EVERY SATURDAY. enchanting genius, proved beyond cavil," said an enthusiastic reviewer of youthful years, who on the strength of this faith addressed her a private communication through her publishers, in it informing her that "his own personal experience had been of a like character; that he felt an irresistible conviction that his soul was bound to the soul of Ulm Neil by mysterious cognate ties that time would prove indissoluble; that their destinies were coeval; that he awaited breathlessly till he should see his conviction attested by the divine seal of her own inspirational words; he waited an answer. in short, This was but one of hundreds of personal letters which from every direction out in the world now met on the little table in the quaint loghouse at the Pinnacle. There were men who wanted wives, and who were sure, by the delicate and touching revelations of feminine character made by Ulm Neil, that Ulm Neil was the mortal who could lead them to their ideals, which they had long been searching for but never yet had found. There were women who wanted to tell their sorrows, to pour out their aspirations; women who wanted sympathy, women who wanted help, women who wanted love; women whose hair was gray and whose day was almost done, and young girls who wanted to be told the sunniest way to the fulness of love and happiness. Through the mass of egotism, conceit, and foolishness, how often the unfeigned cry of the human penetrated her heart. What could she do? Alas! how little to appease the never-satisfied want, to still the never-ceasing plaint. A word of sympathy, of help, of cheer, was all it was in her power to give; how futile it was to relieve the stress of so much supplicating need! In the humility of helplessness she took on the yoke of success. What was any pang of her own but a tiny pulse in the universal aching heart? She bore the griefs and carried the sorrows of her kind. She could pity, cheer, and soothe, but she could not save. Because she could not she felt weighted with the burdens of many. Her letters were addressed to "Miss Ulm Neil," to "Mrs. Ulm Neil," to "Mr. Ulm Neil," and one to "Ulm Neil, Esquire." This one made an emphatic impression, partly because it bore the address of Dufferin, partly because of its tone, and partly because of its writer. He was the only one of these many letterwriters whom she had ever seen. As she read the name, "Athel Dane," the image of a sombre-faced young man rose before her, leading her sunny-faced little girl by the hand, just as he appeared once in the open door of Miss Buzzill's shop. Vida, pursuing butterflies, had run far down the street, where panting and discomfited, for the butterfly had flitted far above her childish reach, she was found just inside the churchyard fence by the Reverend Athel Dane, as he was starting to take his afternoon ride. Anything half as pretty as that yellow-haired little girl he had never seen inside of that church-yard fence. running and tearful with disappointment, she was full Flushed with of confidence and eager to be comforted. She had lost her butterfly, she had run away, and her mamma was up to the Corners. Whereupon Athel Dane, instead of going for his horse, took the little girl by the hand and led her back to her mother. Agnes, looking up from her work in an inner room, saw framed in the outer door the youthful but solemn face of a man (an unusual sight in the door of Miss Buzzill's shop), and in the same instant Vida's piping voice began to send forth [OCTOBER 10, little panting puffs of story. Agnes rose to receive her child from the hand of a stranger who with cold countenance but perfect breeding told where he had found departed. She had never seen him since, though while her little girl, and, barely waiting to receive thanks, she stayed at Dufferin she certainly heard the name of the young rector on feminine lips oftener than any other. Here was a letter from him to " Ulm Neil, Esquire." He said in this letter "that when he became conscious of owing a debt, he could not make himself easy until he paid it. himself with new authors, especially the writers of He was certainly a debtor to the writer of The Annals of a Quiet City.' He rarely troubled line of reading. Indeed, it was quite by accident that stories, their books being the very opposite of his usual he took up The Annals of a Quiet City,' in a bookstore. For the mines of human experience which it revealed, the types of human character which it embodrendered to all upward-reaching souls, he thanked the ied, above all for the strong yet tender help which it writer. One quality in the book he could not analyze, while he felt it as a fascination: this was its atmosphere of familiarity, a haunting something like a look in the eyes of a stranger reminding one of a cherished and familiar friend. He felt rather than saw in some phere of his native North. There were touches, of these pages the vivid light and quickening atmostouches only, which seemed surely to indicate that the the reader while he read. writer was familiar with the very scenes surrounding Nobody had ever dwelt at Dufferin who could have combined with suggestions of all its glorious outlying Yet this was impossible. land such revelations of cosmopolitan character and experience. Only a man could have written it, for it strength." was granted to man only to add to tenderness Sometimes with flushing cheeks, then with suffusing eyes, then with indifference, Agnes read, in the newsungracious notices of her book. One would tell her papers sent by her publishers, both the gracious and that "Ulm Neil was all imagination;" another, that "Ulm Neil had no imagination at all." In one he was an idealist with little or no force of thought; in another he was a realist, and his worse than pre-Raphaelite strokes were mere copies of literal life. She found Ulm Neil both unappreciated and over-praised. Perhaps three" notice" writers in a hundred had really read the book with sufficient leisure and interest to receive its spirit, to quicken to the humanity thrilling through it, to perceive its mental quality, and to judge it justly both in what it reached and in what it failed to reach. Because it was born of life, it lived. To her wonder that which was most living in it, which touched life most nearly, was what the reviewers called "overwrought," and the most "untrue to actual experience.” She knew now out of what travail of brain and soul and conscience a living book came; what will, what bravery, it cost to dare to tell the truth, to paint life as it is. How often the conscientiousness of a true artist, price to herself, had been the only support of her sinkadhering to her ideal of truth as she perceived it, at any ing spirit. From the first line to the last, not one word of faith and encouragement had come to her from any human source. Even Mr. Blank One failed her on the reception of the first chapter. He told her plainly that he was disappointed. He expected- he did not know what he expected; but "certainly something different." "He still hoped" (but with many doubts and many fears unmistakably) "to sell the fifty thousand copies; but to make this possible she must brighten up, resume the sparkling style of Basil: A Boy,' which was simply perfect in its way." Mr. Blank Two took the chapter to his home and read it one evening to a circle of friends, critical and cultivated to an extreme degree. No one of them could create a work either of art or of inspiration, but they could mildly and maliciously tear both to pieces with a facility which amounted to genius. They conscientiously filtered forth a few drops of occasional praise to the unknown writer during the pleasant process of dissecting him, but Mr. Blank Two was scarcely conscious of these drops, and forgot them altogether when the next morning, from sheer nervousness, he reported to Ulm Neil every disagreeable word said by the guests of the evening before. The combined verdict was certainly unfavorable to the first "Annal of a Quiet City," it gave him great pain to say, but as the larger share of the work was still unwritten there was a chance for growth, for a development of the faculty of telling common things in an uncommon way,- a faculty which Ulm Neil did not yet command. These were her publishers who held her in such poor esteem, and beyond them her fancy conjured up the voiceless but scornful image of the sublimated "Co.," with his nose in the air, waiting the loss and disappointment of "the House" as due retribution for its unwise trust in an untried writer. Her hand grew still, her brain cold and numb. She could not go on, not without one encouraging word, and in all the world there was not one human being to utter it. Yes, there was one. Evelyn begged her to read "jest a page," as they sat alone one evening. As Agnes read, Evelyn laughed and cried, grew wrathful and tender and silent. The written page moved Evelyn just as life moved her, as she lived it hour by hour. Agnes went on. She never knew how or why; surely it was with no hope of reward, but no less with unconscious fidelity to the truth that was in her. Here was the response. Her book lived in the affections of the people because it was woven of the same tissue out of which their daily human life was made; yet wrought into purer, sweeter, nobler forms of experience than those to which they yet had grown; forms which they yearned and reached after, nevertheless. The book sold well, if not wonderfully. Blank, Blank & Co. were satisfied. Agnes Darcy was gone and forgotten. Because she had lived, loved, suffered, and died to herself, Ulm Neil lived, strong, tender, not unto herself, but for every human being out on the lonely earth, hungering for sympathy, whom her great, helpful pity could reach. These were not Agnes' thoughts. She was thinking, before all this recognition how poor was the woman to whom it came. Admiration, homage, criticism, blame, held their due value in her mind, no doubt, but they were less than nothing to her yearning and unanswering heart. Her heart had never sought such rewards nor such a life. Desire had never painted it. The world might set its own value upon it-it belonged to the world. It had cost the woman too dear. What if the whole world were hers, and yet the life of her life, of her love, of her home, were not? She was still so poor that for such poverty the universe held no recompense. With these thoughts her eyes, glancing She read this notice through once, twice, thrice, as she might have read it had she been asleep, with eyes open yet with suspended consciousness. Slowly the significance of what she read came to her comprehension "This is the woman who did not want my husband," who did not want to marry, who wanted her freedom, her kingdom, her subjects only; wanted his adulation, his homage, his subjugation, at any cost of honor, but not him! A year since the divorce! To the world she is his wife. Then what am I? I? I am dead. I am buried. I am forgotten. I am not, and as if I had never been, in his world. Yet in wifehood, in motherhood, I still live for him, for his child. Beyond all outward form, beyond the power of human law to annul, beyond the power of human treachery to destroy, I am his wife; I only, forever. I thank Thee, my God, that she is not, that she never can be, his wife!" These words would have sounded like the raving of a wild woman to the gay denizens of Vanity Fair, who with fawning and flattering salute hastened to welcome back to the capital Circe Sutherland as the Hon. Mrs. King. The announcement of the marriage was more than a month old. In a later journal that Agnes mechanically took up, her eyes encountered, under the head of "Gay Life at the National Capital," an extended report of "a resplendent reception given by the Hon. Cyril King and Mrs. Sutherland King, on the opening for theseason of their magnificent mansion at the West End." More than a column of a metropolitan journal was devoted to a description of the upholstery and furniture of this " palatial abode." All the adjectives of English speech were exhausted in portraying its curtains, cushions, and divans of coral and amber satin, of Gobelin and Aubusson tapestry; its velvet carpets; its inlaid floors; its salons paved with mosaics; its marvels of silver, gold, and glass; its furniture of malachite and ebony; its paintings; its statues from Rome; its carvings from Florence and Oberammergau; its laces from the looms of Saxony and the bobbins of Chantilly. But the culminating "description," the one in which Jenkins surpassed even himself in inflated metaphors and fulsome flattery, was in the portraiture of this mansion's mistress: "Beautiful beyond the possibility of language to portray, or of eyes that had never beheld her dazzling loveliness to imagine, was this sumptuous woman, who had been the cynosure of worshipping eyes in the courts of Europe, had now begun her reign as empress supreme in the social realm of the Federal capital." Then followed a minute description of the dress worn by her at her first reception. A robe of lace made in Scotland from her own designs, worn over yellow satin, while the rarest amber of Constantinople, the palest that ever a sorrowing peri wept, shed its soft lustre upon her lustrous neck and arms "The host, superb in health and manly beauty, witty, fascinating, magnetic, looked a radiant god in happiness as he stood the central sun of attraction, fairly dividing the homage of the occasion with his dazzling bride. A pair so distingué had not appeared at the national capital for a generation. Such wealth, wit, esprit, eloquence, elegance, beauty, and grace did not unite in one pair once in a century." As Agnes finished this paragraph, how distinctly she saw the dome of the Capitol, white, stainless against the blue, as she saw it last; the Capitol itself on its emerald hill; the alcove in its library where she sat and listened to the beguiling voice that wrought her woe; the drawing-rooms at the West End beneath whose blinding lights she herself once stood, wherein she was now as utterly forgotten as if she had never made one in their splendid throngs. Now? She could touch the ceiling of the cramped room in which she sat. The tapestry on its walls was six-cent cotton. Not a picture frame that decked it ever cost a dollar; the most sumptuous article in it was her cane-seated rocking-chair. These cheap comforts, this small room even, were not her own. Earth did not hold an object really her own, - and he! Vida laughed in her sleep. Nothing her own! She went and threw her arms around her child; was not she all her own? No woman was poor, no woman was alone, who could hold to her heart her breathing child, all, all her own. In having her, she had more than they. In her poverty she was richer than they were. Did Mrs. Sutherland King, as her estates and her pride caused her to call herself, step at once to her throne in the social kingdom without protest? Was no one brave enough to call her a pretender? to challenge her as a usurper of at least her newly attained name? Yes, the Hon. Mrs. Peppercorn was brave enough and honest enough to do both, and in a voice of no uncertain sound. There were a few, a very few, who, remembering "the first Mrs. King," as Agnes was now called, and remembering also that she was yet alive, somewhere in the world, regarded the presence of a second Mrs. King as a sin against the family state, and an offense against good society. True to their convictions, a truth not easily maintained amid the many conflicting interests of Capitolian life, they proved it upon every possible occasion by the pointed remark, "We do not call upon Mrs. Sutherland King." But as thousands did, that conquering lady did not seem to receive even a chill from the "cold shoulder" of the righteous minority. Society cherished its own private opinion of Mrs. Sutherland King, a private opinion that was perpetually "leaking out" into public through the unguarded comments of the ten thousand dear friends who attended her receptions and balls, drank her champagne, ate her French dinners, waltzed in her magnificent salle de danse, and the next morning, in boudoir and parlor, with smiling malice picked her reputation to pieces by way of reward. Stories of her past career casting deep shadow upon her womanhood, gathering exaggeration as they went, flew eagerly from lip to lip. Everything dubious was insinuated of her, if not asserted. Everybody ques tioned or distrusted her, even while they followed and flattered her; but because of distrust or even open accusation, they did not flatter her or follow after her the less. Not to be able to show Mrs. Sutherland King's card of invitation, with its delicate tracery and ancient crest, was to prove yourself" not in society." Nor did this prove that the "moral tone" of the American capital was lower than is that of other cities of the earth. Wealth, beauty, grace, wit, fascination, place, and power are potential forces the whole earth over. Without these, the concentrated purity of the entire human race would stand as a cipher to what is termed "the gay world." It was what Mrs. Sutherland King had, not what she had not, that the gay world wanted and took. It reserved to itself, however, its own inviolable right of "making remarks" during the pleasant process. Example: Scene, morning reception at the White House. Mrs. Sutherland King upon the arm of her distinguished-looking husband appears in the doorway of the Blue Room, and advances, while hundreds of eyes concentrate upon her, toward the Presidential circle. Very near it, a little to one side, hovers the Hon. Mrs. Peppercorn, exchanging running comments upon all she sees and hears with her friend, Mrs. Midget. "There's that woman!" she exclaims, with lowering brows. "I do not call upon her," replies Mrs. Midget with elevated eyes. 6 "I do," responds the senatress, "though first I never would. With all her airs she is only a member's wife; nor that, by right or decency. My list is too long to admit of my running after members' wives (such a herd!) even if etiquette did not demand imperatively that they should make the first call. In society I stand upon etiquette to the death, but not with my friends, as Mrs. Skinflint of I. does. Her bosom friend might die in the next room alone, if she hadn't made the first call. Mrs. Sutherland King made the first call. You see I accept the Washington code,' she said. I knew she accepted the necessity of propitiating me. Money and beauty are not everything, even in Washington. A good name and good behavior are not without value, even here. She knows my opinion of hers; that I'll never forgive her for her treatment of Mrs. King-the only Mrs. King. I know she was a poor-spirited little thing, and scarcely deserved the keeping of a husband when she wouldn't manage him any better. But to my dying day I shall never forget the look on her face at the ambassadors' ball; and I'm not going to try. Now look at that woman in her place already!" Circe, all grace, in radiant beauty even under the searching chandelier, was dispensing smiles and wordmusic to the President, who was sufficiently entranced to make it necessary for the official usher to recall him from his lapse to hand-shaking and the throng. "Look at her, Mrs. Midget!" groaned Mrs. Peppercorn in suppressed bass. "That woman never spoke to a man in her life without the fixed intention of making him fall in love with her." "And she usually succeeds, does she not?" ventures Mrs. Midget. "No indeed. All men are not Cyril Kings, thank Heaven! Mr. Peppercorn despises her, just as much as I do. I know it by his remarks." 66 Making your usually astute observations on womankind? You don't take the trouble to judge the gentlemen, I believe, Mrs. Peppercorn?" said Circe in the blandest tones, as she slipped through a little opening in the throng. dimness of the far past, seemed to touch them and to make them live again. "John Darcy!" and as she spoke his name a pink tinge touched her withered cheek. "John Darcy! Surely it is he and I! We both are here. Not as "You mistake me there. I comment on whatever we are now, the one old, the other glorified, but both I see, you may be sure of that. I see women plainer beautiful with youth. I see women plainer beautiful with youth. Only one living being could than men, for it was never my fashion to run after make this picture John Darcy's child. I see not a men. One is quite enough for me to manage." line to tell, but it was she who sent it to me, she who wrote it. I am sure, sure. May God love her and keep her in her great sorrow, wherever on this earth she may be! And if He would only let my old eyes see her face once more, I would praise his holy name!" "I agree with you, Mrs. Peppercorn. One is more than it's really worth one's while to manage. It's ever so much nicer to let even him go his way, and you go yours." "I do not agree with you. It is much safer for Mr. Peppercorn to go my way; and pleasanter, he finds it." "Doubtless. You have a genius for government I never had. Let me introduce you to the Marquise, the wife of the new Minister from France. I knew her in Paris. She is charming." "Thank you;" and the senatress drew herself up till she looked inches taller. "I prefer to meet her first officially. I'm not one of the crowd who run and fawn about the Diplomatic Corps. They may be as good as other people in their own countries, but they are not better than other people here, though as a rule they show plainly enough that they think they are. I will meet them half-way, but I never go after foreigners nor anybody else." "Let me bring the Marquise to you?" in the sweetest of unruffled tones., "You could not help loving her." "I have more to love now than I can do justice to," said the implacable. "You remind me more and more of a character in The Annals of a Quiet City.' Have you read it yet?" "Yes. A remarkable book; so quiet, and yet so full of human emotion and experience. I know whom you mean, Mrs. Peppercorn. I think, myself, she is like me; like what I would have been under the same conditions. It's a haunting kind of a book, isn't it?" I "Yes, it is. It is something better than I expected to hear at a morning reception, that it haunts you. hope it will continue to haunt you." "How kind of you! For it is like being haunted with the refrain of a song after the song has ceased. If it is half sad, it is delicious." "It would not be delicious to me if I were in your place," Mrs. Peppercorn wanted to say; but even she felt compelled to keep within the bounds of insult if not of rudeness. Cyril King kept clear of Mrs. Peppercorn. He was chatting with the Marquise. In a moment more, all radiance still, Circe joined them. That evening, amid her plants and cats in her little lilac-shaded cottage in old Ulm, Mrs. Twilight sat by her lamp, peering through her round spectacles down the pages of a new book. Mrs. Twilight did not abound in new books. As a rule she did not care for them. She preferred her Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, and Young's Night Thoughts," she believed, to all the new books in the world. Yet here was a new book which not only chained her attention, but made her heart, in the most unexpected and unprecedented manner, her heart that had beat slowly and peacefully so many years as an old heart should, now actually thrill and throb once more with the sweetest experience of youth. Something what was it? - in the book, through all the dust of years, through all the (To be continued.) FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD. CHAPTER XL. ON CASTERBRIDGE HIGHWAY. FOR a considerable time the woman walked on. Her steps became feebler, and she strained her eyes to look afar upon the naked road, now indistinct amid the penumbræ of night. At length her onward walk dwindled to the merest totter, and she opened a gate within which was a haystack. Underneath this she sat down and presently slept. depths of a moonless and starless night. A heavy unbroken crust of cloud stretched across the sky, shutting out every speck of heaven; and a distant halo which hung over the town of Casterbridge was visible against the black concave, the luminosity appearing the brighter by its great contrast with the circumscribing darkness. Towards this weak, soft glow the woman turned her eyes. When the woman awoke it was to find herself in the "If I could only get there!" she said. "Meet him the day after to-morrow: God help me! Perhaps I shall be in my grave before then." A clock from the far depths of shadow struck the hour, one, in a small, attenuated tone. After midnight the voice of a clock seems to lose in breadth as much as in length, and to diminish its sonorousness to a thin falsetto. Afterwards a light-two lights - arose from the remote shade, and grew larger. A carriage rolled along the road, and passed the gate. It probably contained some late diners-out. The beams from one lamp shone for a moment upon the crouching woman, and threw her face into vivid relief. The face was young in the groundwork, old in the finish; the general contours were flexuous and childlike, but the finer lineaments had begun to be sharp and thin. The pedestrian stood up, apparently with a revived determination, and looked around. The road appeared to be familiar to her, and she carefully scanned the fence as she slowly walked along. Presently there became visible a dim white shape; it was a mile-stone. She drew her fingers across its face to feel the marks. "Three!" she said. She leant against the stone as a means of rest for a short interval, then bestirred herself, and again pursued her way. For a lengthy distance she bore up bravely, afterwards flagging as before. This was beside a lone hazel copse, wherein heaps of white chips strewn upon the leafy ground showed that woodmen had been fagoting and making hurdles during the day. Now there was not a rustle, not a breeze, not the faintest clash of twigs to keep her company. The woman looked over the gate, opened it, and went in. Close to the entrance stood a row of fagots, bound and unbound, together with stakes of all sizes. For a few seconds the wayfarer stood with that tense stillness which signifies itself to be not the end, but merely the suspension, of a previous motion. Her attitude was that of a person who listens, either to the external world of sound, or to the imagined discourse of thought. A close criticism might have detected signs proving that she was intent on the latter alternative. Moreover, as was shown by what followed, she was oddly exercising the faculty of invention upon the speciality of the clever Jacquet Droz, the designer of automatic substitutes for human limbs. By the aid of the Casterbridge aurora, and by feeling with her hands, the woman selected two sticks from the heaps. These sticks were nearly straight to the height of three or four feet, where each branched into a fork like the letter Y. She sat down, snapped off the small upper twigs, and carried the remainder with her into the road. She placed one of these forks under each arm as a crutch, tested them, timidily threw] her whole weight upon them, so little that it was, and swung herself forward. The girl had made for herself a material aid. The crutches answered well. The pat of her feet, and the tap of her sticks upon the highway, were all the sounds that came from the traveller now. She had passed a second mile-stone by a good long distance, and began to look wistfully towards the bank, as if calculating upon another mile-stone soon. The crutches, though so very useful, had their limits of power. Mechanism only transmutes labor, being powerless to abstract it, and the original quantum of exertion was not cleared away; it was thrown into the body and arms. She was exhausted, and each swing forward became fainter. At last she swayed sideways, and fell. more. Here she lay, a shapeless heap, for ten minutes and The morning wind began to boom dully over the flats, and to move afresh dead leaves which had lain still since yesterday. The woman desperately turned round upon her knees, and next rose to her feet. Steadying herself by the help of one crutch she essayed a step, then another, then a third, using the crutches now as walkingsticks only. Thus she progressed till the beginning of a long railed fence came into view. She staggered across to the first post, clung to it, and looked around. Another mile-stone was on the opposite side of the road. The Casterbridge lights were now individually visible. It was getting towards morning, and vehicles might be hoped for if not expected soon. She listened. There was not a sound of life save that acme and sublimation of all dismal sounds, the bark of a fox, its three hollow notes being rendered at intervals of a minute with the precision of a funeral bell. "One mile more," the woman murmured. "No, less," she added, after a pause. "The mile is to the Town Hall and my resting-place is on this side Casterbridge. Three quarters of a mile, and there I am!" After an interval she again spoke. "Five or six steps to a yard six perhaps. I have to go twelve hundred yards. A hundred times six, six hundred. Twelve times that. Oh pity me, Lord!" Holding to the rails she advanced, thrusting one hand forward upon the rail, then the other, then leaning over it whilst she dragged her feet on beneath. This woman was not given to soliloquy; but extremity of feeling lessens the individuality of the weak, as it increases that of the strong. She said again in the same tone, "I'll believe that the end lies five posts forward, and no farther, and so get strength to pass them." This was a practical application of the principle that a half-feigned and factitious faith is better than no faith at all. She passed five posts, and held on to the fifth. beguilement with what she had known all the time to be false had given her strength to come a quarter of a mile that she would have been powerless to face in the lump. The artifice showed that the woman, by some mysterious intuition, had grasped the paradoxical truth that blindness may operate more vigorously than prescience, and the short-sighted effect more than the far-seeing; that limitation, and not comprehensiveness, is needed for striking a blow. The half-mile stood now before the sick and weary woman like a stolid Juggernaut. It was an impassive King of her world. The road here ran across a level plateau with only a bank on either side. She surveyed the wide space, the lights, herself, sighed, and lay down on the bank. Never was ingenuity exercised so sorely as the traveller here exercised hers. Every conceivable aid, method, stratagem, mechanism, by which these last desperate eight hundred yards could be overpassed by a human being unperceived, was revolved in her busy brain, and dismissed as impracticable. She thought of sticks, wheels, crawling she even thought of rolling. But the exertion demanded by either of these latter two was greater than to walk erect. The faculty of contrivance was worn out. Hopelessness had come at last. "No farther!" she whispered, and closed her eyes. From the stripe of shadow on the opposite side of the way a portion of shade seemed to detach itself and move into isolation upon the pale white of the road. It glided noiselessly towards the recumbent woman. She became conscious of something touching her hand; it was softness and it was warmth. She opened her eyes, and the substance touched her face. A dog was licking her cheek. He was a huge, heavy, and quiet creature, standing darkly against the low horizon, and at least two feet higher than the present position of her eyes. Whether Newfoundland, mastiff, blood-hound, or what not, it was impossible to say. He seemed to be of too strange and mysterious a nature to belong to any variety among those of popular nomenclature. Being thus assignable to no breed he was the ideal embodiment of canine greatness - a generalization from what was common to all. Night, in its sad, solemn, and benevolent aspect, apart from its stealthy and cruel side, was personified in this form. Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power, and even the suffering woman threw her idea into figure. In her reclining position she looked up to him just as in earlier times she had, when standing, looked up to a man. The animal, who was as homeless as she, respectfully withdrew a step or two when the woman moved, and, seeing that she did not repulse him, he licked her hand again. A thought moved within her like lightning. Perhaps I can make use of him- I might do it then! She pointed in the direction of Casterbridge, and the dog seemed to misunderstand: he trotted on. Then, finding she could not follow, he came back and whined. The ultimate and saddest singularity of woman's effort and invention was reached when, with a quickened breathing, she rose to a stooping posture, and, resting her two little arms upon the shoulders of the dog, leant firmly thereon, and murmured stimulating words. Whilst she sorrowed in her heart she cheered with her voice, and what was stranger than that the strong should need en "I'll pass five more by believing my longed-for spot is couragement from the weak was that cheerfulness should at the next fifth. I can do it." be so well simulated by such utter dejection. Her friend moved forward slowly, and she with small, mincing steps moved forward beside him, half her weight being thrown upon the animal. Sometimes she sank as she had sunk from walking erect, from the crutches, from the rails. The dog, who now thoroughly understood her desire and her incapacity, was frantic in his distress on these occasions; he would tug at her dress and run forward. always called him back, and it was now to be observed that the woman listened for human sounds only to avoid them. It was evident that she had an object in keeping her presence on the road and her forlorn state unknown. She |