I pondered over this remark, for I was too young to understand the application of it.
"Do you know the origin of happiness?" continued the minister.
I could have said, Plenty of money and fun—a fine house, a fine horse, and so forth; but I was silent, or merely said, "No."
"Then hark you, Master Oliver Ellis—the origin of happiness is contentment, and the resources of a mind humbled by the trials with which it pleaseth God to inflict us."
"So I have heard you preach a thousand times," thought I; and while I glanced around the magnificent drawing-room, on his well-cushioned easy-chair, his amplitude of paunch and successive folds of chin, the idea did occur to me, that the apostles were content with fewer of this world's goods; but I was silent again.
In short, the minister talked of morality and duty—of business habits, of close application, and strict honesty, and so forth, until I was heartily weary. I seemed to listen, but heard him not; for my thoughts were running far away on other things, and had soared into the region of sunshine and daydreams, until, after many trite common-places and innumerable pious nothings, he broke the spell by bluntly announcing that "the time was come when I must look about me. I was now sixteen; my mother was getting old; she could not last for ever, and if anything happened to her, what would become of me."
This cruel insinuation, so coldly uttered, cut me to the heart, and my mother's sad eyes involuntarily sought mine. She had often—too often in her sad and lonely hours—thought of the separation death might one day make between her penniless children and herself; but to hear it thus roughly alluded to, was too much for her, and the poor woman wept aloud.
The minister tried to console her by some hackneyed scriptural text: that man was made to mourn,—that he was sent into this world to be miserable, and had no business to be anything else; but this burst of emotion on her part stifled every secret aspiration and every strong wish in me, and I assented to any plan his reverence had to propose, resolving to leave to him the onerous office of opening up the path that was to lead me to fortune and to fame.
He promised "to speak anent me to his doer," a literal, and often fatally literal phrase, applied by the Scots to their lawyer or "man of business," without consulting whom, many of them will not even vote for an M.P., or do the most trivial thing. "I'll tak' a thought—I'll spier o' my doer," being the answer in the country to almost everything proposed.
Hence, in one week after our visit to the manse, I found myself in Edinburgh, and perched on the leathern summit of a high three-legged stool, in the office of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, solicitors, eminent alike for their "sharp practice" and acute manner of handling all troublesome or cloudy cases of insolvency.