a little thing fresh from the cottage and the
field. Surely for such an one, angels will wait by its sick bed, and
rejoice as they bear its soul away; and over its shroud flowers will be
strewn, and the birds will sing by its grave. So your common
sentimentalist would think, and paint. Holbein sees the facts, as they
verily are, up to the point when vision ceases. He speaks, then, no
more.

The country laborer's cottage--the rain coming through its roof, the
clay crumbling from its partitions, the fire lighted with a few chips
and sticks on a raised piece of the mud floor,--such dais as can be
contrived, for use, not for honor. The damp wood sputters; the smoke,
stopped by the roof, though the rain is not, coils round again, and
down. But the mother can warm the child's supper of bread and milk
so--holding the pan by the long handle; and on mud floor though it be,
they are happy,--she, and her child, and its brother,--if only they
could be left so. They shall not be left so: the young thing must leave
them--will never need milk warmed for it any more. It would fain
stay,--sees no angels--feels only an icy grip on its hand, and that it
cannot stay. Those who loved it shriek and tear their hair in vain,
amazed in grief. 'Oh, little one, must you lie out in the fields then,
not even under this poor torn roof of thy mother's to-night?'

[Illustration: "HE THAT HATH EARS TO HEAR, LET HIM HEAR."

(Fig. 6) Facsimile from Holbein's woodcut.]

176. Again: there was not in the old creed any subject more definitely
and constantly insisted on than the death of a miser. He had been happy,
the old preachers thought, till then: but his hour has come; and the
black covetousness of hell is awake and watching; the sharp harpy claws
will clutch his soul out of his mouth, and scatter his treasure for
others. So the commonplace preacher and painter taught. Not so Holbein.
The devil want to snatch his soul, indeed! Nay, he never _had_ a soul,
but of the devil's giving. His misery to begin on his death-bed! Nay, he
had never an unmiserable hour of life. The fiend is with him now,--a
paltry, abortive fiend, with no breath even to blow hot with. He
supplies the hell-blast _with a machine_. It is winter, and the rich man
has his furred cloak and cap, thick and heavy; the beggar, bare-headed
to beseech him, skin and rags hanging about him together, touches his
shoulder, but all in vain; there is other business in hand. More haggard
than the b