The man whom he envied and hated had triumphed; robbed him of fortune, and robbed him of happiness; happiness of which Morton had had already his full share, and a fortune which would but swell the ample bulk of his possessions. Vinal was frenzied with grief, rage, and jealousy.
_Clo_. That she should love this fellow and refuse me! If it be sin to make a true election, she is damned. _Cymbeline_.
Morton sat in the reading room of the National, the grand hotel of Matherton. It was by no means an elegant apartment. In the middle was a table covered with newspapers; at the sides were desks, likewise covered with newspapers, padlocked together in files. The walls and the ceiling glared a drear monotony of white, broken, however, by sundry ornaments, worthy the attention of the curious. Here, framed in birdseye maple, was the engraved likeness of "Old Hickory," with hat and cane in hand, a cloak to hide the gauntness of his figure, and hair bristling in electrified disorder. Here, too, was a colored print of the favorite steamboat "Queen of the Lake;" Niagara Falls, by a license of art, forming a blue curtain in the background. At its side was a lithograph of the Empire Hotel, New York, the sidewalk in front being embellished with groups of pedestrians, dressed with matchless elegance, after the fashion plates; and, over against this, an advertisement of Jessup's steel, encircled with a lithographed halo, composed of chisels, axes, hammers, saws, and ploughshares.
The apartment, thus furnished and thus adorned, had, besides Morton, but two occupants; the one a factory agent, who stood at a desk, absorbed in the New Orleans Picayune; the other a country tailor, who displayed the sign of the "Full-dressed Man" at the neighboring village of Mudfield, and was now seated at a window, busied in polishing a huge garnet ring, which he wore, with a red silk handkerchief.
In a window recess, aloof from the tailor's, sat Morton, scarcely conscious of any presence but that of his own thoughts. He had found a philosopher's stone; and through the rest of his life, this comfortless reading room of the Matherton Hotel, this sanctuary of dry and weary Yankeedom, was linked in his memory with dreams of golden brightness.
