e
other,--something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not:
a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived
of his birthright. What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost
hope to make the hills of heaven more fair?

Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this
figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my
library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,--it is such a rough, ungainly
thing. Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that
show a master's hand. Sometimes,--to-night, for instance,--the curtain is
accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly
in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan, woful
face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with
its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work. Its pale,
vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question, "Is this the End?"
they say,--"nothing beyond?--no more?"

Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the eyes of dumb
brutes,--horses dying under the lash. I know.

The deep of the night is passing while I write. The gas-light wakens
from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through
the room: only faintly, though; for they belong to the open sunlight. As
I glance at them, they each recall some task or pleasure of the coming
day. A half-moulded child's head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves;
music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal
truth and beauty. Prophetic all! Only this dumb, woful face seems to
belong to and end with the night. I turn to look at it Has the power of
its desperate need commanded the darkness away? While the room is yet
steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head
like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken
cloud to the far East, where, in the nickering, nebulous crimson, God
has set the promise of the Dawn.

* * * * *

THE REIGN OF KING COTTON.

To every age and to all nations belong their peculiar maxims and
political or religious cries, which, if collected by some ingenious
philosopher, would make a striking compendium of universal history.
Sometimes a curious outward similarity exists between these condensed
national sentences of peoples dissimilar in every other respect. Thus,
to-day is heard in the senescent Ea