own.

"It is the New Year," said Holmes, bending his head.

The cripple was dead; but LOIS, free, loving, and beloved, trembled
from her prison to her Master's side in the To-Morrow.

I can show you her grave out there in the hills,--a short, stunted
grave, like a child's. No one goes there, although there are many
firesides where they speak of "Lois" softly, as of something holy and
dear: but they think of her always as not there; as gone home; even old
Yare looks up, when he talks of "my girl." Yet, knowing that nothing
in God's just universe is lost, or fails to meet the late fulfilment of
its hope, I like to think of her poor body lying there: I like to
believe that the great mother was glad to receive the form that want
and crime of men had thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that
had been so cruelly wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender,
palpitating love.

It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs,
the old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into fresh atoms,
woke at last with a strange sentience, and, when God smiled permission
through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true
beauty that she loved so well. In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre
leaves or gray lichens: throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in
lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life!

Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her
freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to
hope, and learn to be. And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and
work and love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the
story of the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows
vague and incomplete, like unguessed riddles. I have no key to solve
them with,--no right to solve them.

My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth, a
certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice running through
it, awarding apparent good and ill? I know: it is a story of To-Day.
The Old Year is on us yet. Poor old Knowles will tell you it is a dark
day; bewildered at the inexplicable failure of the cause for which his
old blood ran like water that dull morning at Ball's Bluff. He doubts
everything in the bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even,
if the very flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic
selfishness: if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain
trut