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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: for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that,
amateur psychologist? You call it an altogether serious thing
to be alive: to these men it is a drunken jest, a joke,--
horrible to angels perhaps, to them commonplace enough. My
fancy about the river was an idle one: it is no type of such a
life. What if it be stagnant and slimy here? It knows that
beyond there waits for it odorous sunlight, quaint old gardens,
dusky with soft, green foliage of apple-trees, and flushing
crimson with roses,--air, and fields, and mountains. The future
of the Welsh puddler passing just now is not so pleasant. To be
stowed away, after his grimy work is done, in a hole in the
 Life in the Iron-Mills |