she shall find him whom she lost, and that then she will not be all-unworthy.  Who blames her?  Something is lost in the passage of every soul from one eternity to the other,—­something pure and beautiful, which might have been and was not:  a hope, a talent, a love, over which the soul mourns, like Esau deprived of his birthright.  What blame to the meek Quaker, if she took her lost hope to make the hills of heaven more fair?

Nothing remains to tell that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl.  I have it here in a corner of my library.  I keep it hid behind a curtain,—­it is such a rough, ungainly thing.  Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master’s hand.  Sometimes,—­to-night, for instance,—­the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine:  a wan, woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its unfinished work.  Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a terrible question, “Is this the End?” they say,—­“nothing beyond?—­no more?”

Why, you tell me you have seen that look in the eyes of dumb brutes,—­horses dying under the lash.  I know.

The deep of the night is passing while I write.  The gas-light wakens from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room:  only faintly, though; for they belong to the open sunlight.  As I glance at them, they each recall some task or pleasure of the coming day.  A half-moulded child’s head; Aphrodite; a bough of forest-leaves; music; work; homely fragments, in which lie the secrets of all eternal truth and beauty.  Prophetic all!  Only this dumb, woful face seems to belong to and end with the night.  I turn to look at it Has the power of its desperate need commanded the darkness away?  While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the nickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn.

* * * * *

THE REIGN OF KING COTTON.

To every age and to all nations belong their peculiar maxims and political or religious cries, which, if collected by some ingenious philosopher, would make a striking compendium of universal history.  Sometimes a curious outward similarity exists between these condensed national sentences of peoples dissimilar in every other respect.  Thus, to-day is heard in the senescent East the oft-repeated formula of the Mussulman’s faith, “There is no God but Allah, and Mahomet is his Prophet,” while in the youthful West a new cry, as fully believed, not less devout, and scarcely less often repeated, arises from one great and influential portion of the political and social