investor faces an altered world.  His oldest friend says, “Well, Tom, it’s a bitter bad business, and if a hundred is of any use to you, it is at your service; but you know, with my family,” &c.  The unhappy defrauded fellow finds it hard to get work of any sort; begins to show those pathetic signs of privation which are so easily read by the careful observer; hat, boots, coat, grow shabby; the knees seem to have a pathetic bend.  Friends are not unkind, but they have their own burdens to bear, and if he inflicts his company and his sorrows too much on any one of them, he is apt to receive a hint—­probably from a woman—­that his presence can be spared; so the downward road trends towards utter deprivation, and then to extinction.  A young man may recover from almost any blow that does not affect his character; and this was strikingly proved in the case of that brilliant man of science, R.A.  Proctor, who was afterwards stricken out of life untimely.  He lost his fortune in the crash of Overend and Gurney’s company, and he immediately forgot his luxurious habits and turned to work with blithe courage.  How he worked only those who knew him can tell, for no four men of merely ordinary power could have achieved such bewildering success as he did.  But a man who is on the downward slope of life cannot fare like the lamented Proctor; he must endure the pangs of neglect, until death comes and relieves him of the dire torture of being down.

And the harmless widows who are suddenly robbed of their protector.  Ah, how some of them are made to suffer!  Little Amelia Sedley, in “Vanity Fair,” has her sufferings and indignities painted by a master-hand, and there is not a line thickened or darkened overmuch.  The miserable tale of the cheap lodgings, and the insults which the poor girl had flung at her because, in the passion of her love, she spent trifling sums on her boy—­how actual it all seems!  The widow who may have held her head high in her days of prosperity, soon receives lessons from women:  they call it teaching her what is her proper place.  Those good and discreet ladies have a notion that their conduct is full of propriety and discretion and sound sense; but how they make their sisters suffer—­ah, how they make the poor things suffer!  I believe that, if any improvident man could see, in a keenly vivid dream, a vision of his wife’s future after his death, he would stint himself of anything rather than run the risk of having to reflect on his death-bed that he had failed to do his best for those who loved him.  Women sometimes out of pure wantonness try to exasperate a man so that he falls into courses which bring his end swiftly.  Could those foolish ones only see their own fate when the doom of being down in the world came upon them, they would strain every nerve in their bodies so that their husband’s life and powers of work might be spared to the last possible hour.