hat's just the trouble," and the youthful brows knit in perplexity.
"All things seem alike to me: I haven't any choice."

Mr. Darcy drew a long breath that was almost a sigh. If Jack only would
evince some preference!

However, a place was found as under-bookkeeper. It was desperately
tiresome to Jack to sit perched on a high stool all day; and after three
months of it he begged to be put at something else.

At this period we had gone through our costly civil war; and, instead of
being exhausted as friends and enemies predicted, the machinery of
business appeared to have been set in motion with a new and overwhelming
impetus. Every thing was wanted; everybody had work or money; and the
most useless commodity found a purchaser: as if our anguish had crazed
us, and we went into a delirium of mental opium, and dreamed wild,
exhilarating dreams which we mistook for reality.

Yerbury had been a slow, solid, conservative town. Property was low,
taxes light and easily paid, a balance on hand in the treasury to
commence the new year, and very little pauperism in the town. Yerbury
officials utilized their inefficient population, and their county jail
was not made a palace of luxury. The old-fashioned element in the place
held crime as the result of sin instead of occult disease,--a thing to
be punished, rather than petted. It had good railroad connections,
plenty of water, with one navigable stream, and a variety of industries.
Iron, shoes, hats, paper, and clothing were manufactured to a
considerable extent, to say nothing of many smaller branches. Hope Mills
was the largest, the focus of the town, and had the prestige of being
handed down through three generations, though never as extensive as now.

Toward the west there was a succession of pretty hills that lay in the
broad sunshine, making you think somehow of Spanish slopes, covered with
vineyards, olives, and luxuriant verdure. Over beyond, a wide,
diversified country range, farms, woodland, hills and valleys, with a
branch of the river winding through, called, rather unromantically,
Little Creek.

On these slopes, the new part, dwelt the aristocracy. Streets wound
around in picturesque fashion to make easy grades, and many old
forest-trees were preserved by that means, giving the place an air of
years, rather than yesterday and improvement. There were two pretty
parks,--one devoted to Fourth-of-July orations from time immemorial;
there were churches of every denomin