ure. Yet he noticed now on
her forehead two faint wrinkles showing, and in the corners of her mouth
an overhanging fold; and this he saw as if reflected in a thousand
ill-made mirrors around, distorted and exaggerated and grotesqued indeed
but nevertheless the self-same marks of constant pain and struggle.

They reached the end of the first alley and passed out to the pavement,
slippery with trodden mud. There was a little knot gathered there, a
human eddy in the centre of the pressing throng. Looking over the heads
of the loiterers, he could see in the centre of the eddy, on the kerb, by
the light that came from the gateway, a girl whose eyes were closed. She
was of an uncertain age--she might be twelve or seventeen. Beside her
was a younger child. Just then she began to sing. He and Nellie waited.
He knew without being told that the singer was blind.

It was a hymn she sang, an old-fashioned hymn that has in its music the
glad rhythm of the "revival," the melodious echoing of the Methodist day.
He recollected hearing it long years before, when he went to the
occasional services held in the old bush schoolhouse by some itinerant
preacher. He recalled at once the gathering of the saints at the river;
mechanically he softly hummed the tune. It was hardly the tune the blind
girl sang though. She had little knowledge of tune, apparently. Her
cracked discordant voice was unspeakably saddening.

This blind girl was the natural sequence to the sphinx-like head that he
had seen amid the black stockings. Her face was large and flat,
youthless, ageless, crowned with an ugly black hat, poorly ribboned; her
hands were clasped clumsily on the skirt of her poor cotton dress,
ill-fitting. There was no expression in her singing, no effort to
express, no instinctive conception of the idea. The people only listened
because she was blind and they were poor, and so they pitied her. The
beautiful river of her hymn meant nothing, to her or to them. It might
be; it might not be; it was not in question. She cried to them that she
was blind and that the blind poor must eat if they would live and that
they desire to live despite the city by-laws. She begged, this blind
girl, standing with rent shoes in the sloppy mud. In Sydney, in 1889, in
the workingman's paradise, she stood on the kerb, this blind girl, and
begged--begged from her own people. And in their poverty, their
weariness, their brutishness, they pitied her. None mocked, and many
p