ral-islands, with greedy robbers amid the fragrant
hills of Greece, with fierce Indians beneath the snow-peaks of the Far
West, with coward Mexicans among tunals of cactus and agave, beneath
the burning tropic sun--What a man he was! Where had he not been? and
what had he not seen? And how he had been preserved--for her? And his
image seemed to her utterly beautiful and glorious, clothed as it
was in the beauty and glory of all that he had seen, and done, and
suffered. Oh Love, Love, Love, the same in peasant and in peer! The
more honour to you, then, old Love, to be the same thing in this world
which is common to peasant and to peer. They say that you are blind;
a dreamer, an exaggerator--a liar, in short. They know just nothing
about you, then. You will not see people as they seem, and as they
have become, no doubt: but why? because you see them as they ought
to be, and are, in some deep way, eternally, in the sight of Him who
conceived and created them.

At last she started, as if waking from a pleasant dream, and spoke,
half to herself--

"Oh, how foolish of me--to be idling away this opportunity; the only
one, perhaps, which I may have! Oh, Mr. Thurnall, tell me about this
cholera!"

"What about it?"

"Everything. Ever since I heard of what you have been saying to the
people, ever since Mr. Headley's sermon, it has been like fire in my
ears!"

"I am truly glad to hear it. If all parsons had preached about it for
the last fifteen years as Mr. Headley did last Sunday, if they had
told people plainly that, if the cholera was God's judgment at all, it
was His judgment of the sin of dirt, and that the repentance which
He required was to wash and be clean in literal earnest, the cholera
would be impossible in England by now."

"Oh, Mr. Thurnall: but is it not God's doing? and can we stop His
hand?"

"I know nothing about that, Miss Harvey. I only know that wheresoever
cholera breaks out, it is some one's fault; and if deaths occur, some
one ought to be tried for manslaughter--I had almost said murder, and
transported for life."

"Someone? Who?"

"That will be settled in the next generation, when men have common
sense enough to make laws for the preservation of their own lives,
against the dirt, and covetousness, and idleness, of a set of human
hogs."

Grace was silent for awhile.

"But can nothing be done to keep it off now? Must it come?"

"I believe it must. Still one may do enough to save many lives