Shall I go over the history of the hours of that night? how the man wandered from one to another of his old haunts, with a half-consciousness of bidding them farewell,—­lanes and alleys and back-yards where the mill-hands lodged,—­noting, with a new eagerness, the filth and drunkenness, the pig-pens, the ash-heaps covered with potato-skins, the bloated, pimpled women at the doors,—­with a new disgust, a new sense of sudden triumph, and, under all, a new, vague dread, unknown before, smothered down, kept under, but still there?  It left him but once during the night, when, for the second time in his life, he entered a church.  It was a sombre Gothic pile, where the stained light lost itself in far-retreating arches; built to meet the requirements and sympathies of a far other class than Wolfe’s.  Yet it touched, moved him uncontrollably.  The distances, the shadows, the still, marble figures, the mass of silent kneeling worshippers, the mysterious music, thrilled, lifted his soul with a wonderful pain.  Wolfe forgot himself, forgot the new life he was going to live, the mean terror gnawing underneath.  The voice of the speaker strengthened the charm; it was clear, feeling, full, strong.  An old man, who had lived much, suffered much; whose brain was keenly alive, dominant; whose heart was summer-warm with charity.  He taught it to-night.  He held up Humanity in its grand total; showed the great world-cancer to his people.  Who could show it better?  He was a Christian reformer; he had studied the age thoroughly; his outlook at man had been free, world-wide, over all time.  His faith stood sublime upon the Rock of Ages; his fiery zeal guided vast schemes by which the gospel was to be preached to all nations.  How did he preach it to-night?  In burning, light-laden words he painted the incarnate Life, Love, the universal Man:  words that became reality in the lives of these people,—­that lived again in beautiful words and actions, trifling, but heroic.  Sin, as he defied it, was a real foe to them; their trials, temptations, were his.  His words passed far over the furnace-tender’s grasp, toned to suit another class of culture; they sounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown tongue.  He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake.  In this morbid, distorted heart of the Welsh puddler he had failed.

Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street.  He looked up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden mists had vanished, and the sky lay dull and ash-colored.  He wandered again aimlessly down the street, idly wondering what had become of the cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet.  The trial-day of this man’s life was over, and he had lost the victory.  What followed was mere drifting circumstance,—­a quicker walking over the path,—­that was all.  Do you want to hear the end of it?  You wish me to make a tragic story out of it?  Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such tragedies:  hints of ship-wrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,—­that there a soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow.  Commonplace enough the hints are,—­jocose sometimes, done up in rhyme.