From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs.  The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges.  What wonder?  When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day.  Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills.  Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.  What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist?  You call it an altogether serious thing to be alive:  to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,—­horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough.  My fancy about the river was an idle one:  it is no type of such a life.  What if it be stagnant and slimy here?  It knows that beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight,—­quaint old gardens, dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing crimson with roses,—­air, and fields, and mountains.  The future of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant.  To be stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the muddy graveyard, and after that,—­not air, nor green fields, nor curious roses.

Can you see how foggy the day is?  As I stand here, idly tapping the window-pane, and looking out through the rain at the dirty back-yard and the coal-boats below, fragments of an old story float up before me,—­a story of this old house into which I happened to come to-day.  You may think it a tiresome story enough, as foggy as the day, sharpened by no sudden flashes of pain or pleasure.—­I know:  only the outline of a dull life, that long since, with thousands of dull lives like its own, was vainly lived and lost:  thousands of them,—­massed, vile, slimy lives, like those of the torpid lizards in yonder stagnant water-butt.—­Lost?  There is a curious point for you to settle, my friend, who study psychology in a lazy, dilettante way.  Stop a moment.  I am going to be honest.  This is what I want you to do.  I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—­here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia.  I want you to hear this story.  There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries:  I want to make it a real thing to you.  You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—­this