Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/243

 Never be ashamed of your burden, not even though your own folly should have clapped an additional half-hundred on the top of it. Get your shoulders well under the heaviest part, walk as upright as you may, but do not try to swagger; and if you have a friend who likes you well enough to give his assistance, let him catch hold at one end, and so between you move on with it the best way you can.

Some packages grow all the lighter, like a contraband trunk at the Douane, for being weighed and examined, or, as our neighbours call it, "pierced and plumbed." Home again gather increased proportions when we enlarge upon them; but it is only those of which we dare not speak, those which no friend must seem to see, for which no brother must offer a hand, that sink our failing strength, that crush us down humbled and helpless in the mire.