it is enough to
break a body's heart to see how little a thing can make a woman happy.

It was another summer. Major Fairfax had come down with Jack to spend
Sunday at the Golden House. Edith was showing the Major the view from
the end of the veranda. Jack was running through the evening paper.
"Hi!" he cried; "here's news. Mavick is to have the mission to Rome, and
it is rumored that the rich and accomplished Mrs. Henderson, as the wife
of the minister, will make the Roman season very gay."

"It's too bad," said Edith. "Nothing is said about the training-school?"

"Nothing." "Poor Henderson!" was the Major's comment. "It was for this
that he drudged and schemed and heaped up his colossal fortune! His life
must look to him like a burlesque."

THAT FORTUNE

By Charles Dudley Warner

On a summer day, long gone among the summer days that come but to go, a
lad of twelve years was idly and recklessly swinging in the top of a tall
hickory, the advance picket of a mountain forest. The tree was on the
edge of a steep declivity of rocky pasture-land that fell rapidly down to
the stately chestnuts, to the orchard, to the cornfields in the narrow
valley, and the maples on the bank of the amber river, whose loud,
unceasing murmur came to the lad on his aerial perch like the voice of
some tradition of nature that he could not understand.

He had climbed to the topmost branch of the lithe and tough tree in order
to take the full swing of this free creature in its sport with the
western wind. There was something exhilarating in this elemental battle
of the forces that urge and the forces that resist, and the harder the
wind blew, and the wider circles he took in the free air, the more
stirred the boy was in the spring of his life. Nature was taking him by
the hand, and it might be that in that moment ambition was born to
achieve for himself, to conquer.

If you had asked him why he was there, he would very likely have said,
"To see the world." It was a world worth seeing. The prospect might be
limited to a dull eye, but not to this lad, who loved to climb this
height, in order to be with himself and indulge the dreams of youth.
Any pretense would suffice for taking this hour of freedom: to hunt for
the spicy checker-berries and the pungent sassafras; to aggravate the
woodchucks, who made their homes in mysterious passages in this gravelly
hillside; to get a nosegay of columbine for the girl who spelled against
him