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Rh hardship, with an honesty and vigour of character, which won him perhaps a more hearty esteem for every successive effort, than the display of his lost riches might ever have acquired him. His labours and his abilities obtained gradual but sure success, and he now enjoyed the blessings of a competence earned with the most scrupulous integrity, and spent with the most kindly benevolence. A trace of the trials they had passed through, was discernible in each; those trials had stolen the rose from the wife's cheek, and had sown untimely wrinkles in the broad brow of Clifford. There were moments too, but they were only moments, when the latter sunk from his wonted elastic and healthful cheerfulness of mind, into a gloomy and abstracted reverie; but these moments the wife watched with a jealous and fond anxiety, and one sound of her sweet voice had the power to dispel their influence; and when Clifford raised his eyes, and glanced from her tender smile around his happy home and his growing children, or beheld through the very windows of his room, the public benefits he had created, something of pride and gladness glowed