"None harder for one believing as I do. I will starve before I will do this work." The man stared at him for a moment, and then coolly replied, "Starve then!" and turned on his heel and walked away. Dennis also rushed from the place, followed by the coarse, jeering laugh of those who witnessed the scene. In his morbid, suffering state their voices seemed those of mocking demons. The night had now fallen. He was too tired and discouraged to look any further. Wearily he plodded up the street, facing the bitter blast filled with snow that had begun to fall. This then was the verdict of the world--"Starve!" This was the only prospect it offered--that same brave world which had so smilingly beckoned him on to great achievements and unbounded success but a few days since--"Starve!" Every blast that swept around the corners howled in his ears, "Starve!" Every warmly clad person hurrying unheedingly by seemed to say by his indifference, "Starve! who cares? there is no place for you, nothing for you to do." The hard, stern resolution of the past few days, not to yield an inch, to persist in hewing his way through every difficulty, began to flag. His very soul seemed crushed within him. Even upon the threshold of his life, in his strong, joyous youth, the world had become to him what it literally was that night, a cold, wintry, stormy place, with a black, lowering sky and hard, frozen earth. His father's old temptation recurred to him with sudden and great power. "Perhaps father was right," he mused. "God was against him, and is also against me, his son. Does He not visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation? Not but that He will save us at last, if we ask Him, but there seems some great wrong that must be severely punished here. Or else if God does not care much about our present life, thinking only of the hereafter, there must be some blind fate or luck that crushes some and lifts up others." Thus Dennis, too sad and morbid to take a just view of anything, plodded on till he reached his boarding-place, and stealing in as if he had no business to be there, or anywhere else, sat down in a dusky corner behind the stove, and was soon lost to surrounding life in his own miserable thoughts. CHAPTER VII A GOOD SAMARITAN