they were now in the black by near the e and the hands were crowding in the bell was ringing and the serpent was a serpent of many and the elephant was getting ready the strange old woman was delighted with the very bell it was the she had ever heard i e said and sounded grand she asked him when he stopped to shake hands with her before going in how long he had worked there a dozen year he told her i must the hand said she that has worked in this fine factory for a dozen year and she lifted it though he would have prevented her and put it to her what harmony besides her age and her simplicity surrounded her he did not know but even in this fantastic action there was a something neither out of time nor place a something which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as serious or done with such a natural and touching air he had been at his loom half an hour thinking about this old woman when having occasion to move round the loom for its he glanced through a window which was in his comer and saw her still looking up at the pile of building lost in admiration heedless of the smoke and mud and wet and of her two long journeys she was gazing at it as if the heavy that issued from its many stories were proud music to her she was gone by and by and the day after her and the lights sprung up again and the express whirled in sight of the fairy palace over the arches near little felt amid the of the machinery and scarcely heard above its crash and rattle long before then his thoughts had gone back to the dreary room above the little shop and to the figure heavy on the bed but heavier on his heart machinery throbbing feebly like a fainting stopped the again tiie glare of light and heat the heavy in the black wet night � their tall chimneys rising up into the air like towers of he had spoken to only night it was true and had walked with her a little way but he had his new misfortune on him in which no one else could give him a moment s relief and for the sake of it and because he knew t hard times himself to want that softening of his anger which no voice but hers could effect he felt he might so far disregard what she had said as to wait for her again he waited but she had him she was gone on no other night in the year could he so ill have spared her patient face o better to have no home in which to lay his head than to have a home and dread to go to it through such a cause he ate and drank for he was exhausted � but he httle knew or cared what and he wandered about in the chill rain and thinking and brooding and brooding no word of a new marriage had ever passed between them but had taken great pity on him years ago and to her alone he had opened his heart all this time on the subject of his miseries and he knew well that if he were to ask her she would take him he thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with pleasure and pride of the different man he might have been that night of the lightness then in his now heavy laden breast of the then restored honor self reject and tranquillity all torn to pieces he thought of ihe waste of the best part of his life of the change it made in his character for the worse every day of the nature of his existence bound hand and foot to a dead woman and tormented by a demon in her shape he thought of how young when they were first brought together in these circumstances how mature now how soon to grow old he thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry how many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her how she had pursued her own lone quiet path � for him � and how he had sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face that smote him with and despair he set the picture of her up beside the infamous image of last night and thought could it be that the whole course of one so gentle good and self denying was to such a wretch as that filled with these thoughts � so filled that he had an sense of growing larger of being placed in some new and relation towards the objects among which he passed of seeing the round eveiy misty light turn red � he went home for shelter hard times m chapter a ca family in i ie to which the black ladder had often been raised the sliding away of all that was most precious in this world to a wife and a brood of hungry babies and added to his thoughts the stem reflection i at of all the of this existence upon earth not one was dealt out with so unequal a hand as ii the of birth was nothing to it for say that the child of a king and the child of a were bom to night in the same moment what was that to the death of any human creature who was serviceable to or beloved by another while this abandoned woman lived on from the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside with ended breath and with a slow footstep he went up to his door opened it and so into the room quiet and peace were there was there 