aths for your feet
on the hills, do not see it clearly,--this terrible question which men
here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret
into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken
faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or
of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I
will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you
to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own
reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the
very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world
has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark
as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with death; but if your
eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no perfume-tinted dawn will be
so fair with promise of the day that shall surely come.

My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of one
of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the great
order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter; run usually
with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I choose the half-forgotten
story of this Wolfe more than that of myriads of these furnace-hands.
Perhaps because there is a secret, underlying sympathy between that
story and this day with its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or
perhaps simply for the reason that this house is the one where the
Wolfes lived. There were the father and son,--both hands, as I said,
in one of Kirby & John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah,
their cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was rented
then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the cellar-rooms.
The old man, like many of the puddlers and feeders of the mills, was
Welsh,--had spent half of his life in the Cornish tin-mines. You may
pick the Welsh emigrants, Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the
windows, any day. They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not
so brawny; they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor
shout, nor stagger, but skulk along like beaten hounds. A pure,
unmixed blood, I fancy: shows itself in the slight angular bodies and
sharply-cut facial lines. It is nearly thirty years since the Wolfes
lived here. Their l