the flower is like an everlasting bud from the last tree of Time.
See, my Sheila, your drunken, reckless lover pulls this sweet
offering from his garden and offers it to you. He has no virtues;
and yet he would have been a thousand times worse, if you had not
come into his life. He had in him the seeds of trouble, the
sproutings of shame, for even in the first days of his love there in
Dublin he would not restrain himself. He drank, he played cards, he
fought and went with bad company--not women, never that; but he kept
the company of those through whom he came at last to punishment for
manslaughter.

Yet, without you, who can tell what he might have been? He might
have fallen so low that not the wealth of ten thousand treasure-
boxes could give him even the appearance of honesty. And now he
offers you what you cannot accept--can never accept--a love as deep
as the life from which he came; a love that would throttle the world
for you, that would force the doors of hell to bring you what you
want.

What do you want? I know not. Perhaps you have inherited the vast
property to which you were the heir. If you have, what can you want
that you have not means to procure? Ah, I have learned one thing,
my friend 'one can get nearly everything with money. It is the
hidden machinery which makes the world of success go round. With
brains, you say? Yes, money and brains, but without the money
brains seldom win alone. Do not I know? When I was in prison, with
estate vanished and home gone and my father in his grave, who was
concerned about me?

Only the humblest of all God's Irish people; but with them I have