speak. Troubles thickened fast over Hitty; her husband was always at
home now, and rarely sober; the relief his absences had been was denied
her entirely; and in some sunny corner of the uninhabited rooms
up-stairs she spent her days, toiling at such sewing as was needful, and
silent as the dead, save as her life appealed to God from the ground,
and called down the curse of Cain upon a head she would have shielded
from evil with her own life.

Keen human legislation! sightless justice of men!--one drunken wretch
smites another in a midnight brawl, and sends a soul to its account with
one sharp shudder of passion and despair, and the maddened creature that
remains on earth suffers the penalty of the law. Every sense sobered
from its reeling fury, weeks of terribly expectation heaped upon the
cringing soul, and, in full consciousness, that murderer is strangled
before men and angels, because he was drunk!--necessary enough, one
perceives, to the good of society, which thereby loses two worse than
useless members; but what, in the name of God's justice, should His
vicegerent, law, visit upon the man who wrings another life away by slow
tortures, and torments heart and soul and flesh for lingering years,
where the victim is passive and tenacious, and dies only after
long-drawn anguish that might fill the cup of a hundred sudden deaths?
Yet what escapes the vicegerent shall the King himself visit and judge.
"For He cometh! He cometh to judge the earth; with righteousness shall
he judge the world, and the people with equity."

Six months passed after Keery's death, and now from the heights of
Greenfield and her sunny window Hitty Dimock's white face looked out
upon a landscape of sudden glory; for October, the gold-bringer, had
come, pouring splendor over the earth, and far and wide the forests
blazed; scarlet and green maples, with erect heads, sentinelled the