Of Margaret Arundel, in “The Gordian Knot,” we read, in her hour of household desolation and distress, that could we have seen her fair face, now pale with pain, now flushed with emotion, we should have pitied her; but “it may be that some superior intelligence witnessed her suffering, and pitied her not; knowing that all she was to undergo was but the fiery trial destined for those for whom in the evening there is light.” Stephen Blackpool, in “Hard Times,” who has found life “aw a muddle,” and meets with his death in the pit, is tranquillized with light at the last—light which he identifies with the star that shone upon him while he lay mangled in the old shaft. “Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down there in my trouble, I thowt it were the very star as guided to our Saviour’s home. I awmost think it be the very star.” His rescuers lift him up, and he is overjoyed to find they are about to take him in the direction whither the star seems to him to lead. Very gently they carry him along the fields and down the lanes; but it is soon a funeral procession. “The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor; and through humility and sorrow and forgiveness, he had gone to his Saviour’s rest.” It is not every life the early prime of which has been blissful enough to warrant the exclamation,— “Ne’er tell me of glories serenely adorning The close of our day, the calm eve of our night: Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning, Its smiles and its tears are worth evening’s best light.” For sometimes the light comes at evening-time that has never come before.