The Argosy — page 274: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Peer OAR GOS Y. OCTOBER, 1883. WINITFRED-POWER. meeArTtThRse XXVITT. RICHARD’S QUIXOTRY. Pp ENG the terrible days of the Commune Winifred Power had lived in a kind of lurid dream. She was not a politician, far less a partizan, and if asked a month earlier with which men or tendencies in distracted France her sympathies went, she would most assuredly have been puzzled te answer. many But she was too generous not to be stirred to pity in the inevitable hour when the aspirations of the people were bartered by the selfish and the mean; and her heart was wrung with compassion for the sons and daughters of toil, who, after suffering from generation to generation, and sinning in one brief hour of mistaken hope, turned anew to face the grim reality of wretchedness, and learnt that their sufferings were to be forgotten and only their sins remembered. She came home one day in a state of great excitement. “It is hard,” she cried passionately ; startling Martha Freake at her patient work of bandage-making. ‘* You remember Anatole?” “That nice-looking young joiner you had in once to do some work? Did I not hear that he had joined the Commune P—God help him !” answered Martha. | ““He was very enthusiastic and eloquent.—I am sure he was single-minded. And he was as tender as a woman to his poor old bed-ridden mother.” * And has he been killed ? ” *"No; but arrested. And he will be déporté.—And if he lives to come back, he will be ruined in mind and soul and body.” Martha sat silent : deeply sorry, yet half afraid to say so. She and Winifred had so many poor neighbours and knew them all so well, that her own gentle heart had no room for any feeling but compassion. But she would fain have taught all struggling humanity her own remedy of patience and faith: her own saintly shrinking from violence, VOL. XXXVI. R Cconnicloooks (C(O) mn