He got up at last, and without a sigh went slowly away, leaving the courage and self-reliance of his life behind him, buried with that one beautiful, fair dream of life.  He never came back again.  People said Knowles was quieter since his loss; but I think only God saw the depth of the difference.  When he was leaving the plateau, that day, he looked back at it, as if to say good-bye,—­not to the dingy fields and river, but to the Something he had nursed so long in his rugged heart, and given up now forever.  As he looked, the warm, red sun came out, lighting up with a heartsome warmth the whole gray day.  Some blessing power seemed to look at him from the gloomy hills, the prairie, and the river, which he was to see again.  His hope accomplished could not have looked at him with surer content and fulfilment.  He turned away, ungrateful and moody.  Long afterwards he remembered the calm and brightness which his hand had not been raised to make, and understood the meaning of its promise.

He went to work now in earnest:  he had to work for his bread-and-butter, you understand?  Restless, impatient at first; but we will forgive him that:  you yourself were not altogether submissive, perhaps, when the slow-built hope of life was destroyed by some chance, as you called it, no more controllable than this paltry burning of a mill.  Yet, now that the great hope was gone on which his brain had worked with rigid, fierce intentness, now that his hands were powerless to redeem a perishing class, he had time to fall into careless, kindly habit:  he thought it wasted time, remorsefully, of course.  He was seized with a curiosity to know what plan in living these people had who crossed his way on the streets; if they were disappointed, like him.  He went sometimes to read the papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or pshaw once at his maundering about secession or the misery in his back.  Went to church sometimes:  the sermons were bigotry, always, to his notion, sitting on a back seat, squirting tobacco-juice about him; but the simple, old-fashioned hymns brought the tears to his eyes:—­“They sounded to him like his mother’s voice, singing in paradise:  he hoped she could not see how things had gone on here,—­how all that was honest and strong in his life had fallen in that infernal mill.”  Once or twice he went down Crane Alley, and lumbered up three pair of stairs to the garret where Kitts had his studio,—­got him orders, in fact, for two portraits; and when that pale-eyed young man, in a fit of confidence, one night, with a very red face drew back the curtain from his grand “Fall of Chapultepec,” and watched him with a lean and hungry look, Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a gorilla, walked about, looking through his fist at it, saying, “how fine the chiaroscuro was, and that it was a devilish good thing altogether.”  “Well, well,” he soothed his conscience, going down-stairs, “maybe that bit of canvas is as much to that poor chap as the phalanstery was once to another fool.”  And so went on through the gas-lit streets into his parishes in cellars and alleys, with a sorer heart, but cheerfuller words, now that he had nothing but words to give.