who never had the slightest appreciation of my poetry. “Just think of him penning a sonnet with a fist like that! There is at least this good in a life of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a man, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to him. If a farmer can make poetry at the plough-tail, it must be because his nature insists on it; and if that be the case, let him make it, in Heaven’s name!”

“And how is it with you?” asked Zenobia, in a different voice; for she never laughed at Hollingsworth, as she often did at me.

“You, I think, cannot have ceased to live a life of thought and feeling.”

“I have always been in earnest,” answered Hollingsworth. “I have hammered thought