ough
prickly underwood, and over tangled masses of briery plants, clinging to
him every where around, as with a thousand taloned claws; he is
exhausted, extrication is impossible; he beats the tough creepers with
his dulled hatchet, as a wounded man vainly; ha! one effort more--a
dying effort--must he be impaled upon these sharp aloes, and
strange-leafed prickly shrubs; they have caught him there, those thirsty
poisoned hooks, innumerable as his sins; his way, whichever way he
looks, is hedged up high with thorns--thick-set thorns--sturdy, tearing
thorns, that he cannot battle through them. Emaciated, bleeding, rent,
fainting, famished, he must perish in the merciless thicket into which
hard-heartedness had flung him!

Before he was well dead, those flapping carrion fowls had found him out;
they were famishing too, and half forgot their natural distaste for
living meat. He fought them vainly, as the dying fight; soon there were
other screams in that echoing solitude, besides the screeching falcons!
and when they reached his heart (if its matter aptly typified its
spirit), that heart should have been a very stone for hardness.

So let the selfish die! alone, in the waste howling wilderness; so let
him starve uncared-for, whose boast it was that he had never felt for
other than himself--who mocked God, and scorned man--whose motto
throughout life, one sensual, unsympathizing, harsh routine, was this:
"Take care of the belly, and the heart will take care of itself!"--who
never had a wish for other's good, a care for other's evil, a thought
beyond his own base carcase; who was a man--no man--a wretch, without a
heart. So let him perish miserably; and the white eagles pick his
skeleton clean in yonder tangled jungle!

CHAPTER XIX.

WHEREIN MATTERS ARE CONCLUDED.

Certain folks at Ballyriggan, near Belfast, observe to me, with not a
little Irish truth, that it is by no means easy to conclude a history
never intended to be finished. It so happens that my good friends the
clan Clements are still enjoying life and all it sweets, beneficent in
their generation; and as for their hearts' affections, that story
without an end will still be heard, ringing on its happy changes, in the
presence of God and of his immortal train, when every reader of these
records shall have been to this world dead. Out of the heart are the
issues of life, and within, it is life's well-spring. Death is but a
little narrow gate, in a dark ro