The man sat quiet.

There was not much in the years gone to soften his thought, as it grew desperate and cruel: there was oppression and vice heaped on him, and flung back out of his bitter heart.

Nor much in the future: a blank stretch of punishment to the end.

He was an old man: was it easy to bear?
What if he were black?
what if he were born a thief?
what if all the sullen revenge of his nature had made him an outcast from the poorest poor?
Was there no latent good in this soul for which Christ died, that a kind hand might not have brought to life?
None?
Something, I think, struggled up in the touch of his hand, catching the skirt of his child's dress, when it came near him, with the timid tenderness of a mother touching her dead baby's hair,--as something holy, far off, yet very near: something in his old crime-marked face,--a look like this dog's, putting his head on my knee,--a dumb, unhelpful love in his eyes, and the slow memory of a wrong done to his soul in a day long past.

A wrong to both, you say, perhaps; but if so, irreparable, and never to be recompensed.