, as of something holy and
dear: but they think of her always as gone home; even old Yare looks up,
when he talks of "my girl." Yet, knowing that nothing in God's just
universe is lost, or fails to meet the late fulfilment of its hope, I
like to think of her poor body lying there: I like to believe that the
great mother was glad to receive the form that want and crime of men had
thwarted,--took her uncouth child home again, that had been so cruelly
wronged,--folded it in her warm bosom with tender, palpitating love.

It pleased me in the winter months to think that the worn-out limbs, the
old scarred face of Lois rested, slept: crumbled into fresh atoms, woke
at last with a strange sentience, and, when God smiled permission
through the summer sun, flashed forth in a wild ecstasy of the true
beauty that she loved so well. In no questioning, sad pallor of sombre
leaves or gray lichens: throbbed out rather in answering crimsons, in
lilies, white, exultant in a chordant life!

Yet, more than this: I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her
freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to hope,
and learn to be. And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and work and
love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the story of
the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows vague and
incomplete, like an unguessed riddle. I have no key to solve it
with,--no right to solve it. Let me lay the pen abruptly down.

* * * * *

My story is coarse, unended, a mere groping hint? It has no conduit of
God's justice running through it, awarding good and ill? It lacks
determined concord, and a certain yea and nay? I know: it is a story of
To-Day. The Old Year is on us yet. Poor faithful old Knowles will tell
you that it is a dark day: that now, as eighteen hundred years ago, the
Helper stands unwelcome in the world: that the air is filled with the
cry of the slave, and of nations going down into darkness, their message
untold, their work undone: that your own heart, as well as the great
humanity, asks, even now, an unrendered justice. Does he utter all the
problem of To-Day? I think, not all: yet let it be. Other hands are
strong to show you how, in the very instant peril of this hour, is
lifted clearer into view the eternal, hopeful prophecy; may tell you
that the slumbering heaven and the unquiet earth are instinct with it;
that the unanswered prayer of your