The Tor Is Pierced by the Thorns
THERE is something sustaining in the very agitation that apahe first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces aement which is tra strength. It is in the slow, ged life that follows - iime when sorrow has bee stale and has no longer aive iy that teracts its pain, iime when day follows day in dull uant sameness and trial is a dreary routine - it is then that despair threatens: it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt, and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our existence which shall give to endurahe nature of satisfa. This time of utmost need was e to Maggie, with her short span of thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that early experience of struggle, of flict between the inward impulse and outward fact which is the lot of every imaginative and passioure; and the years since she hammered the nails into her woodeish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic, had been filled with so eager a life iriple world of reality, books and waking dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years ihing except in her entire want of that prudend self-and which were the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled, and he was ag as Wakems manager on the old spot. Tom went to and fro every m and evening and became more and more silent in the short intervals at home: what was there to say? One day was like another, and Toms i in life, driven bad crushed on every other side, was trating itself into the one el of ambitious resistao misfortuhe peculiarities of his father and mother were very irksome to him now they were laid bare of all the softening apas of an easy prosperous home, for Tom had very clear prosaic eyes not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination. Poor Mrs Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self - her placid household activity: how could she? The objects among which her mind had moved platly were all gone: all the little hopes, and schemes, and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her treasures which had made this world quite prehensible to her for a quarter of a tury, since she had made her first purchase of the sugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that would have happeo her which had not happeo other women, remained an insoluble question by which she expressed her perpetual ruminating parison of the past with the present. It iteous to see the ely blond stout womaing thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mental restlessness which made her often wander about the empty house after her work was done, until Maggie, being alarmed about her, would seek her and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that she was injuring her health by never sitting down aing herself. Yet amidst this helpless imbecility, there was a toug trait of humble self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly towards her poor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mental feebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviest and most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggie attempted to relieve her from her grate-brushing and sc: `Let it alone