ough those others be their elders. I
fancy that, as we grow old ourselves, we are apt to forget that it
was so with us; and, forgetting it, we do not believe that it is
so with our children. We constantly talk of the thoughtlessness of
youth. I do not know whether we might not more appropriately speak of
its thoughtfulness. It is, however, no doubt, true that thought will
not at once produce wisdom. It may almost be a question whether such
wisdom as many of us have in our mature years has not come from the
dying out of the power of temptation, rather than as the results of
thought and resolution. Men, full fledged and at their work, are, for
the most part, too busy for much thought; but lads, on whom the work
of the world has not yet fallen with all its pressure,--they have
time for thinking.

And thus John Eames was thoughtful. They who knew him best accounted
him to be a gay, good-hearted, somewhat reckless young man, open to
temptation, but also open to good impressions; as to whom no great
success could be predicated, but of whom his friends might fairly
hope that he might so live as to bring upon them no disgrace and
not much trouble. But, above all things, they would have called him
thoughtless. In so calling him, they judged him wrong. He was ever
thinking,--thinking much of the world as it appeared to him, and of
himself as he appeared to the world; and thinking, also, of things
beyond the world. What was to be his fate here and hereafter? Lily
Dale was gone from him, and Amelia Roper was hanging round his neck
like a mill-stone! What, under such circumstances, was to be his fate
here and hereafter?

We may say that the difficulties in his way were not as yet very
great. As to Lily, indeed, he had no room for hope; but, then, his
love for Lily had, perhaps, been a sentiment rather than a passion.
Most young men have to go through that disappointment, and are
enabled to bear it without much injury to their prospects or
happiness. And in after-life the remembrance of such love is a
blessing rather than a curse, enabling the possessor of it to feel
that in those early days there was something within him of which he
had no cause to be ashamed. I do not pity John Eames much in regard
to Lily Dale. And then, as to Amelia Roper,--had he achieved but a
tithe of that lady's experience in the world, or possessed a quarter
of her audacity, surely such a difficulty as that need not have
stood much in his way! What could