dull earth again, would rise with other strength and wings eternal, following the healing light. The sick and tired drudge, scarce better than a pitiable slave, bound down to earth and hardened usage, leading a grey and lifeless life, each day more leaden than the one before, feeling the softening rays would melt to happy tears, and leaden bars would shine like silver, bearing no weight. The pain-bound sufferer, feeble and sick to death, moaning in silent agony the livelong night, fretting unnoticed through the livelong day, would for the time forget all suffering, and in the after days have sweet balm to pour upon the oft-returning pain, and drive it out with love’s own medicine. For, could they feel it, all would strive afresh, with strength afresh and youth afresh to make it theirs. Each would hold out to the other a brother’s hand, nor mind the soil- or toil-worn palm. Each would be gentler, firmer; stern against Sin, that gaudy, tarnished, creeping worm, which leaves nothing but breeding corruption in its path and rots with wily sting e’en when it appears most harmless. Oh! that this light, this ever-shining light, this clear warm sunshine wrought in heaven out of love, might pierce the heavy, leaden chilliness that ever prevails. But to this grimed and hardened earth it cannot always come, because alien weapons drive it off, and men think because it fades away, and out of vision, it is dead. Rather had the earth die, the sun, humanity itself, all things of intellect and things of mind, than this sweet radiance melt. For hearts would harden, intellects grow cold, beauty pass worm-eaten, and weary sighs change into millstones round the feeble soul, and none would come to raise, or calm, or cheer, since all would die and wither like a blighted garden, that once had felt a little yet not all, and then had faded—saddest of deaths, because it once had known. Oh, Light! Light! Light! What would the storm-lost traveller be without you? What lingering death of gloom must he endure! What harsh straining after the ghastly fire-flies, that flicker and dance and then die out before his burning eyes! What blackened leaves would be his funeral bed—that now spring up as silvery flowers about his path—what gloomy gurgles of the river—and hollow moanings through the tracks of pain! If only all might feel, and see, and know, how altered would this dreary world become! transformed to paler shade of the hereafter, no barren landscape leading but to hell. Then should we find no idle scoffers, nor those who sneered upon another’s pain, no wandering disbelievers laughing coldly, nor those who reckoned only earthly gain. But perhaps this path is hard to find; brambles and thorns and bushes hide the road. There is no beaten track that guides us onwards; each step is taken slowly, wearily, uncertainly it may be, and still the light is hid.