CHAPTER IX.
YET MORE ESCAPES.
But there are many other sorts of peril in human life to which I may briefly advert, as we all have had some experiences of the same.

Who does not know of his special financial temptation, some sanguine and unscrupulous speculator urging him from rock to rock across the rapids of ruin, till he is engulfed as by Niagara?
Or of the manifestly disinterested and generous capitalist, who gives to some young legatee a junior partner's free arm-chair, only that he may utilise his money and keep the house solvent for yet a year or two, utterly unheeding that ere long the grateful beneficiaire must be dragged down with his chief to poverty?
Or, which of us has not had experience of some unjust will, stealing our rights by evil influence?
Or of the seemingly luckless accident killing off our intending benefactor just before that promised codicil?
Or of the ruinous investment?
Or of the bankrupt Life Assurance?
Or of the unhappy fact of your autograph, "a mere matter of form," on the back of some dishonoured bill of one's defaulting friend?
Yet all these are providences too,--lessons of life, and parts of our schools and schoolmasters.
And there are many like social evils besides.

Let me delicately touch one of them.

I desire as an Ancient, now nearing the close of my career, at least in this the caterpillar and soon to be chrysalis condition of my being, to give my testimony seriously and practically to the fact (disputed by too many from their own worse experience) that it is quite possible to live from youth to age in many scenes and under many circumstantial difficulties, preserving still through them all the innocent purity of childhood.

True, the crown of greater knowledge is added to the Man; but although it be a knowledge both of evil and of good, theoretically,--it need not practically be a guilty knowledge.