Do you suppose their brows were wreathed with the honeysuckle's second autumn bloom, with streaked convolvulus and bronzed ears of wheat? Their backs were bowed beneath great bundles of gleanings, or faggots of dead sticks carefully sought for fuel, and they carried weary infants, restless and fretful. Their forms had lost all semblance to the graceful curve of woman; their faces were hard, wrinkled, and angular, drawn with pain and labour. Save by their garments none could distinguish them from men. Yet they were not penned in narrow walls, but all things green and lovely were spread around them. The fresh breezes filled their nostrils in the spring with the delicate odour of the flowering bean-field and the clover scent; the very ground was gilded with sunshine beneath their feet. But the magic of it touched them not, for their hearts were pinched with poverty. These are they to whom the old, old promise bears its full significance: "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." They trooped past the window, and saw the old man sitting in his chair; and one said to another, "Thur be thuck ould varmint. He never done nought all his time, and have got more vittels than a' can yeat. Thaay says a' drinks a' main drop of gin moast days. He wur a bad un, he wur, time ago. What be the matter with thuck you? How he do howl--it sounds main unkid!" "Come on, you," said another; "I be terrable tired, bean't you? Wonder how long it wull be to the Judgment Daay?" So they went by the window, and each as she passed dropped a lowly curtsey to "Measter" in the beehive chair. Then at last the great blood-red rim of the sun went down, and a wondrous glory of light rushed over the earth. A fiery blaze surged up into the sky, shooting from the west to the zenith, and thence to the east in the twinkling of an eye; like the glow of a grand aurora, but ninefold more brilliant, a deep-tinted crimson. Men stayed and looked up, amazed at the beauty and the awe of it; for the world was changed, as if it were on fire, and the flames like a flood sweeping up from the western edge. Into the chamber came the reflection--as of the last conflagration that we dare not think of, when the sky shall roll away as parchment--and the place was filled with a luminous glamour. Listen! faintly up from the silence of the ages comes the chaunt of the monks: Dies irae, dies illa, Solvet saeclum in favilla.