under a secret crime. Walter went hither and