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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here
in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,--it
is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it
touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand.
Sometimes,--to-night, for instance,--the curtain is accidentally
drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in
the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face watching mine: a wan,
woful face, through which the spirit of the dead korl-cutter
looks out, with its thwarted life, its mighty hunger, its
unfinished work. Its pale, vague lips seem to tremble with a
terrible question. "Is this the End?" they say,--"nothing
 Life in the Iron-Mills |