“I esteem you highly. I believe in you. I would trust you, Richling,”—his listener remembered how the speaker had trusted him, and was melted,—“but as to recommending you, why, that is like going upon the witness-stand, as it were, and I cannot say that I know anything.”
Richling’s face suddenly flashed full of light. He touched the Doctor’s hand.
“That’s it! That’s the very thing, sir! Write that!”
The Doctor hesitated. Richling sat gazing at him, afraid to move an eye lest he should lose an advantage. The Doctor turned to his desk and wrote.
On the next morning Richling did not come for his breakfast; and, not many days after, Dr. Sevier received through the mail the following letter:—
New Orleans, December 2, 1857.
Dear Doctor,—I’ve got the place. I’m Reisen’s book-keeper. I’m earning my living. And I like the work. Bread, the word bread, that has so long been terrible to me, is now the sweetest word in the language. For eighteen months it was a prayer; now it’s a proclamation.
I’ve not only got the place, but I’m going to keep it. I find I have new powers; and the first and best of them is the power to throw myself into my work and make it me. It’s not a task; it’s a mission. Its being bread, I suppose, makes it easier to seem so; but it should be so if it was pork and garlic, or rags and raw-hides.
My maxim a year ago, though I didn’t know it then, was to do what I liked. Now it’s to like what I do. I understand it now. And I understand now, too, that a man who expects to retain employment must yield a profit. He must be worth more than he costs. I thank God for the discipline of the last year and a half. I thank him that I did not fall where, in my cowardice, I so often prayed to fall, into the hands of foolish benefactors. You wouldn’t believe this of me, I know; but it’s true. I have been taught what life is; I never would have learned it any other way.