“Lord of Light why so much darkness? Bread of Life
why so much hunger?”
“The great fight, the long fight, the fight that must be
won, without any further delay.”
IT is not necessary for me to describe the formal introduction of Katherine to London society. A large number of my readers may have a personal experience of that uncertain step, which Longfellow says, the brook takes into the river, affirming also that it is taken “with reluctant feet”; but Longfellow must be accepted with reservations. Most girls have all the pluck and courage necessary for that leap into the dark and Katherine belonged to this larger class. She felt the constraints of the upper social life. She was ready for the event and wished it over.
The squire also wished it over. He could not help an uneasy regret about the days and the money spent in preparing for its few hours of what seemed to him unnecessary entertaining; not even free from the possibility of being rudely broken up—the illuminated house, the adjoining streets filled with vehicles, the glimpses of jewelry and of rich clothing as the guests left their carriages; the sounds of music—the very odors of cooking from the open windows of the kitchens—the calls of footmen—all the stir of revelry and all the paraphernalia of luxury. How would the hungry, angry, starving men gathering all over London take this spectacle? The squire feared there would be some demonstration and if it should be made against his family’s unfeeling extravagance how could he bear it? He knew that Englishmen usually,
Through good and evil stand,
By the laws of their own land.
But he knew also, that Hunger knows no law, and that men too poor to have where to lay their heads do not have much care regarding the heads of more fortunate men.
Squire Annis was a thoroughly informed man on all historical and political subjects and he knew well that the English people had not been so much in earnest since the time of Oliver Cromwell as they then were; and when he called to remembrance the events between the rejection of the first Reform Bill and its present struggle, he was really amazed that people could think or talk of any other thing. Continually he was arranging in his mind the salient points of moral dispute, as he had known them, and it may not be amiss for two or three minutes to follow his thoughts.