, 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 downstairs, "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.

The only place where he hardened his heart was in the hospital with
Holmes. After he had wakened to full consciousness, Knowles thought
the man a beast to sit there uncomplaining day after day, cold and
grave, as if the lifeful warmth of the late autumn were enough for him.
Did he understand the iron fate laid on him? Where was the strength of
the self-existent soul now? Did he know that it was a balked, defeated
life, that waited for him, vacant of the triumphs he had planned? "The
self-existent soul! stopped in its growth by chance, this omnipotent
deity,--the chance burning of a mill!" Knowles muttered to himself,
looking at Holmes. With a dim flash of doubt, as he said it, whether
there might not, after all, be a Something,--some deep of calm, of
eternal order, where he and Holmes, these coarse chances, these
wrestling souls, these creeds, Catholic or Humanitarian, even that
namby-pamby Kitts and his picture, might be unconsciously working out
their part. Looking out of the hospital-window, he saw the deep of the
stainless blue, impenetrable, with the stars unconscious in their
silence of the maddest raging of the petty world. There was such calm!
such infinite love and justice! it was around, above him; it held him,
it held the world,--all Wrong, all Right! For an instant the turbid
heart of the man cowered, awestruck, as yours or mine has done when
some swift touch of music or human love gave us a cleaving glimpse of
the great I AM. The next, he opened the newspaper in his hand. What
part in the eternal order could THAT hold? or slavery, or secession, or
civil war? No harmony could be infinite enough to hold such discords,
he thought, pushing the whole matter from him in despair. Why, the
experiment of self-government, the problem of the ages, was crumbling
in ruin! So he despaired, just as Tige did the night the mill fell
about his ears, in full confidence that the world had come to