As though she was conscious of his presence, but had not heard his words, she turned her face over her shoulder,—that colorless face, lighted by eyes that still burned with undimmed luster,—and said,—
"Do you know, father. I have been talking with Eugene, and he has forgiven me!"
The voice, the look melted the old man's heart.
He fell upon the bed, and wept.
[CHAPTER V.]
AN EPISODE.
Here, my friend, let us take a breathing spell in this, our dark history. Horrors crowd fast and thick upon us,—horrors, not born of romance, but of that under-current of real life, which rolls on evermore, beneath the glare and uproar of the Empire City. We do not wish to write them down,—shudder sometimes and drop the pen as we describe them,—and ask ourselves, "Can these things really be? Is not the world all song and sunshine? Does that gilded mask which we call by the name of Civilization,—the civilization of the nineteenth century,—only hide the features of a corpse?" And the answer to these queries comes to us in the columns of every daily paper; in the record of every day's farces and crimes; in the unwritten history of those masses, who, while we write, are slowly serving their apprenticeship of hardship and starvation, in order that at last they may inherit a—grave.
Ah, it is the task of the author who writes a book, traversing a field so vast as is attempted in the present work, not to exaggerate, but to soften, the perpetual tragedies of every day. He dares not tell all the truth; he can only vaguely hint at those enormous evils which are the inevitable result,—not of totally depraved human nature, for such a thing never existed,—but of a social system, which, false alike to God and man, does perpetually tempt one portion of the human race with immense wealth, as it tempts another portion with immeasurable poverty.
But let us leave these dark scenes for a little while. Let us breathe where crime does not poison the air. It is June, and the trees are in full leaf, and through canopies of green leaves, the brooks are singing their summer song. Come out with me into the open country, where every fleeting cloud that turns its white bosom to the sun, as it skims along the blue, shall remind us, not of crime and blood, but of thankfulness to God, that summer is on the land, and that we are alive. Come,—without object, save to drink at some wayside spring,—without hope, other than to lose ourselves among the summer boughs,—let us take a stroll together.