d; he knew that nothing but
your old-fashioned hand would draw a reply from _me_, to anything
written by _him_.

I've no faith in sick-bed repentances; and none in John Hallet, sick or
well:

'When the devil was sick,
The devil a monk would be;
When the devil got well,
The devil a monk was he.'

However, as Hallet is capable of cheating his best friend, even the
devil, I will take his letter into consideration; but it having taken
him sixteen years to make up his mind to do a right action, it may take
me as many days to come to a decision on this subject.

Frank is everything to us, and nothing but the clearest conviction that
his ultimate good will be promoted by going to his father, will induce
us to consent to it.

I do not write Hallet. You may give him as much or as little of this
letter as you think will be good for him.

Kate sends love to you and to Alice; and dear David, with all the love I
felt for you when I wore a short jacket, and sat on the old stool,

I am your devoted friend.

* * * * *

It was a dingy old sign. It had hung there in sun and rain till its
letters were faint and its face was furrowed. It had looked down on a
generation that had passed away, and seen those who placed it there go
out of that doorway never to return; still it clung to that dingy old
warehouse, and still Russell, Rollins & Co. was signed in the dingy old
counting room at the head of the stairway. It was known the world over.
It was heard of on the cotton fields of Texas, in the canebrakes of
Cuba, and amid the rice swamps of Carolina. The Chinaman spoke of it as
he sipped his tea and plied his chopsticks in the streets of Canton, and
the half-naked negro rattled its gold as he gathered palm oil and the
copal gum on the western coast of Africa. Its plain initials, painted in
black on a white ground, waved from tall masts over many seas, and its
simple 'promise to pay,' scrawled in a bad hand on a narrow strip of
paper, unlocked the vaults of the best bankers in Europe. And yet it was
a dingy old sign! Men looked up to it as they passed by, and wondered
that a cracked, weather-beaten board, that would not sell for a dollar,
should be counted 'good for a million.'

It was a dingy old warehouse, with narrow, dark, cobwebbed windows, and
wide, rusty iron shutters, which, as the bleak October wind swept up old
Long Wharf, swung slowly on their hinges with a sharp, grating