“I listened to their honest chat; Said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be Plod, plod along the featureless sands And coasting miles and miles of sea.’ Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’ Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like To-day, but much more sweet.’ ‘To-morrow,’ said they, strong with hope, And dwelt upon the pleasant way; ‘To-morrow,’ cried they, one and all, While no one spoke of yesterday. Then life stood still at blessed noon, I, only I, had passed away: ‘To-morrow and to-day,’ they cried: I was of yesterday.” It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade’s story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker’s clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. “A sleepy languor now came over him; ... but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, ‘My head, how heavy it feels.’ But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, and murmured again brokenly, ‘I’ll—take it to—Pembroke-street to—morrow: to—mor—row.” Fool—like other us fools of nature—that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead. Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backwards as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow. “I have spent all my life in pursuit of it,” adds the sage old gentleman, “being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for me. But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me.” “This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend,” said the Man of Intelligence, “is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays.” The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.