nd, the sullen lake
without a sail. The cliff was waiting--it had waited for ages; the lake
was waiting too.

Winthrop took a large portion of his fortune and put it into this mine.
A new company was formed, but he himself remained the principal owner,
and took the direction into his own hands. It was the right moment; in
addition, his direction was brilliant. For a time he worked excessively
hard, but all his expectations were fulfilled; by means of this, and one
or two other enterprises in which he embarked with the same mixture of
bold foresight and the most careful attention to details, his fortune
was largely increased.

When the war broke out he was abroad--his first complete vacation; he
was indulging that love for pictures which he was rather astonished to
find that he possessed. He came home, took a captain's place in a
company of volunteers, went to the front, and served throughout the war.
Immediately after the restoration of peace, he had gone abroad again.
And he had come back this second time principally to disentangle from a
web of embarrassments the affairs of a cousin of his father's, David
Winthrop by name, whom he had left in charge of the foundery which he
had once had charge of, himself. Having some knowledge of founderies,
David was to superintend this one, and have a sufficient share of the
profits to help him maintain his family of seven sweet, gentle,
inefficient daughters, of all ages from two to eighteen, each with the
same abundant flaxen hair and pretty blue eyes, the same pale oval
cheeks and stooping shoulders, and a mother over them more inefficient
and gentle and stooping-shouldered still--the very sort of a quiverful,
as ill-natured (and richer) neighbors were apt to remark, that such an
incompetent creature as David Winthrop would be sure to possess. This
cousin had been a trial to Andrew Winthrop all his life. David was a
well-educated man, and he had a most lovable disposition; but he had the
incurable habit of postponing (with the best intentions) until another
time anything important which lay before him; the unimportant things he
did quite cheerily. If it were but reading the morning's paper, David
would be sure to not quite get to the one article which was of
consequence, but to read all the others first in his slow way, deferring
that one to a more convenient season when he could give to it his best
attention; of course the more convenient season never came. Mixed with
this co