'There's Jim Truscot at Stratford. He is a hunchback and lame, and eight years younger than I. I have known him all my life. When he was a boy and I a lad, I used to watch him as he looked at the other boys playing cricket. He would clap his hands and shout when a ball was well hit or a player well stumped. No one had such judgment or knowledge of the game as poor Jim Truscot, and yet he could never swing a bat or bowl a ball. Often have I watched the boy, and grieved for him, until the tears would run into my eyes; and I would have handed the boy the bat and given up the game, if poor Jim might play one game. Jim is at home in Stratford now, hardly awake yet. Yes, poor Jim is no doubt lying asleep now in Stratford, his deformed withered legs stretched out, his misshapen breast heaving quickly! Poor Jim! perhaps now he does not care for cricket as much as formerly. Perhaps the spirit that inhabited the poor tenement has now fallen down in worship before some young girl of pastoral and woodland Warwickshire. If this were so with the man, what had been the boy's sorrow? A passing cloud compared to a life-long gloom. 'Far away there, under the pall of lingering darkness, ran the little river, now whispering as it had never whispered at any other time. The sounds came closer together, there was a hurry, a confusion in the tones. The sounds were tremulous and the accents full of fear. They came nearer to speaking a human tongue. The river seemed anxious to communicate some secret of vital importance. It appeared to make a final effort to render itself intelligible before dawn came in the broad east and silenced the voice of the river. 'Now I listen once more to these whispers. I have found the key to the tongue they speak, I know now what they have tried to say and could not. It was,-- '"Fools! Fools, you men! You think you are of some importance to the Creator. You are nothing. You are like us, merely the result of the great current of life striking the shore. While the river flows by banks, you have voice, as we. But in the great ocean beyond the shores of time you shall be like us, dumb. You are no better than we, or these rushes here, in anything you can show, except that you enjoy more privileges. Fools, why should you not be content? Is it not much to be lords of earth, without aspiring to be peers of heaven?" 'Has it all come to this? Has it all come to this at last? Mother and Alice away in Stratford, are they nothing more than ripples on the stream of life? If my mother does not get a reward on earth for all her goodness, will she get no reward for it hereafter? Monstrous thought! Will poor Jim Truscot go into his coffin, and find in his coffin nothing but nothingness? Was that poor misshapen creature brought into the world merely to be the sport of Fate? No, no; this cannot be. I will not believe it.' The cold grey dawn of midwinter was now in the east.