There were two pretty pictures on the two sides of the wall in the cottage.  On one side there was the broad-shouldered, large-featured, hardy old woman, in her blue jacket and buff kerchief, with her dim-eyed anxious looks turned continually on the lily face and the slight form in the black dress that were either moving lightly about in helpful activity, or seated close by the old woman’s arm-chair, holding her withered hand, with eyes lifted up towards her to speak a language which Lisbeth understood far better than the Bible or the hymn-book.  She would scarcely listen to reading at all to-night.  “Nay, nay, shut the book,” she said.  “We mun talk.  I want t’ know what thee was cryin’ about.  Hast got troubles o’ thy own, like other folks?”

On the other side of the wall there were the two brothers so like each other in the midst of their unlikeness:  Adam with knit brows, shaggy hair, and dark vigorous colour, absorbed in his “figuring”; Seth, with large rugged features, the close copy of his brother’s, but with thin, wavy, brown hair and blue dreamy eyes, as often as not looking vaguely out of the window instead of at his book, although it was a newly bought book—­Wesley’s abridgment of Madame Guyon’s life, which was full of wonder and interest for him.  Seth had said to Adam, “Can I help thee with anything in here to-night?  I don’t want to make a noise in the shop.”

“No, lad,” Adam answered, “there’s nothing but what I must do myself.  Thee’st got thy new book to read.”

And often, when Seth was quite unconscious, Adam, as he paused after drawing a line with his ruler, looked at his brother with a kind smile dawning in his eyes.  He knew “th’ lad liked to sit full o’ thoughts he could give no account of; they’d never come t’ anything, but they made him happy,” and in the last year or so, Adam had been getting more and more indulgent to Seth.  It was part of that growing tenderness which came from the sorrow at work within him.

For Adam, though you see him quite master of himself, working hard and delighting in his work after his inborn inalienable nature, had not outlived his sorrow—­had not felt it slip from him as a temporary burden, and leave him the same man again.  Do any of us?  God forbid.  It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it—­if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human lives, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness.  Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy—­the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.  Not that this transformation of pain into sympathy had completely taken place in