ACTION

In this world there is no thriving place for idleness. The unoccupied and the purposeless man, however seemingly favored by fortune, has no foothold among the men of his generation. He is brought into no combination of usefulness, . . . he finds no sympathy; he is a feather upon the wind, a bubble upon the wave. . . .

The noblest spirits of this earth, those who have toiled in greatest pain and amid most formidable perils for the achievement of the highest results towards human happiness, have ever been men who had smallest care for themselves; men who have set a great unselfish purpose before them, and bestowed upon its accomplishment that labor which shrank not before the weariness of incessant application, nor before pain, nor danger, nor even death.

Let us not, therefore, suppose that any condition of affluence exempts us from the common lot which has been apportioned to all men faithful to their duty here to work. Man has an infinite capacity; genius to invent, impulse and motive to excite him, hand to execute all and everything that may spread prosperity and power around him. His mind is an alembic, ever distilling good thoughts, and converting fancies and desires into forms for use and action. To that seething of the mind idleness is death.

JOHN PENDleton Kennedy. [From "Kennedy At Home and Abroad." Used by courtesy of G. P. Putman's Sons.]

A PRISONER OF THE BASTILLE.

[Doctor Alexander Manette, a physician of Paris, has been confined for eighteen years in the Bastille, because, in his professional capacity, he had become acquainted with the secret crimes of a noble family.]

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside, took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to where the window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim and dark; for the window of dormer shape was in truth a door in the roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from the street; unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way.

Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means that it was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit alone could have slowly formed in any one the ability to do any work requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet work of that kind was being done in the garret; for, with his back toward the door, and his face toward the window where the keeper of the wine shop stood

looking at him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

"Good day!" said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head bent low over the shoemaking.

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the salutation, as if it were at a distance:

"Good day!"

"You are still hard at work, I see."

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the voice replied, "Yes I am working." This time a pair of haggard eyes had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo of a sound made long and long ago.

So entirely had it lost the life and resonance of the human voice that it affected the senses like a voice underground. So expressive it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveler, wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed, and the haggard eyes had looked up again: - not with any

interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical perception beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were aware of had stood, was not yet empty.

"I want," said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker, "to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?"

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked, with a vacant air of listening, at the floor on one side of him; then, similarly, at the floor on the other side of him; then upward at the speaker.

"What did you say?"

"You can bear a little more light?"

"I must bear it, if you let it in." (Laying the palest shadow of stress upon the second word.) The opened half-door was opened a little farther, and secured at that angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and showed the workman, with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his labor. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very long; a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. . . . His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body to be withered and worn.

He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes had, in long seclusion from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of parchment yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze, pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke without first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak. "What did you say?"

"Are you going to finish that pair of shoes today?" asked Defarge, motioning Mr. Lorry to come forward.

"What did you say?"

"Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?" "I can't say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don't know."

But the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.

Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at it, and then the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The look and the action had occupied but an instant.

“You have a visitor, you see," said Monsieur Defarge.