so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.

My story is very simple,--only what I remember of the life of one
of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great
order for the Lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually
with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten
story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.
Perhaps because there is a secret underlying sympathy between that story
and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps
simply for the reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived.
There were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby
& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their cousin, a
picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented then to half
a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms. The old man,
like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was Welsh,--had
spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh
emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any
day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny;
they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor shout, nor
stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure, unmixed blood, I
fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and sharply-cut facial
lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes lived here. Their
lives were like those of their class: incessant labor, sleeping in
kennel-like rooms, eating rank pork and molasses, drinking--God and the
distillers only know what; with an occasional night in jail, to atone
for some drunken excess. Is that all of their lives?--of the portion
given to them and these their duplicates swarming the streets to-day?
--nothing beneath?--all? So many a political reformer will tell
you,--and many a private reformer, too, who has gone among them with a
heart tender with Christ's charity, and come out outraged, hardened.

One rainy night, about eleven o'clock, a crowd of half-clothed women
stopped outside of the cellar-door. They were going home from the
cotton-mill.

"Good-night, Deb," said one, a mulatto, steadying herself against the
gas-post. She needed the post to steady her. So did more than one of
them.

"Dah's a ball to Miss Potts' to-night. Ye'd best come."

"Inteet, Deb, if hur 'll come, hu