tences, drifting and endless as the cloud-seas of color. Clutching
it, as if the tightness of his hold would strengthen his sense of
possession, he went aimlessly down the street. It was his watch at the
mill. He need not go, need never go again, thank God!--shaking off the
thought with unspeakable loathing.

Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the
man wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a
half-consciousness of bidding them farewell,--lanes and alleys and
back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,--noting, with a new eagerness,
the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens, the ash-heaps covered with
potato-skins, the bloated, pimpled women at the doors,--with a new
disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague
dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there? It
left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his
life, he entered a church. It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the
stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the
requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe's. Yet it
touched, moved him uncontrollably. The distances, the shadows, the
still, marble figures, the mass of silent kneeling worshippers, the
mysterious music, thrilled, lifted his soul with a wonderful pain. Wolfe
forgot himself, forgot the new life he was going to live, the mean
terror gnawing underneath. The voice of the speaker strengthened the
charm; it was clear, feeling, full, strong. An old man, who had lived
much, suffered much; whose brain was keenly alive, dominant; whose heart
was summer-warm with charity. He taught it to-night. He held up Humanity
in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his people. Who
could show it better? He was a Christian reformer; he had studied the
age thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all
time. His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages; his fiery zeal
guided vast schemes by which the gospel was to be preached to all
nations. How did he preach it to-night? In burning, light-laden words he
painted the incarnate Life, Love, the universal Man: words that became
reality in the lives of these people,--that lived again in beautiful
words and actions, trifling, but heroic. Sin, as he defied it, was a
real foe to them; their trials, temptations, were his. His words passed
far over the furnace-tender's grasp, toned to suit another class of
culture; they s