tion. I would that this lesson may take deep root; not that you should brood over itand this you seem unlikely to do—but that you should not altogether forget it; for I look upon such trials to such minds as yours as the greatest blessings that can be bestowed upon them; because, if I do not greatly err, experience tells me few have felt a true spirit of piety who have not undergone a large share of sorrow. Who but he who has despaired of all earthly comfort can have experienced that intense longing for a peace nowhere to be found on earth. It seems, almost, as if a certain sum of evil was essential to even a small degree of religious feeling; as if the choicest blessings were regarded with indifference-as matters of courseand as if we were only to be reminded of the Giver when for a moment He deprived us of His gift. How much wiser should we be, could we bear in mind that all absence of pain is pleasure; all freedom from want is

wealth; that all we enjoy is a gratuitous blessing; that misery might, but for the love of God, have been the greater instead of, by very much, the lesser portion of our existence; that even if misery were in exact proportion to happiness, that if they were so intermingled that neither predominated, we should, in all probability, still think life worth having. If we could bear all this constantly in mind, it seems to me we might the more securely enjoy our possessions in preparing ourselves for the loss of them. Ingratitude would then be gone, and when gone, no longer need the goad to drive it off.

"The loss of your property you bear nobly. It is natural in the present posture of your mind that you should feel the other loss more. But as there is always a bright as well as a gloomy side to the face of Fortune, I am disposed to think, if both ills were destined to befal you, it were best that they

happened at the same moment, inasmuch as they serve to counterbalance each other. 'Fair weather cometh out of the north ;' there may yet be some milk-white day' in store for you. That it may soon come, is the earnest wish of your sincere friend, "W. GREGORY."

CHAPTER IX.

By writing and receiving such letters as the above, More was learning to reap the best fruits of adversity. He was daily recovering his health both of mind and body. Mr. Bellerby saw his impatience to return to town, and calculated that the moment had come to relieve his impatience by making the final arrangements for the sale of the estate. The attorney found his guest willing to accede to almost any terms; and it may easily be conceived that he did not let the

opportunity slip through his fingers without making the most of it.

Of course he continued to urge the impossibility of meeting with a purchaser, and of course he did not omit to explain to Mr. More the "alarming sacrifice" he, Mr. Bellerby, was about to make in becoming the purchaser himself. There was one point in the transaction which created a difficulty that went hard to cancel the whole business. This was the sale of the house together with the estate. More stoutly refused to part with the home of his fathers, and Mr. Bellerby as positively declared he had never dreamt of buying the estate without the house. He demonstrated by the most lucid propositions that the house was not only useless without the estate, but that the money raised by the sale of the land, after paying the debts and the interest on the former mortgage, would be totally inadequate to enable Mr. More to live there, or even to keep the house in common