ple, 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,
Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a gorilla, walked about,
looking through his fist at it, saying, "how fine the _chiaroscuro_ was,
and that it was a devilish good thing altogether." "Well, well," he
soothed his conscience, going down-stairs, "maybe that bit of canvas is
as much to that poor chap as the phalanstery was once to another fool."
And so went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars
and alleys, with a sorer heart, but cheerfuller words, now that he had
nothing but words to give.

The only place where he hardened his heart was in the hospital with
Holmes. After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles thought the
man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day, cold and grave,
as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were enough for him. Did
he understand the iron fate laid on him? Where was the strength of the
self-existent soul now? Did he know that it was a balked, defeated
life, that waited for him, vacant of the triumphs he had planned? "The
self-existent soul! stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent
deity,--the chance burning of a mill!" Knowles muttered to himself,
looking at Holmes. With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether
there might not, after all, be a Something,--some deep of calm, of
eternal order, where these coarse chances, these wrestling souls, these
creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian, even that namby-pamby Kitts and his
picture, might be unconsciously working out their part. Looking out
of the hospital-window, he saw the deep of the stainless blue,
impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their silence of the maddest
raging of the petty world. There was such calm! such infinite love and
justice! it was around, above him; it held him, it held the world,--all
Wrong, all Right! For an instant the turbid heart of the man cow