es on the street,--I can paint nothing
of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the
life of one man: whatever muddy depth of soul-history lies beneath you
can read according to the eyes God has given you.

Wolfe, while Deborah watched him as a spaniel its master, bent over the
furnace with his iron pole, unconscious of her scrutiny, only stopping
to receive orders. Physically, Nature had promised the man but little.
He had already lost the strength and instinct vigor of a man, his
muscles were thin, his nerves weak, his face ( a meek, woman's face)
haggard, yellow with consumption. In the mill he was known as one of
the girl-men: "Molly Wolfe" was his sobriquet. He was never seen in
the cockpit, did not own a terrier, drank but seldom; when he did,
desperately. He fought sometimes, but was always thrashed, pommelled to
a jelly. The man was game enough, when his blood was up: but he was no
favorite in the mill; he had the taint of school-learning on him,--not
to a dangerous extent, only a quarter or so in the free-school in fact,
but enough to ruin him as a good hand in a fight.

For other reasons, too, he was not popular. Not one of themselves, they
felt that, though outwardly as filthy and ash-covered; silent, with
foreign thoughts and longings breaking out through his quietness in
innumerable curious ways: this one, for instance. In the neighboring
furnace-buildings lay great heaps of the refuse from the ore after the
pig-metal is run. Korl we call it here: a light, porous substance, of
a delicate, waxen, flesh-colored tinge. Out of the blocks of this korl,
Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and
moulding figures,--hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely
beautiful: even the mill-men saw that, while they jeered at him. It was
a curious fancy in the man, almost a passion. The few hours for rest he
spent hewing and hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his
watch came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of disappointment. A
morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to feed his soul in grossness
and crime, and hard, grinding labor.

I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the
lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him
justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back,
as he does every day, at h