drunk with the joy of battle, stung to
fierce effort by his father's eyes. The great banner, blazoned with the
Cross of Saint George, streamed in crimson and azure between the battle
and the lonely watcher in the storm-tossed boat, and the vision was
gone.... The spires of a great city, where men walked with long faces
and church bells made the only music, rose through the gloom, and he saw
a dingy chamber in a dingy stack of buildings, and within it, bending
over great tomes of law, a man, impoverished and orphaned, but young,
strong, and full of hope,--a man well spoken of and allowed to be on the
road to high preferment. The chamber wavered into darkness; but the city
spires flashed light, and the slow ringing changed to mad peals from joy
bells. Some one had been restored--to drop balm upon the bleeding heart
of a nation, to bring light to them that sit in darkness,--so said the
joy bells.... He saw a loathsome prison, and the man who had sat in the
dingy chamber lying therein under accusation of a crime which he had not
committed. He saw him pining there, week after week, month after month,
untried, forgotten, at the mercy of an enemy to his house whose day had
come with the Restored One.... The prison vanished, and the waves that
tossed around him were the waves of the Atlantic. A ship ploughed her
way through them. He saw into her hold,--a horrible place of stench and
filth and darkness,--a place where hounds would not have kenneled. Men
and women were there who cursed and fought for the scanty, worm-eaten
food that was thrown them. Some wore gyves: they were heavy upon the
wrists and ankles of the man of his vision. He saw a face looking down
upon this man, a handsome supercilious face, with insolent amusement in
the languid eyes and in the curves of the lips. The hatches were
battened down upon the cargo of misery, and the ship with its brutal
captain and its handful of gold-laced, dicing, swearing passengers
vanished.... He saw a sandy, grass-grown street, and a row of mean
houses, and a low, brick building with barred windows. There was a crowd
before this building, and a man standing upon the platform of a pillory
was selling human flesh and blood. He saw the boy who had stood beneath
the yews of the old Hall, who had fought at Worcester beneath his
father's eye; the man who had lain in prison and in the noisome hold of
the ship, put up and sold to the highest bidder. He saw him carried away
with other mercha