some journey was mine to get within sight of the ladder at all!
The future biographer of the painter of "Faith and Love" will have to
record that he was born in a hovel; that he was nursed in a smithy;
that his cradle was a piece of board suspended from the smithy
ceiling by a chain, which his mother--his widowed mother--kept
swinging by an occasional touch in the intervals of her labours at
the forge.'

I did not even smile at this speech, so entirely was the effect of
its egotism killed by the wonderful way of pronouncing the word
'mother.'

'You have heard,' he continued in a voice whose intense earnestness
had an irresistible fascination for the ear, like that of a Hindoo
charmer--'you have heard of the mother-bird who feeds her young from
the blood of her own breast; that bird but feebly typifies her whom
God, in His abundant love of me, gave me for a mother. There were ten
of us--ten little children. My mother was a female blacksmith of Old
Hill, who for four shillings and sixpence a week worked sixteen hours
a day for the fogger, hammering hot iron into nails. The scar upon my
forehead--look! it is shaped like the red-hot nail that one day leapt
upon me from her anvil, as I lay asleep in my swing above her head. I
would not lose it for all the diadems of all the monarchs of this
world. She was much too poor to educate us. When the wolf is at the
door, Mr. Aylwin, and the very flesh and blood of the babes in danger
of perishing, what mother can find time to think of education, to
think even of the salvation of the soul,--to think of anything but
food--food? Have you ever wanted food, Mr. Aylwin?' he suddenly said,
in a voice so magnetic from its very earnestness that I seemed for
the moment to feel the faintness of hunger.

'No, no,' I said, a tide of grief rushing upon me; 'but there is one
who perhaps--there is one I love more dearly than your mother loved
her babes--'

Sinfi rose, and came and placed her hand upon my shoulder and
whispered,

'She ain't a-starvin', brother; she never starved on the hills. She's
only jest a-beggin' her bread for a little while, that's all.'

And then, after laying her hand upon my forehead, soft and soothing,
she returned to Cyril's side.

'No one who has never wanted food knows what life is,' said
Wilderspin, taking but little heed of even so violent an interruption
as this.'No one has been entirely educated, Mr. Aylwin--no one knows
the real primal meaning of that pat