hearted bystander?

The thought of one quarry, in his frozen wits, suggested

another; and he plodded off toward Craigleith. A wind had

sprung up out of the north-west; it was cruel keen, it dried

him like a fire, and racked his finger-joints. It brought

clouds, too; pale, swift, hurrying clouds, that blotted

heaven and shed gloom upon the earth. He scrambled up among

the hazelled rubbish heaps that surround the caldron of the

quarry, and lay flat upon the stones. The wind searched

close along the earth, the stones were cutting and icy, the

bare hazels wailed about him; and soon the air of the

afternoon began to be vocal with those strange and dismal

harpings that herald snow. Pain and misery turned in John's

limbs to a harrowing impatience and blind desire of change;

now he would roll in his harsh lair, and when the flints

abraded him, was almost pleased; now he would crawl to the

edge of the huge pit and look dizzily down. He saw the

spiral of the descending roadway, the steep crags, the

clinging bushes, the peppering of snow-wreaths, and far down

in the bottom, the diminished crane. Here, no doubt, was a

way to end it. But it somehow did not take his fancy.

And suddenly he was aware that he was hungry; ay, even

through the tortures of the cold, even through the frosts of

despair, a gross, desperate longing after food, no matter

Tales and Fantasies