Oh, passion! eloquent pages have been wasted on thy woes; volumes have been written to tell mankind of thy delights and thy torments. To no other tale will youth bend its greedy ear, of no other feelings will man acknowledge the power to charm his spirit and his heart. And here was one who knew thee not in name or in truth, and yet who drank to the dregs, and to the last bitterness his cup of sorrow. Oh! miserable and unpoetic griefs of the prosaic poor. Where are ye, elements of power and pathos of our modern epic: the novel? A wretched shop that will not take, a sickly child that dies! Ay, and were the picture but drawn by an abler hand, know proud reader, if proud thou art, that thy very heart could bleed, that thy very soul would be wrung to read this page from a poor man's story. And so he lay by his dead, swelling with a tearless agony, a nameless and twofold desolation. Gaze not on that grief--eye of man: thou art powerless to pity, for thou art powerless to understand. "Only think!" said a neighbour to Mrs. Smith, "Mr. Jones's shutters have been closed the whole day. I can't think what the matter is." "Can't you," replied Mrs. Smith laughing, "why, woman, the shop is shut." Ay, the shop was shut. The shop which Richard Jones had opened with so much pride--the shop which he had ever linked with his child, closed on the day of her death, and never reopened. He did not care. His little ambition was wrecked; his little pride was broken; his little cruise of love had been poured forth upon the earth by God's own hand; it was empty and dry; arid sand and dust had drunk up its once sweet waters. What a man without ambition, pride, and lore may be, he had become in the one day that bereaved him. Pity not him, reader; his tale is told; pity him whose bitter story of hope and disappointment but begins as I write, and as you read. For mortal hand has not sounded the bitter depth of such woes. In them live the true tragic passions that else seem to have passed from the earth; passions that could rouse the meekest to revenge and wrath, if daily dew from heaven fell not on poor parched hearts, as nightly it comes down from the skies above, on thirsting earth. CHAPTER XXI. A time may come when the London churchyard shall be remembered as a thing that has been and is no more; but now who knows it not? Who need describe the serried gravestones that mark the resting places in this sad field of death; who need tell how they stare at busy passers by through their iron grating--how they look ghastly, like the guest of the Egyptian feast, dead in the midst of tumult and riotous life. Dreary are they when the sun shines on them, and their rank weeds, the sun which those beneath feel not, but more dreary by far when the drizzling rain pours down the dark church walls and filters into the sodden earth. And in such a place, and on such a day did they make the grave of Mary Jones.