and the father trying in an agony of earnestness to be sure that the baby knew him; here a little girl, looking half reproachfully at her brother, terror struggling with tenderness in her young face; on the side of the friends, love and yearning and pity beyond all words to describe; on the side of the prisoners, love and yearning just as great, but with a misery of shame added, which gave to many faces a look of attempt at dogged indifference on the surface, constantly betrayed and contradicted, however, by the flashing of the eyes and the red of the cheeks.”

The story so impressed me that I could not for days lose sight of the picture it raised; the double walls of iron grating; the cruel, inexorable, empty space between them,—­empty, yet crowded with words and looks; the lines of anxious, yearning faces on either side.  But presently I said to myself, It is, after all, not so unlike the life we all live.  Who of us is not in prison?  Who of us is not living out his time of punishment?  Law holds us all in its merciless fulfilment of penalty for sin; disease, danger, work separate us, wall us, bury us.  That we are not numbered with the number of a cell, clothed in the uniform of a prison, locked up at night, and counted in the morning, is only an apparent difference, and not so real a one.  Our jailers do not know us; but we know them.  There is no fixed day gleaming for us in the future when our term of sentence will expire and we shall regain freedom.  It may be to-morrow; but it may be threescore years away.  Meantime, we bear ourselves as if we were not in prison.  We profess that we choose, we keep our fetters out of sight, we smile, we sing, we contrive to be glad of being alive, and we take great interest in the changing of our jails.  But no man knows where his neighbor’s prison lies.  How bravely and cheerily most eyes look up!  This is one of the sweetest mercies of life, that “the heart knoweth its own bitterness,” and, knowing it, can hide it.  Hence, we can all be friends for other prisoners, standing separated from them by the impassable iron gratings and the fixed gulf of space, which are not inappropriate emblems of the unseen barriers between all human souls.  We can show kindly faces, speak kindly words, bear to them fruits and food, and moral help, greater than fruit or food.  We need not aim at philanthropies; we need not have a visiting-day, nor seek a prison-house built of stone.  On every road each man we meet is a prisoner; he is dying at heart, however sound he looks; he is only waiting, however well he works.  If we stop to ask whether he be our brother, he is gone.  Our one smile would have lit up his prison-day.  Alas for us if we smiled not as we passed by!  Alas for us if, face to face, at last, with our Elder Brother, we find ourselves saying, “Lord, when saw we thee sick and in prison!”

A Companion for the Winter.