"WE may predict a man's success in life from his spirits," says Mr. Emerson (viva voce, if not in his published lectures). Not from his spirit, surely, or so many of the loveliest would not be for ever toiling on the lower rounds of life's ladder, while those who know not what manner of spirit they are of, and would be ashamed to look the truth in the face if it were presented to them, are sitting coolly at the top, or waving their hats in triumph at the moistbrowed throng below. A man's spirit-made up of his honesty, his meekness, his patience, his humility, his charity, his sympathy-will not insure his success, allowing the world to be judge of success, as it claims to be. Animal spirits go much further towards it; and, perhaps, Mr. Emerson meant these. They are the world's sine qua non. It never sympathizes with one's depression. Grief it can understand, because there is vivacity in grief. It respects passion, for passion has movement and energy. But the man who can be discouraged by any stroke of fate whatever, it sets down as a poltroon, and if it turn not the cold shoulder of contempt upon him, it either treats him as a foil, or a stepping-stone, or it goes round as if he had never existed.

This discipline of Mother World seems somewhat hard to the life-pupil. Like the rattan, or the slipper of nursery-training, it is rather pungent and irritating, for the time, than convincing or restorative. But like those balmy bitters, it saves a world of crude philosophizing when we have learned to consider it inevitable. As the rod furnishes the only royal road to learning, so the world's neglect offers the man who has not patience and courage for the beaten track, a short-cut to common sense; happy if egotism have not so befilmed his mental sight, that the iron finger points in vain the upward path!

These remarks, however, apply only to ordinary grumblers—the immense class of the great unappreciated, whose sense of their own merits wraps them all over like a cloak, so that outsiders may be excused if they pass by unconscious. There are others whose spirits fall below the tone required for the life-struggle, through mere tenderness and humility. These could be tolerably cheerful under their own troubles, if that were all; but it is a necessity

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of their nature to become so completely interwoven with the fate and feelings of those whom they find about them, that no thread can be snapped without disturbing them. Their identity is diffused, as it were; they have a great frontier lying open to the enemy. Their house of life has so many windows for the sunshine, that every blast finds entrance. They become egotists through mere forgetfulness of self, since all the misfortunes of those they love are personal to them, and lead, like common egotism, to a morbid sensibility. We may exaggerate the troubles of our friends, as well as our own, and fall into despondency as proxy as well as principal.

This evil, being the result of experience, it must be cured, homoeopathically, by more experience. Hard rubs have no place in the treatment of such cases. As "amiable" people are apt to be very obstinate, so amiable weaknesses defy all direct efforts at reform. If they do not cure themselves, they are hopeless. Their owners are the last to believe them troublesome or inconvenient, as the Valaisans are said to consider their habitual goitre rather an ornament than otherwise.

But we may, perhaps, better illustrate the idea which set our pen in motion, by a sketch of the circumstances under which a certain person, whom we may as well call John Todd as anything else, came to consider himself as being de trop in the world. He had some apology, as the reader will allow.

He was the eldest son in a household, whose head was just so much worse than the head of a bad pin that it did not come off, although decidedly of no use to any one, even the owner! Why such men are called to preside over tables badly covered in proportion as they are well surrounded, seems strange, but not so strange as the fact that they are apt to be quite jolly, rather personable, and particularly well-dressed people, full of wonder at the obstinate toiling and moiling of the world around them, and very severe upon the avarice of those who, having worked hard for their money, are disposed to be over-careful of it. They are always men of the most generous feelings; wishing for a million of dollars that they might have wherewithal to help everybody that needs help, and contriving ingenious plans of

relief for all those ills of life, which are supposed to lie within the curative powers of ready cash. As to their own means of living, they are invariably on the brink of becoming suddenly rich; either by the death of an uncle who went to sea when he was a boy, and has never been heard of since, and therefore must come home a nabob; or by the advanced value of land in the Northwest Territory, bought of the Indians at the rate of a gallon of whiskey the quarter section, twenty years ago, and on which no taxes have as yet been demanded; or from the success of an entirely new branch of business, devised by the jolly man himself, and entered into with much zeal by his crony and double, Jack Thompson, who offers to be the outdoor partner, making the thing popular, by persuading people it is just what they want. Some form of "speculation" it must be; for this order of genius finds mere industry dreadfully slow.

John Todd, then, was the son of a gentleman, i. e., of a man who had nothing, and who did nothing, or next to nothing, for his living, yet lived very well, and entertained very high sentiments. We need hardly say that Mrs. Todd, the mother, who luckily had had a very small annuity, secured to her by the foresight of an elder brother, was one of those hard-working, devoted creatures, who seem to have no individual existence, but to have been born the adjunct and complement of such men. How and where she found bread for the family,-to say nothing of beef,a mystery to the neighbours, to whose apprehension Mr. Todd seemed to do nothing but soil white waistcoats and plaited shirt-frills, lest his wife should get out of business. Not but he went down town every day; that was

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one of the duties held sacred in his estimation. But what he did there no echo ever betrayed, though the dinner hour never failed to find him punctually at home, generally complaining of fatigue, or at least exhaustion. Mrs. Todd was generally too weary to come to the table, which her husband excused with great amenity, kindly advising her to lie down and take a nap, as he could make out very well, which he certainly did. Some people took it into their heads that he was the invalid who declined giving his little daughter the last half of the seventeenth dumpling, saying, "Papa's sick!" but this we cannot vouch for.

Children reared under such auspices are notedly good and dutiful, and so were most of the youthful Todds; but John, being the oldest and ablest, and always his poor mother's right hand man, was the apex of the little pyramid, as well in character as in stature. Indeed, he never had any childhood. He occupied the position of confidential agent to his mother; a

sort of property-man and scene-shifter to the needy establishment, where so much was to be done with so little. These two held long whispered conferences with each other, of which the subjects seldom transpired-the debates, perhaps, of a committee of ways and means on pantaloons or potatoes. Mysterious signs and movements, nods and winks, would pass between them occasionally, followed by dartings hither and thither on the part of John, and uneasy glances at the door or window on that of his mother, while the Papa Todd sat reading the newspaper and fidgeted for his breakfast, and the children were all huddled about the kitchen fire, because they must not disturb their "poor father." It was a great thing to be so preserved from selfishness as that family was, by its head taking all the risks of indulgence on his own shoulders. The virtue of self-denial, so beautiful to look at, became habitual with most of the members; and the father regarded this excellent quality in his household with a serene complacency quite edifying to behold.

It was a time of great trial to the mother when John was considered old enough to be put to business, an epoch which arrived much earlier in the judgment of Mr. than of Mrs. Todd. "It ruins a boy to be brought up in idleness!" said he. "Idleness!" thought the mother, but she said nothing, and her beloved factotum was placed with a merchant, who looked at him with much the same sort of interest with which one regards a new broom or a pair of bellows, which come in to supply the place of a worn-out article of household service. Here was a new page of life for our poor little friend, who had always, amid the general dreariness of his lot, had

"Light upon him from his mother's eyes, at least."

Here were new duties, new and mocking faces, long, laborious days, uncheered by one kind word of encouragement, and a general consciousness that a boy in a store is only a necessary evil, out of whom it is everybody's business to get as much work as possible, by way of compensation for enduring his awkwardness. The boy had learned, somehow, that there is such a thing as fun in the world, and had even discovered some capacity for it in himself, though he had deferred the use of it under the emergencies of home-life. But he soon found there must be a still further postponement of the laughing era. All was grave about him, so grave that nothing short of a hyena could have ventured upon a laugh there, and poor John was anything but a hyena in disposition. So he learned to withdraw into himself and paint pictures of an ideal future,