an answer to the question, but no answer comes. Providence does not
reveal all things to us. Is it not well it should be so?

"He was a hard, iron-looking, adamantine man. His eyes were glowing
furnaces for the crucibles of thought. You felt that he saw you when he
looked at you. His nose was like a red gothic tower built amidst broken
angles of sullied snow, and his mouth was the cellar of that tower. His
hair was of the sort that resists a comb. You have seen the same sort
on the heads of men of great thought. It is the tangled bush in which
the goat of Thought loses itself.

"John Smith hiccupped, as he helped himself to some more pork and
beans. He did not notice that the foot which he had semi-consciously
placed on a pale, sickly child, was beginning to move. But it did move,
and there crawled from under it the shape of a diseased dwarf of
womanhood. This timid, pallid thing, uplifted itself to its bleeding
feet, and nestled to the side of John Smith.

"'Y'o hae been separated by unspeaking space from dis humble leetle
place for some hours longer that zis boosom could uncomplainingly
indure,--y'o have.'

"The child meant to say, in its coarse, brutal, unlettered way, that
the man had been absent too long.

"John Smith helped himself to some more pork and beans. He was a man,
you know, and could not answer without deep thought. He took his knife
and wiped it thoughtfully upon her head, and then sawed off a sickly
yellow curl. When he placed that curl on the same plate with the pork
and beans, its coils seemed like those of some golden snake.

"'Girletta,' he said, with the ring of iron in his tones, 'why is it
that the beasts never want to marry? God made them as He made us; yet
they never ask priests to make them slaves to each other.'

"The sickly little waif cringed closer to that inscrutable great heart
which underlaid a soul of eternal questioning. She shuddered like a
wounded hog, but could not answer. An inward fever was devouring her.

"The man took some more pork and beans. 'Girletta,' he said, almost
fiercely, 'the beasts teach me a lesson; but I will not, dare not,
SHALL not heed it. I want a home; my heart demands some one to work for
me; to support me. I am weary of labor, and want some one to labor and
toil and suffer for me, and do my washing. I love you. Have me.'

"The atom of womanhood contorted her diseased features into the pale
twist of agony, and her bosom heaved with stormy wavings,