this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of
its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known
of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but
will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul
and dark as this thick vapor about us, and as pregnant with
death; but if your eyes are free as mine are to look deeper, no
perfume-tinted dawn will be so fair with promise of the day that
shall surely come.

My story is very simple,--Only what I remember of the life of
one of these men,--a furnace-tender in one of Kirby & John's
rolling-mills,--Hugh Wolfe. You know the mills? They took the
great order for the lower Virginia railroads there last winter;
run usually with about a thousand men. I cannot tell why I
choose the half-forgotten story of this Wolfe more than that of
myriads of these furnace-hands. Perhaps because there is a
secret, underlying sympathy between that story and this day with
its impure fog and thwarted sunshine,--or perhaps simply for the
reason that this house is the one where the Wolfes lived. There
were the father and son,--both hands, as I said, in one of Kirby
& John's mills for making railroad-iron,--and Deborah, their
cousin, a picker in some of the cotton-mills. The house was
rented then to half a dozen families. The Wolfes had two of the
cellar-rooms. The old man, like many of the puddlers and
feeders of the mills, was Welsh,--had spent half of his life in
the Cornish tin-mines. You may pick the Welsh emigrants,
Cornish miners, out of the throng passing the windows, any day.
They are a trifle more filthy; their muscles are not so brawny;
they stoop more. When they are drunk, they neither yell, nor