ier, not allowing them to go to weeds before the summer was half
over. Those who could go to the industrial school learned a deal about
sewing, and became seamstresses instead of mill-girls. Some made their
own family dresses, some were very tasty milliners. It gave them a
reliance upon what they could do themselves. The two daughters of one
workman kept a little poultry-yard "scientifically," and dressed
themselves from its proceeds. Industry became more general. Instead of
dawdling away whole evenings in gossip, they had some light employment,
and worked as they talked.

The September showing was very encouraging. There were still a great
many bankruptcies and losses, but some of them could not be guarded
against. Darcy and Winston regularly eschewed speculation, though the
latter confessed his fingers sometimes burned to be in the pie.

"But, after all," he said frankly, "if the energy, ingenuity, ambition,
and strength that are expended to make certain people buy and sell, over
and over, a thing that can be no more valuable than the money it makes
year by year, which often is not much,--if this were turned into
industrial and commercial channels,--gad! what a country we would be!
Our flag would float on every sea, our goods be in every port. And yet
they go on, rich to-day because they have beggared their neighbor, poor
to-morrow because their neighbor has beggared them. What idiotic
business!"

But I must go back a little with my hero. There were many things to
occupy his mind, the summer of the "strikes;" yet through it all, like
one strain of heavenly harmony in a clash of discord, he came to know
the diviner needs of his being. Another man might have been dismayed at
the revelation. Like a flash when the horizon is opened, he saw the
light; and he knew, from the depths of the darkness the next moment,
what manner of storm it would be.

He had never weakened or frittered away his sweetest emotions on the
various flirtations that fill the early years of so many men. He had
liked and admired Sylvie Barry above all young women he had ever met;
but this emotion, though pure and lasting, never stirred the ardor of
his soul. Had it really lain untouched so long, or had some vague dream
slipped into it the night he and Sylvie had planned the costume for
Irene Lawrence, the time he first encountered her beauty in all its
vivid splendor? To him she was a glorious young goddess.

The long-ago summer day he had met the