“What can be more wretched than the man who has lost all he loved and desired in the world?”
“Listen, Morrel, and pay attention to what I am about to tell you. I knew a man who like you had fixed all his hopes of happiness upon a woman. He was young, he had an old father whom he loved, a betrothed bride whom he adored. He was about to marry her, when one of the caprices of fate—which would almost make us doubt the goodness of Providence, if that Providence did not afterwards reveal itself by proving that all is but a means of conducting to an end—one of those caprices deprived him of his mistress, of the future of which he had dreamed (for in his blindness he forgot he could only read the