to make the ends meet. It would not be a
pleasant arrangement, that a man who was to be carried across the
straits from England to France should be fixed on a board so weighted
that his mouth and nostrils should be at the level of the water, thus
that he should be struggling for life, and barely escaping drowning
all the way. Yet hosts of people, whom no one proposes to put under
restraint, do as regards their income and expenditure a precisely
analogous thing. They deliberately weight themselves to that degree that
their heads are barely above water, and that any unforeseen emergency
dips their heads under. They rent a house a good deal dearer than they
can justly afford; and they have servants more and more expensive than
they ought; and by many such things they make sure that their progress
through life shall be a drowning struggle: while, if they would
rationally resolve and manfully confess that they cannot afford to have
things as richer folk have them, and arrange their way of living in
accordance with what they can afford, they would enjoy the feeling of
ease and comfort; they would not be ever on the wretched stretch on
which they are now, nor keeping up the hollow appearance of what is
not the fact. But there are folk who make it a point of honor never to
admit, that, in doing or not doing anything, they are actuated for an
instant by so despicable a consideration as the question whether or not
they can afford it. And who shall reckon up the brains which this social
calamity has driven into disease, or the early paralytic shocks which it
has brought on?

When you were very young, and looked forward to Future Years, did
you ever feel a painful fear that you might outgrow your early home
affections, and your associations with your native scenes? Did you ever
think to yourself,--Will the day come when I shall have been years away
from that river's side, and yet not care? I think we have all known the
feeling. O plain church, to which I used to go when I was a child, and
where I used to think the singing so very splendid! O little room, where
I used to sleep! and you, tall tree, on whose topmost branch I cut the
initials which perhaps the reader knows! did I not even then wonder to
myself if the time and would ever come when I should be far away from
you,--far away, as now, for many years, and not likely to go back,--and
yet feel entirely indifferent to the matter? and did not I even then
feel a strange pain in th