scrawled upon a wall with his fingers dipped in muddy wine-lees

BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on

the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many

there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a

momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the

darkness of it was heavycold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and

want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presencenobles of

great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a

people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in

the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old

people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every

doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a

garment that the wind shook. The mill which had worked them

down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had

ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the

grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up

afresh, was the sign, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere.

Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched

clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into

them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was

repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that