hat loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, how shall he love God whom he hath not seen?

A sob, like a bird new-born, burst from Mary's bosom. It broke the
enchantment in which Joseph was bound. That enchantment had possessed
him, usurping as it were the throne of his life, and displacing it;
when it ceased, he was not his own master. He started--to conscious
confusion only, neither knowing where he was nor what he did. His limbs
for the moment were hardly his own. How it happened he never could
tell, but he brought down his violin with a crash against the piano,
then somehow stumbled and all but fell. In the act of recovering
himself, he heard the neck of his instrument part from the body with a
tearing, discordant cry, like the sound of the ruin of a living world.
He stood up, understanding now, holding in his hand his dead music, and
regarding it with a smile sad as a winter sunset gleaming over a grave.
But Mary darted to him, threw her arms round him, laid her head on his
bosom, and burst into tears. Tenderly he laid his broken violin on the
piano, and, like one receiving a gift straight from the hand of the
Godhead, folded his arms around the woman--enough, if music itself had
been blotted from his universe! His violin was broken, but his being
was made whole! his treasure taken--type of his self, and a woman given
him instead!

"It's just like him!" he murmured.

He was thinking of him who, when a man was brought him to be delivered
from a poor palsy, forgave him his sins.

CHAPTER LVII.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING.

Joseph Jasper and Mary Marston were married the next summer. Mary did
not leave her shop, nor did Joseph leave his forge. Mary was proud of
her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a
blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the
manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do
something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will
recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in
the old true sense a more _gentle_ thing, to follow a good handicraft,
if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping
books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain
white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of
view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor;
but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of min