What is that that makes man's heart cold as the mountain tops of Kamtschatka? It is that cursed greed for gain--that all absorbing ambition for fortune--that warps the heart and turns to adamant all those attributes of gentleness with which God has made us. The haggard beggar and the affluent man of the world, must eventually share the same fate. No matter that on the grave of the first--"no storied urn records who rests below," while on the grave of the other, we find in sculptured marble long eulogies of those who rest beneath, telling us "not what he was, but what he should have been." Their end is the same, for beneath the same sod they "sleep the last sleep that knows no waking," and their spirits wing their flight to the same eternal realms, there to be judged by their own merits, and not by the station they occupied below. If there are men in this world who cannot be changed by wealth, Swartz was not of the number. What cared he for the sighs of the desolate, the appeals of the hungry, or the tears of the helpless? His duty was but to fill his coffers with money, and not to expend it in aimless deeds of charity. He looked upon the poor just as we would look upon a reptile--something to be shunned. It was indeed a wild hallucination that induced Mrs. Wentworth to bend her steps towards his office. Could he have seen her as she was coming, he would have left his room, for the sight of the mendicant filled him with greater horror than a decree of God declaring that the end of the world had come. CHAPTER NINETEENTH. AN ACT OF DESPAIR. Mrs. Wentworth reached the store of Mr. Swartz and entered. The clerk looked at her in astonishment. She was unrecognizable. Her dress was ragged and dirty; the hands and face that once rivalled the Parian marble in whiteness, were tanned by toil, and lay shrivelled and dried. Her hair was dishevelled and gathered up in an uncomely heap on the back of her head. She looked like the beggar, she had become. "Some beggar," the clerk said, in a contemptuous tone, as he advanced towards her. "Is Mr. Swartz in?" enquired Mrs. Wentworth in a husky tone. "What do you want with him?" he demanded in a gruff voice. "I desire to see him privately, for a few moments," she answered. "If it is charity you have come to beg, you may as well save yourself the trouble," observed the clerk. "This house don't undertake to support all the beggars in Jackson." As his brutal words fell on her ear, a spark of womanly dignity filled her breast, and her eyes kindled with indignation. She looked at him for a moment sternly and silently, until her gaze caused him to turn his countenance from her, abashed at the mute rebuke she had administered. The pride of by-gone days had returned, with the unfeeling remarks of the clerk, and Mrs. Wentworth again felt all the bitterness of her position. "I did not say I was an applicant for charity," she said at last "All I desire to know is, if Mr. Swartz is in."