Jump to content

Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/33

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
"BONES AND I."
25

I will ask you, therefore, as I know you have been in Cheshire, High Leicestershire, and other cattle-feeding-countries, whether you ever watched a dairymaid making a cheese? If so, you must have observed how strong and pitiless a pressure is required to wring the moisture out of its very core. My friend, the human heart is like a cheese! To be good for anything, the black drop must be wrung out of it, however tight the squeeze required, however exquisite the pain. Therefore it is, that we so often see the parable of the poor man's ewe lamb enacted in daily life. One, having everything the world can bestow, is nevertheless further endowed with that which his needy brother would give all the rest of the world to possess. For the first, the pressure has not yet been put on, though his time, too, may come by-and-by For the second, that one darling hope, it may be, represents the little black drop left,