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Updated: June 26, 2025
Many an inquisitive boy or girl experienced a mental awakening or quickening by contact with their superior intelligence; and many a toil-worn man and woman renewed the brighter memories of earlier years as the preacher brought them glimpses of the outer world, or read from some well-worn volume carried in his saddle-bags pages of some much-prized English classic.
The nobles, the soldiers, the courtiers, the people, they came and looked, often with silent tears, as he lay in state, in the light of countless tapers, on his mound of flowers offerings not only from royal terraces for his mother had willed it so but the gifts which his people had brought, lay there together, rare exotics and the flowers of the field and forest, crushed and mangled, perchance, in some toil-worn hand when they came from far.
Rouse up in your thousands, and with your toil-worn hands pull down the pillars of iniquity and vice that overshadow and darken the land!
It boasts no travel in summer, but by winter an occasional toil-worn traveller may be seen issuing forth from the Great Country beyond, bound for the open water; while once in thirty days the mail-team whirls out of the forest to the south, pauses one night to leave word of the world, and then is swallowed up in the silent hills.
Our likings are regulated by our circumstances. The artist prefers a hilly country because it is picturesque; the engineer a flat one because it is convenient; the man of pleasure likes what he calls "a fine woman" she suits him; the fashionable young gentleman admires the fashionable young lady she is of his kind; the toil-worn, fagged, probably irritable tutor, blind almost to beauty, insensible to airs and graces, glories chiefly in certain mental qualities: application, love of knowledge, natural capacity, docility, truthfulness, gratefulness, are the charms that attract his notice and win his regard.
What a change is made within us when suddenly we find ourselves transported into the calm solitudes of Nature, into scenes familiar to our happy dreaming childhood; back, back from the dusty thoroughfares of our toil-worn manhood to the golden fountain of our youth! Blessed is the change, even when we have no companion beside us to whom the heart can whisper its sense of relief and joy.
Providence provides them with many opportunities for the practice of philosophy. I was present at a "high tea" given last winter by charitable folk to a party of char-women. After the tables were cleared we sought to amuse them. One young lady, who was proud of herself as a palmist, set out to study their "lines." At sight of the first toil-worn hand she took hold of her sympathetic face grew sad.
"If you feel like that, dear, perhaps some day when you have finished your studies we will start again on a longer trail." He took one of the little toil-worn hands in his. "The long, long trail, Lou, only we will be together! When that day comes, will you take the new road with me?" She bowed her head, and somehow he found it nestling in the hollow of his shoulder, and his arms were about her.
"Mrs Stirling might be as happy as the day is long, with nobody to trouble her from one year's end to the other," was the frequent remark of many a toil-worn mother, fighting with poverty and cares, in the midst of many children. Yet none of them would have changed her life of care for Nancy's solitary comfort. Not that Nancy did not enjoy life in her way.
Then Friar Martin reached out his hand and laid it upon Walkyn's bowed head: and, though the hand was hard and toil-worn, the touch of it was ineffably gentle, and he spake with eyes upraised to heaven: "O Christ of Pity, look down upon this stricken soul, be Thou his stay and comfort.
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