ve to this period of getting
ready for work again a sense of great elation. If a man only passed John
on the hill or in the corridors of the mill during these days, he caught
spirit and energy and hope from his up-head and happy face and firm
step. At the beginning of May the poor women had commenced with woeful
hearts to clean their denuded houses, and make them as homelike as they
could; and before May was half over, peace was won and there were
hundreds of cotton ships upon the Atlantic.

John's finished goods were all now in Manchester warehouses, and
Greenwood was watching the arrival of cotton and its prices in
Liverpool. John had very little money--none in fact that he could use
for cotton, but he confidently expected it, though ignorant of any
certain cause for expectation.

As he was eating dinner with his mother one day, she said, "Whatever
have you sent Greenwood to Liverpool for?"

"To buy any cotton he can."

"But you have no money."

"Simpson and Hager paid me at once for the calicoes I sent them. I shall
be getting money every day now."

"Enough?"

"I shall have enough--some way or other--no fear."

"I'll tell you what, John. I can lend you twenty thousand pounds. I'll
be glad to do it."

"O mother! Mother! That will be very salvation to me. How good you are!
How good you are!" and there was a tone in John's voice that was perhaps
entirely fresh and new. It went straight to his mother's heart, and she
continued, "I'll give you a check in the morning, John. You are varry,
varry welcome, my dear lad."

"How can you spare me so much?"

"Well, I've been saving a bit here and there and now and then for thirty
years, and with interest coming and coming, a little soon counts up.
Why, John, I must have been saving for this very strait all these years.
Now, the silent money will talk and the idle money roll here and there,
making more. That is what money is cut round for--I expect."

"Mother, this is one of the happiest hours in my life. I was carrying a
big burden of anxiety."

"Thou need not have carried it an hour; thou might hev known that God
and thy mother would be sufficient."

The next morning John went down the hill with a check for twenty
thousand pounds in his pocket and a prayer of rest in his heart and a
bubbling song on his lips. And all my readers must have noticed that
good fortune as well as misfortune has a way of coming in company. There
is a tendency in both to pour if they r