Humbled, he hardly knew why: vague,
uncertain in action. Quit dogging old Huff with his advice;
trotted about the streets with a cowed look, that, if one could
have seen into the jaded old heart under his snuffy waistcoat,
would have seemed pitiful enough. He went sometimes to read the
papers to old Tim Poole, who was bed-ridden, and did not pish or
pshaw once at his maundering about secession, or the misery in
his back. Went to church sometimes: the sermons were bigotry,
always, to his notion, sitting on a back seat, squirting
tobacco-juice about him; but the simple, old-fashioned hymns
brought the tears to his eyes:--"They sounded to him like his
mother's voice, singing in Paradise:" he hoped she could not see
how things had gone on here,--how all that was honest and strong
in his life had fallen in that infernal mill. Once or twice he
went down Crane Alley, and lumbered up three pair of stairs to
the garret where Kitts had his studio,--got him orders, in fact,
for two portraits; and when that pale-eyed young man, in a fit of
confidence, one night, with a very red face drew back the curtain
from his grand "Fall of Chapultepec," and watched him with a lean
and hungry look, Knowles, who knew no more about painting than a
gorilla, walked about, looking through his fist at it, saying,
"how fine the chiaroscuro was, and that it was a devilish good
thing altogether." "Well, well," he soothed his conscience,
going downstairs, "maybe that bit of canvas is as much to that
poor chap as the Phalanstery was once to another fool.
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