ation,--of how much freedom, or beauty, or kindly life this was the
heart or seed. It was all over now. All the afternoon the muddy sky hung
low over the hills and dull prairie, while he sat there looking at the
dingy gloom: just as you and I have done, perhaps, some time, thwarted
in some true hope,--sore and bitter against God, because He did not see
how much His universe needed our pet reform.

He got up at last, and without a sigh went slowly away, leaving the
courage and self-reliance of his life behind him, buried with that one
beautiful, fair dream of life. He never came back again. People said
Knowles was quieter since his loss; but I think only God saw the depth
of the difference. When he was leaving the plateau, that day, he looked
back at it, as if to say good-bye,--not to the dingy fields and river,
but to the Something he had nursed so long in his rugged heart, and
given up now forever. As he looked, the warm, red sun came out, lighting
up with a heartsome warmth the whole gray day. Some blessing power
seemed to look at him from the gloomy hills, the prairie, and the river,
which he was to see again. His hope accomplished could not have looked
at him with surer content and fulfilment. He turned away, ungrateful and
moody. Long afterwards he remembered the calm and brightness which his
hand had not been raised to make, and understood the meaning of its
promise.

He went to work now in earnest: he had to work for his bread-and-butter,
you understand? Restless, impatient at first; but we will forgive him
that: you yourself were not altogether submissive, perhaps, when the
slow-built hope of life was destroyed by some chance, as you called it,
no more controllable than this paltry burning of a mill. Yet, now that
the great hope was gone on which his brain had worked with rigid, fierce
intentness, now that his hands were powerless to redeem a perishing
class, he had time to fall into careless, kindly habit: he thought it
wasted time, remorsefully, of course. He was seized with a curiosity to
know what plan in living these people had who crossed his way on the
streets; if they were disappointed, like him. He went sometimes to read
the papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or
pshaw once at his maundering about secession or the misery in his back.
Went to church sometimes: the sermons were bigotry, always, to his
notion, sitting on a back seat, squirting tobacco-juice about him; but
the sim