"Why no," musingly replied the bailiff, taking out his pipe, and looking up from his paper, "thank you, I can't say I want for anything, but what have you to say to a glass of grog, eh?"
He rather brightened himself at the idea.
"I'll send for anything you like," drearily replied Jones, and it was plain he had not understood as relating to himself the kindly meant proposal.
The bailiff rather stiffly said, he wanted nothing.
"Well then," resumed Jones, slipping off his shoes, "I'll leave you for awhile."
"Why, where are you going?" cried the other staring.
"There," said Jones, and raising the curtain, he crept in to his dead darling.
The curtain shrouded him in; he was alone—alone with his child and his grief. A little child he had cradled her in his arms; many a time had she slept in that fond embrace, to her both a protection and a caress. And now! He looked at the little pale face that had fallen asleep in prayer; he saw it lying on its pillow in death-like stillness; and if he repressed the groan that rose to his lips the deeper was his anguish.
Oh, passion! eloquent pages have been wasted on thy woes; volumes have been written to tell mankind of thy delights and thy torments. To no other tale will youth bend its greedy ear, of no other feelings will man acknowledge the power to charm his spirit and his heart. And here was one who knew thee not in name or in truth, and yet who drank to the dregs, and to the last bitterness his cup of sorrow. Oh! miserable and unpoetic griefs of the prosaic poor. Where are ye, elements of power and pathos of our modern epic: the novel? A wretched shop that will not take, a sickly child that dies! Ay, and were the picture but drawn by an abler hand, know proud reader, if proud thou art, that thy very heart could bleed, that thy very soul would be wrung to read this page from a poor man's story.
And so he lay by his dead, swelling with a tearless agony, a nameless and twofold desolation. Gaze not on that grief—eye of man: thou art powerless to pity, for thou art powerless to understand.