know what God means by happy lives,
but to find His thought behind the hunger and intolerable loss that
wring the world's heart is a harder thing to do,--a better, a great,
healthful thing. And one may be sure that the man, be he Christian or
Pagan, who does believe in this under Order and Love, and tries to see
and clear his way down to it, through every day's circumstance, will
have come very near to the real soul of good and humanity,--to the
Christ,--before the time comes for him to rest, and stand in his lot, at
the end of the days.

But to our story. It was in Philadelphia the old machinist lived; he had
been born and had grown old there; but there are only one or two days in
his life you would care to hear about: August days, in the summer of
'59, the culmination and end of all the years gone before for him. You
know what a quiet place Philadelphia is? One might fancy that the first
old Quaker, sitting down among its low, flattish hills, had left a spell
of thoughtful reticence behind him. The hills never dare to rise into
abrupt earnestness; the two broad, bright-faced rivers that hold it in
lapse with a calm consciousness into the sleepy, oyster-bedded bay; even
the accretion of human life there never has been able to utter itself in
the myriad rebellious phases of a great city, but falls gravely into the
drilled monotony of its streets. Brick and mortar will not yield
themselves there to express any whim in the mind of their owner: the
house-fronts turn the same impassive, show-hating faces on the sidewalks
from the Delaware to the Schuylkill. Give the busiest street a moment's
chance and it broods down into a solitary reverie, saying,--"You may
force me into hotels and market-places, if you will, but I know the
business of this town is to hold its tongue." Even the curiously
beautiful women wrap themselves in the uniform of gray, silent color;
the cast of thought of the people is critical, attentive,
self-controlled. When a covered, leaden day shuts the sun out, and the
meaning of the place in, hills and city and human life, one might fancy,
utter the old answer of the woman accused of witchcraft:--"While I hold
my thought, it is my own; when I speak it, it is my master." Out in the
near hills the quietude deepens, loosening and falling back out of the
rigid reserve of the city into the unconscious silence of a fresh
Nature: no solitudes near a large town are so solitary as these. There
is one little river i