ounded in his ears a very pleasant song in an unknown
tongue. He meant to cure this world-cancer with a steady eye that
had never glared with hunger, and a hand that neither poverty nor
strychnine-whiskey had taught to shake. In this morbid, distorted heart
of the Welsh puddler he had failed.

Wolfe rose at last, and turned from the church down the street. He
looked up; the night had come on foggy, damp; the golden mists had
vanished, and the sky lay dull and ash-colored. He wandered again
aimlessly down the street, idly wondering what had become of the
cloud-sea of crimson and scarlet. The trial-day of this man's life was
over, and he had lost the victory. What followed was mere drifting
circumstance,--a quicker walking over the path,--that was all. Do you
want to hear the end of it? You wish me to make a tragic story out of
it? Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen
such tragedies: hints of ship-wrecks unlike any that ever befell on the
high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,--that there a
soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the
hints are,--jocose sometimes, done up in rhyme.

Doctor May, a month after the night I have told you of, was reading to
his wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper: an
unusual thing,--these police-reports not being, in general, choice
reading for ladies; but it was only one item he read.

"Oh, my dear! You remember that man I told you of, that we saw at
Kirby's mill?--that was arrested for robbing Mitchell? Here he is; just
listen:--'Circuit Court. Judge Day, Hugh Wolfe, operative in Kirby &
John's Loudon Mills. Charge, grand larceny. Sentence, nineteen years
hard labor in penitentiary.'--Scoundrel! Serves him right! After all
our kindness that night! Picking Mitchell's pocket at the very time!"

His wife said something about the ingratitude of that kind of people,
and then they began to talk of something else.

Nineteen years! How easy that was to read! What a simple word for Judge
Day to utter! Nineteen years! Half a lifetime!

Hugh Wolfe sat on the window-ledge of his cell, looking out. His ankles
were ironed. Not usual in such cases; but he had made two desperate
efforts to escape. "Well," as Haley, the jailer, said, "small blame
to him! Nineteen years' imprisonment was not a pleasant thing to look
forward to." Haley was very good-natured about it, though Wolfe had
fought him savagely.