"He looks hungry, wait!" said a little girl, who was pinning some flowers on the lapel of a young minister's coat, and she ran to a table and brought a piece of bread to the starving man. He hugged it in his arms, and tottered out into the night, chuckling to himself in joy. A square where trees and flowers grew was before him. He entered it, and sank on to a bench near a fountain. He looked at the bread, and a savage content captured his features. He was about to break it when a man arose from a seat across a walk, and came and sat down beside him, eyeing the food covetously. He touched the thin hand that held it, and the two men looked into each other's eyes.
"I am starving," said the breadless one. "I have no means. I belong to a family who have descended from kings; I cannot beg. I thought you looked as if you did not want it. I am dying."
The other clutched the food tightly in both his hands for an instant. A look of ferocious desire wrung his face, and he raised it to his lips. Then a divine smile dawned in his eyes, and he proffered it to the other. The man took it eagerly, and slipped into the darkness, that he might eat it unseen. As he turned away the head of the giver sank slowly to his breast.
Brightly lighted streets stretched away in several directions. A procession of men and women bearing banners and beating drums and tambourines passed along, singing hymns, and pausing now and then to kneel on the cobblestones to pray or to urge the little clusters of idlers to join them in their march to safety. Above the wondrous stars and moon were shining as they had shone at the dawn of eternal thought. They shone on the Vatican at Rome, the imperial cradle of saints; on the comfortable homes of ministers in the church; on the "palaces" of gentle-blooded bishops; on assemblages of men who were wrangling over creeds; on gatherings where earnest searchers after truth were being tried for heresy; on prisons where inmates of dark, silent cells were praying for a gleam of light, for but the voice of an insect to keep madness from their tortured brains; on millions of suffering human beings—on the cold, dead form of one who understood naught but love.
O THOU WHO SIGHEST FOR A BROADER FIELD.
JULIA ANNA WOLCOTT.
O thou who sighest for a broader field