My Library

to me to know that this man will die a disgraced pauper, dependent on charity for bread. Still less is it to realize, as I do, that the brothel and the gibbet, the gambling hell and massive prisons, are shadowed in the foreground of his line, and that it will utterly perish from off the earth in ignominy and horror. I would not have it so, but fate is fate; and I see, at least, one dangling form of his race swinging in the air! My prophetic eye beholds——” As the man uttered these terrible sentences, he shuddered as if horror-stricken at the impending fate of this wronger of the living and the dead, and it was clear to the girl that he would have freely averted the doom, had such a thing been possible. “Men and cliques,” said he, “have used me for their purposes—have, like this ghoul, wormed themselves into my confidence, and then, when their ends were served, have ever abandoned me to wretchedness and misery. “Rosicrucians, and all other delvers in the mines of mystery, all dealers with the dead, all whose idiosyncracies are toward the ideal, the mystic and the sublime, are debtors to nature, and the price they pay for power is groans, tears, breaking hearts, and a misery that none but such doomed ones can either appreciate or understand. Compensation is an inexorable law of being, nor can there, by any possibility, be