CHAPTER XXII.

I fall upon the thorns of life-I bleed!

SHELLEY.

A man whom fortune hath cruelly scratched.

SHAKESPEARE.

It was near eight o'clock on a dark Saturday night in January, and the day, which being the first of the New Year, had been ushered in by joyous peals from all the old City churches, was going out in raw cold and gloom. An icy fog had all day brooded over London, blotting the tops of towers and chimneys out of sight, magnifying to portentous dimensions the cabs and omnibuses which cautiously crawled onward through the crowded streets, and discolouring the sky to the hue of an unripe orange. The sun, burning like a red-hot penny through the lurid veil that tried to smother him, had been powerless to disperse the universal gloom. Gas had flared all day in gin-palaces, shops and offices, and everywhere boys with flaring torches darted among rash pedestrians who, with wheezing coughs and eyes stinging from the fog-fumes, ran up against each other in blind bewilderment.

A boisterous wind from the east, rising at nightfall, drove the smoke hither and thither, and thinned the film upon the river, and

then, allured from their filthy cellars by the attractive brightness of gas-lit stalls, the vicious, poverty-stricken, and brutalised population of the Borough, swarmed forth to lay out the week's earnings in gin, or dainties for the Sunday's dinner. All the rotten, illdrained, unventilated, sin-haunted courts and alleys that hide themselves away in dark corners lest their deeds should be reproved, poured forth their refuse. The Borough saturnalia began, and a series of repulsive. noises filled the tainted air-cat-screams, joyless laughter, drunken songs and brutal oaths. Many were bent on business, and crowded round glassless butcher's shops, glutting their eyes on gory odds and ends of meat, or fought for places round glowing braziers where chestnuts and coffee were roasting, and booths where dark whelks dissolved in clumsy shells. Others, apparently disapproving the "all work and no play system of life, amused themselves by planting their backs against the walls and relentlessly chaffing the passers by, roaring now and then with appreciative laughter over such melancholy jests as the hideous dance of a drunken woman. It was a shifting, surging, unsightly crowd, in which the two extremes of mortal life were fearfully blended. The ghastly simplicity of second-childhood grinned from bleared eyes and toothless gums, and little faces, prematurely aged, expressed no joy or innocence of childhood, but

the sad wisdom which is taught by harsh experience. It was a mournful sight to see these children, growing up without love, reverence, or aspiration, to become in time decrepit and loathsome, and to moulder unregretted in their pauper graves. And if venerable age is fair to look upon, surely no ghastlier object could earth exhibit than old men like these, who tottering forward into the arms of death, still mouthed and glared, with a maudlin mockery of love's dumb language, at the young girls who passed them by. If there be indeed joy in Heaven over one sinner that repenteth, surely angels must weep at such a sight as this; the flock of God shepherded by Satan, who on the foreheads of young and old, had plainly set his own fell marks of misery and debasement. Did any dim distant yearnings awake vaguely within these human hearts steeped in crime and ignorance? any impalpable influence stir from the far off gloryhome whence their souls had come? any ripple from the pure Ocean of Life pulsate towards this stagnant pit which held no water? Had they learnt already to hug their chains? or did the fettered hands of these slaves of sin feebly lift themselves towards the freedom of their Native Land? Who can tell? yet who shall dare affirm that, if Love indeed be infinite, the vilest or most depraved is beyond the reach of saving hope!

Issuing from a large new church not far from the Elephant and Castle, were three persons, so strangely unlike the crowd with which they were about to mingle that it seemed as if they belonged to an altogether different order of creation-a fair deep-eyed child who looked like the spirit of Purity embodied passing with charmed life through the haunts of corruption, a man whose proudly formed features seemed to show long descent from the ruling classes, a clergyman, on whose brow thought and culture had set their mark.

Sir Kenelm Harold had taken Cicely to hear Mr. Daubeny preach a New Year's sermon in a Newington church, for the child had grown weary of a long birthday, dismally unlike the festivals of yore, spent within the narrow precincts of an East End parsonage. The walk and the bright service had occupied and refreshed her, but the little creature shuddered as leaving the well-lighted church, she emerged into the tumult of the crowded streets.

"Baby shall ride home in state," said Sir Kenelm, lifting her in his arms. "Lean your head on me, Cicely, and see if father doesn't make a good horse."

"That's very nice," said the child, nestling her head upon his shoulder. "But I am getting old, and it will make you tired to carry me. Mayn't we get into a carriage?"

Sir Kenelm shook his head.

"Father has no money for cabs, so now that we have sold our horses you must put up with a two-legged steed."

"No money? oh, poor father! I am sure Eddy's piebald pony would have stayed with us if he had known that, without wanting any servant to wait on him. He knows us so well, and was such a good little fellow."

The hubbub of the crowd and the roar of vehicles now drowned Cicely's childish voice, and ceasing her efforts to make herself heard, she lay quietly back in her father's strong arms, feeling happily secure in that refuge from all terrors of the streets. The trio moved on rapidly, and Daubeny, who frequently glanced sidelong at his companion's face, saw that Sir Kenelm walked with eyes fixed upon the ground, as though wholly unconscious of the ragged multitude that elbowed him. On London Bridge Cicely called to him to stop and let her look down at the river, and as in mechanical obedience, he leant over the parapet, Daubeny caught a look in his eyes that made him tremble-a look of fierce anguish and longing, as though in those dark, silent-ebbing waters there lay some heart-cure which he would fain have made his own. Daubeny grew uneasy-this look and the long silence were so unlike the manner in which his friend had borne himself during the first days of his bereavementdays in which the ice on his heart had seemed to break and to let long-frozen streams of ten