My story is but a mere groping hint? It lacks determined truth, a certain yea and nay? It has no conduit of God's justice running through it, awarding apparent good and ill? I know: it is a story of To-Day. The Old Year is on us yet. Poor old Knowles will tell you it is a dark day; bewildered at the inexplicable failure of the cause for which his old blood ran like water that dull morning at Ball's Bluff. He doubts everything in the bitterness of wasted effort; doubts sometimes, even, if the very flag he fights for, be not the symbol of a gigantic selfishness: if the Wrong he calls his enemy, have not caught a certain truth to give it strength. A dark day, he tells you: that the air is filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into darkness, their message untold, their work undone: that now, as eighteen centuries ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world; that your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks an unrendered justice. Does he utter all the problems of To-Day? Vandyke, standing higher, perhaps, or, at any rate, born with hopefuller brain, would show you how, by the very instant peril of the hour, is lifted clearer into view the eternal prophecy of coming content: could tell you that the unquiet earth, and the unanswering heaven are instinct with it: that the ungranted prayer of your own life should teach it to you: that in that Book wherein God has not scorned to write the history of America, he finds the quiet surety that the rescue of the world is near at hand. Holmes, like most men who make destiny, does not pause in his cool, slow work for their prophecy or lamentation. "Such men will mould the age," old Knowles says, drearily, for he does not like Holmes: follows him unwillingly, even knowing him nearer the truth than he. "Born for mastership, as I told you long ago: they strike the blow, while----. I'm tired of theorists, exponents of the abstract right: your Hamlets, and your Sewards, that let occasion slip until circumstance or--mobs drift them as they will." But Knowles's growls are unheeded, as usual. What is this To-Day to Margret? She has no prophetic insight, cares for none, I am afraid: the common things of every-day wear their old faces to her, dear and real. Her haste is too eager to allay the pain about her, her husband's touch too strong and tender, the Master beside her too actual a presence, for her to waste her life in visions. Something of Lois's live, universal sympathy has come into her narrow, intenser nature; through its one love, it may be. What is To-Morrow until it comes? This moment the evening air thrills with a purple of which no painter as yet has caught the tint, no poet the meaning; no silent face passes her on the street on which a human voice might not have charm to call out love and power: the Helper yet waits near her. Here is work, life: the Old Year you despise holds beauty, pain, content yet unmastered: let us leave Margret to master them.