"This will be the greatest country in the world some day," the old gentleman said when they were back on the veranda and had settled themselves in the comfortable chairs. "All we need is more capital, more people and more facilities for transportation. But tell me about yourself now—your plans—and what you hope to do."
"You've probably heard it from many a young fellow before," Everett answered, looking responsively into the face turned with kindly interest toward him. "I have chosen law as my profession. It has always been my desire since the time I found a long illness had left me unfit for any great physical work. My father was a sea captain and could never understand this choice of mine—a queer notion, as he called it. But I'm going on with it and make a success of it, if hard work and hope will do it. I had some little success with oratory at college, but what I need now is the opportunity to read law and prepare to be admitted to the bar. There seemed no good opportunity for me in New England, everything there is so crowded, and the chance to teach in Mrs. Brandon's family seemed the best thing for me to do. It will give me leisure to study, and then, Morgan Talbot tells me her library is very large."
"It is magnificent. Brandon had case after case of books shipped to him from England—those that he could not get from New York. The library got so large that he had to build a special room for it. But to go back to yourself—how much law do you know? I saw this morning in your talk with those fellows that you were able to grapple with the mazes of politics. But the point for you now is to get a solid foundation of details. Do you think you could get in study enough this winter to pass examinations next spring?"
With the minutes slipping by they talked on, sometimes Everett unbosoming himself to the kind old gentleman as he had never done before, sometimes the old man telling him of the needs and greater demands of the bar of the Southwest, pointing out to him lines of study and books that would be more useful to him in the special characteristics of the law in that country.
In his low modulated voice he told the young fellow starting out on the life journey things that were to come back to him many years later. Afterwards Sargent Everett often recalled his words about success when he was feeling its empty sting: "The path of the successful man is not strewn with flowers. Failure and disappointment are the walls that, when once passed, become golden experiences. Success judged by the outside world and felt by the one who has succeeded are two very different things—sometimes, perhaps most often, the success seen by the world is the least of all successes. What one strives for and yearns for and so rarely accomplishes is a thing that others are unaware of—a thing too sacred to be spoken."
Everett sat spell bound under the influence of the Judge's words. In the rise and fall of the voice, an inflection which had in it a delightful bit of provincialism, he found a charm that was persuasive and forceful.
When the town clock, a block away, chimed three, he rose reluctantly with a sigh that spoke frankly his regret at leaving.
"I wish I might spend the remainder of the afternoon with you," he said, his hand clasping the old gentleman's. "But my journey is not quite finished, yet. I shall go out to Mistress Brandon's now and meet her and see if I am acceptable."
"Tell her I approve," Judge Houston laid his hand on Everett's shoulder. "And if I'm not very much mistaken it may have some weight. Tell her we became good friends in one day."
Everett pressed the old gentleman's hand warmly. "Good friends!" he replied, "you are already more than that to me. I feel as if I had known you always—that I had some right to expect all this kindness from you."