red sun came out,
lighting up with a heartsome warmth the whole gray day. Some blessing
power seemed to look at him from this grave yard of his hopes, from the
gloomy hills, the prairie, and the river, which he never was to see
again. His hope accomplished could not have looked at him with surer
content and fulfilment. He turned away, ungrateful and moody. Long
afterwards he remembered the calm and brightness which his hand had not
been raised to make, and understood the meaning of its promise.

He went to work now in earnest: he had to work for his
bread-and-butter, you understand? Restless, impatient at first; but we
will forgive him that: you yourself were not altogether submissive,
perhaps, when the slow-built expectation of life was destroyed by some
chance, as you called it, no more controllable than this paltry burning
of a mill. Yet, now that the great hope was gone on which his brain
had worked with rigid, fierce intentness, now that his hands were
powerless to redeem a perishing class, he had time to fall into
careless, kindly habit: he thought it wasted time, remorsefully, of
course. He was seized with a curiosity to know what plan in living
these people had who crossed his way on the streets; if they were
disappointed, like him. Humbled, he hardly knew why: vague, uncertain
in action. Quit dogging old Huff with his advice; trotted about the
streets with a cowed look, that, if one could have seen into the jaded
old heart under his snuffy waistcoat, would have seemed pitiful enough.
He went sometimes to read the papers to old Tim Poole, who was
bed-ridden, and did not pish or pshaw once at his maundering about
secession, or the misery in his back. Went to church sometimes: the
sermons were bigotry, always, to his notion, sitting on a back seat,
squirting tobacco-juice about him; but the simple, old-fashioned hymns
brought the tears to his eyes:--"They sounded to him like his mother's
voice, singing in Paradise:" he hoped she could not see how things had
gone on here,--how all that was honest and strong in his life had
fallen in that infernal mill. Once or twice he went down Crane Alley,
and lumbered up three pair of stairs to the garret where Kitts had his
studio,--got him orders, in fact, for two portraits; and when that
pale-eyed young man, in a fit of confidence, one night, with a very red
face drew back the curtain from his grand "Fall of Chapultepec," and
watched him with a lean and hungry look