and David, with a look at
his father and mother which neither of them saw, opened and closed the
door of their warm room, and found himself in the darkness outside at
the foot of the cold staircase.

XIII

A bed of crimson coals in the bottom of the grate was all that survived
of his own fire.

He sat down before it, not seeing it, his candle unlighted in his hand,
a tragedy in his eyes.

A comfortless room. Rag carpeting on the floor. No rug softening the
hearth-stones. The sashes of the windows loose in the frames and shaken
to-night by twisty gusts. A pane of glass in one had been broken and
the opening pasted over with a sheet of letter paper. This had been
burst by an indolent hand, thrust through to close the shutters
outside; and a current of cold air now swept across the small room. The
man felt it, shook himself free of depressing thoughts, rose
resolutely. He took from a closet one of his most worthless coats, and
rolling it into a wad, stopped the hole. Going back to the grate, he
piled on the wood, watching the blaze as it rushed up over the logs,
devouring the dried lichens on the bark; then sinking back to the
bottom rounds, where it must slowly rise again, reducing the wood to
ashes. Beside him as he sat in his rush-bottomed chair stood a small
square table and on this a low brass candlestick, the companion of the
one in the dining room. A half-burnt candle rose out of the socket. As
David now lighted it and laid the long fresh candle alongside the
snuffers, he measured with his eye the length of his luminaries and the
amount of his wood--two friends. The little grate had commenced to roar
at him bravely, affectionately; and the candle sputtered to him and
threw sparks into the air--the rockets of its welcoming flame.

It was not yet ten o'clock: two hours of the long winter evening
remained. He turned to his treasury.

This was a trunk in a corner, the trunk he had bought while at college,
small and cheap in itself, not in what it held. For here were David's
books--the great grave books which had been the making of him, or the
undoing of him, according as one may have enough of God's wisdom and
mercy to decide whether it were the one or the other.

As the man now moved his chair over, lifted the lid, and sat gazing
down at the backs of them, arranged in a beautiful order of his own,
there was in the lofty, solemn look of him some further evidence of
their power over him. The coarse toil