Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/89



, with alternating success and failure, two years sped away. The Courtenays, father and son, were, in different ways, admirably adapted to educe its highest product from labour. The doctor was powerfully charged with that human magnetism that instinctively unites man to man, and gives some the leadership. His was a touch, we call tact, that could turn dust into gold, and strike the best chords in human hearts. It enabled him to select his agents, as by instinct, and to apply the labour of each man's hands and brains to its most appropriate occupation.

His very confidence in man, his belief in the better nature lying somewhere, as he supposed, in the breasts of all, rendered him liable to deception, and subjected him to bitter disappointment. The atmosphere,