seen how faithfully this good woman kept her part of this covenant, by
pointing out to Emma the judgment of charity and the judgment of self.

Emma still sat by the open window, upon that fine morning, thinking and
feeling, as she long had done, of the heart's great depth of
deceitfulness, which no man could know, and no human power could reach,
when she saw Mr. Graffam coming along the road.

Poor Graffam, though in his sober senses, had been longer crossing the
plain that morning than usual. Far down in the depths of his beclouded
soul there was a love of the beautiful, and that love on this morning
had been stirred within him. His eyes had been open to see the
glittering dewdrops upon the tall wild flowers and green herbage of the
plain, to see the giant trees stretch their green arms toward the sky;
and his ears had been open to hear a sweet concert upon their topmost
branches. Poor buried soul!--how it struggled for a resurrection; now
leaping with joy at the thought of its own affinity for the pure and
beautiful, and now sinking, sinking, sinking with the one blighting
thought of human scorn richly merited.

Night after night had poor Graffam reeled from side to side of that
grass-tufted road, while the plain seemed to him an interminable lake
of fire, amid whose scalding waves there rolled and tossed poor
wretches like himself; and morning after morning he had returned by the
same road, feeling as though a frost-breath had passed over the lake of
fire, leaving it rough and leaden like a lava-deluged plain. But now,
whence came the wonderful beauty of the widespread landscape? He knew
in part, and brushed his old jacket sleeve across his swollen eyes. He
feared that the vision was fated to pass away, "For my character is
gone," said he; "nobody respects me; they call me 'old Pete,' and I am