ing
ambition for fortune--that warps the heart and turns to adamant all
those attributes of gentleness with which God has made us. The haggard
beggar and the affluent man of the world, must eventually share the
same fate. No matter that on the grave of the first--"no storied urn
records who rests below," while on the grave of the other, we find in
sculptured marble long eulogies of those who rest beneath, telling us
"not what he was, but what he should have been." Their end is the
same, for beneath the same sod they "sleep the last sleep that knows
no waking," and their spirits wing their flight to the same eternal
realms, there to be judged by their own merits, and not by the station
they occupied below.

If there are men in this world who cannot be changed by wealth, Swartz
was not of the number. What cared he for the sighs of the desolate,
the appeals of the hungry, or the tears of the helpless? His duty was
but to fill his coffers with money, and not to expend it in aimless
deeds of charity. He looked upon the poor just as we would look upon a
reptile--something to be shunned.

It was indeed a wild hallucination that induced Mrs. Wentworth to bend
her steps towards his office. Could he have seen her as she was
coming, he would have left his room, for the sight of the mendicant
filled him with greater horror than a decree of God declaring that the
end of the world had come.

CHAPTER NINETEENTH.

AN ACT OF DESPAIR.

Mrs. Wentworth reached the store of Mr. Swartz and entered. The clerk
looked at her in astonishment. She was unrecognizable. Her dress was
ragged and dirty; the hands and face that once rivalled the Parian
marble in whiteness, were tanned by toil, and lay shrivelled and
dried. Her hair was dishevelled and gathered up in an uncomely heap on
the back of her head. She looked like the beggar, she had become.

"Some beggar," the clerk said, in a contemptuous tone, as he advanced
towards her.

"Is Mr. Swartz in?" enquired Mrs. Wentworth in a husky tone.

"What do you want with him?" he demanded in a gruff voice.

"I desire to see him privately, for a few moments," she answered.

"If it is charity you have come to beg, you may as well save yourself
the trouble," observed the clerk. "This house don't undertake to
support all the beggars in Jackson."

As his brutal words fell on her ear, a spark of womanly dignity filled
her breast, and her eyes kindled with indignation. She looked at him
for