Master Jacky Carling was a very nice boy, but not at that time in his career the safest person to whom to intrust a missive in case its sure and speedy delivery were a matter of importance.  But he protested with so much earnestness and good will that it should be put into the very first post-box he came to on his way to school, and that nothing could induce him to forget it, that Mary Blake, his aunt, confidante and not unfrequently counsel and advocate, gave it him to post, and dismissed the matter from her mind.  Unfortunately the weather, which had been very frosty, had changed in the night to a summer-like mildness.  As Jacky opened the door, three or four of his school-fellows were passing.  He felt the softness of the spring morning, and to their injunction to “Hurry up and come along!” replied with an entreaty to “Wait a minute till he left his overcoat” (all boys hate an overcoat), and plunged back into the house.

If John Lenox (John Knox Lenox) had received Miss Blake’s note of condolence and sympathy, written in reply to his own, wherein, besides speaking of his bereavement, he had made allusion to some changes in his prospects and some necessary alterations in his ways for a time, he might perhaps have read between the lines something more than merely a kind expression of her sorrow for the trouble which had come upon him, and the reminder that he had friends who, if they could not do more to lessen his grief, would give him their truest sympathy.  And if some days later he had received a second note, saying that she and her people were about to go away for some months, and asking him to come and see them before their departure, it is possible that very many things set forth in this narrative would not have happened.

* * * * *

Life had always been made easy for John Lenox, and his was not the temperament to interpose obstacles to the process.  A course at Andover had been followed by two years at Princeton; but at the end of the second year it had occurred to him that practical life ought to begin for him, and he had thought it rather fine of himself to undertake a clerkship in the office of Rush & Co., where in the ensuing year and a half or so, though he took his work in moderation, he got a fair knowledge of accounts and the ways and methods of “the Street.”  But that period of it was enough.  He found himself not only regretting the abandonment of his college career, but feeling that the thing for which he had given it up had been rather a waste of time.  He came to the conclusion that, though he had entered college later than most, even now a further acquaintance with text-books and professors was more to be desired than with ledgers and brokers.  His father (somewhat to his wonderment, and possibly a little to his chagrin) seemed rather to welcome the suggestion that he spend a couple of years in Europe, taking some lectures at Heidelberg or elsewhere, and traveling; and in the course of that time he acquired a pretty fair working acquaintance with German, brought his knowledge of French up to about the same point, and came back at the end of two years with a fine and discriminating taste in beer, and a scar over his left eyebrow which could be seen if attention were called to it.