ade. All the directors are free in their gifts to
churches and chapels--for that is part of a wise director's
policy--and all of them live sumptuously. But surely our investor
should guess that all this lavish expenditure must come out of
somebody's pocket; and surely he has skill enough to analyse a
balance-sheet! The good soul goes on trusting, until one fine morning
he wakes up and finds that his means of subsistence are gone. Then
comes the bitter ordeal; his friends are grieved, the public are
enraged, the sanctified men go to gaol, and the investor faces an
altered world. His oldest friend says, "Well, Tom, it's a bitter bad
business, and if a hundred is of any use to you, it is at your
service; but you know, with my family," &c. The unhappy defrauded
fellow finds it hard to get work of any sort; begins to show those
pathetic signs of privation which are so easily read by the careful
observer; hat, boots, coat, grow shabby; the knees seem to have a
pathetic bend. Friends are not unkind, but they have their own burdens
to bear, and if he inflicts his company and his sorrows too much on
any one of them, he is apt to receive a hint--probably from a
woman--that his presence can be spared; so the downward road trends
towards utter deprivation, and then to extinction. A young man may
recover from almost any blow that does not affect his character; and
this was strikingly proved in the case of that brilliant man of
science, R.A. Proctor, who was afterwards stricken out of life
untimely. He lost his fortune in the crash of Overend and Gurney's
company, and he immediately forgot his luxurious habits and turned to
work with blithe courage. How he worked only those who knew him can
tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved
such bewildering success as he did. But a man who is on the downward
slope of life cannot fare like the lamented Proctor; he must endure
the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire
torture of being down.

And the harmless widows who are suddenly robbed of their protector.
Ah, how some of them are made to suffer! Little Amelia Sedley, in
"Vanity Fair," has her sufferings and indignities painted by a
master-hand, and there is not a line thickened or darkened overmuch.
The miserable tale of the cheap lodgings, and the insults which the
poor girl had flung at her because, in the passion of her love, she
spent trifling sums on her boy--how actual it all seems!