By fragmentz on Skatehive
I often preach them patience and endurance, but I do not believe, put to the proof, I myself should practise the half of it. To think of their being driven away, outcasts from the only friends who love them; watched, and harassed, and threatened darkly by a foe, who will not meet them face to face. And to bear all this and be innocent — for, upon my soul, the lad is innocent! — is it not enough to drive them to despair? And yet, all the gold in that boy’s nature is being ten times refined in the fiery furnace of affliction, and as for his sister—”Here a radiant smile appears on the lips of the Minor Canon, and brightens his eyes; but it is lost on his mother, whose own eyes are cast down and clouded by thickly-falling tears. She quickly wipes them away, and not to expose herself to the bare supposition of having changed her mind, says —“Then what is the reason of your being so sad and troubled and so unlike yourself, since it is not that?”“A horrible suspicion has sprung up in my mind;