The prospect, as he saw it, disheartened him.

As a means of employing his mind on a more agreeable subject for reflection, he opened his traveling desk and took out two or three letters.

They had been addressed to him, while he was in America, by Captain Bennydeck.
The captain had committed an error of which most of us have been guilty in our time.

He had been too exclusively devoted to work that interested him to remember what was due to the care of his health.

The doctor's warnings had been neglected; his over-strained nerves had given way; and the man whose strong constitution had resisted cold and starvation in the Arctic wastes, had broken down under stress of brain-work in London.
This was the news which the first of the letters contained.
The second, written under dictation, alluded briefly to the remedies suggested.