Metzerott, Shoemaker

It was with a heart that knew not whether to be sad or joyful that Louis returned home on that eventful afternoon, upon which he had made such a stride in his young life. Pinkie’s brown eyes had been his lights to rule the day and the night, since either of them could remember; her rosy, audacious, mutinous little face was part and parcel of his very consciousness. Yet, perhaps, just because he could not imagine himself without her, his imagination had never risen to picturing his life with her—at Prices. She was simply his; there was neither past, present, nor future to their life together; only one beautiful, glorious, eternal now.

Upon this state of mind the thought of separation had acted as the jar which was all that was needful to produce crystallization, a jar which any other event might at any moment have supplied; so that the money-king had after all been wise in his day and generation.

But the electricity evolved in the crystallization had given poor Louis a rather severe shock. He had been accustomed to look upon “Prices” as the brief epitome of the time, the picture in little of that which the world ought to be. But as he re-entered it now, late in the afternoon, it seemed strangely altered. The great dining-hall stretched blackly before him; the long lines of tables seeming to reach out to infinity, and the pale windows glimmering like a vanished hope.

Miss Sally met him in the corridor.

“You’re late, Louis,” she said, “and that ain’t usual. Have you had your supper? You don’t mean you went out without your overcoat! Don’t you know these March days ain’t to be trusted? Why, you’re as pale as a ghost.”

“I’m all right, Aunt Sally,” replied the boy patiently. “I didn’t need my overcoat. Yes, I had my supper at Dr. Richards’s.”

“It’s as little as they could do to give you your supper, after you’d been wheeling their son about all the afternoon,” observed Polly.

“I liked it,” said Louis, “and they like to have me to tea. It wasn’t to economize, Aunt Polly, on their side or mine.”

“It had the same effect, though,” said Polly, looking up with a laugh from the great account-book before her; for Miss Sally had drawn him into her own little sitting-room, the room where Susan Price had died. “What you saved on your supper will help to pay your absence fine.”

It was entirely true, and perfectly disinterested in Polly, who was, besides, of twice—nay, ten times—the value to her kind that Rose Randolph was ever likely to be. Yet Louis, hearing now with Pinkie’s ears, as he had seen the great dining-hall with her eyes, turned away sick at heart.

“Is the father at home?” he asked.

“There’s a board-meeting to-night. He’s there. I suppose it’ll be settled about that carpenter’s place. Your father has taken such a fancy to Mr. Clare, Louis. He says he is the very man we want. I don’t know how he knows.”

“I don’t know how I know,” said Louis, “but I do. I think one always does,” he added, so sadly that the women looked at each other meaningly.

“You are tired to death,” said Sally, “that’s what’s the matter; and there’s nothing going on to-night to brighten you up. For a wonder the Hall ain’t been lit, and for another the director is at home, playing on the pianner like mad. You might go to his rooms and have a little music, Louis; that would do you good.”

“I think I’ll go to bed,” said Louis, smiling faintly. “I heard the Herr Musik-Direktor as I came up; he was playing ‘Tannhäuser,’ and I don’t think I could appreciate Wagner to-night. I’ll go to bed, Aunt Sally.”

“Well, so do; but, Louis, by the way, I don’t suppose you saw anything of Gretchen Schaefer?”

“Gretchen? no; that is, not since dinner-time. Why?” asked Louis, with his hand on the knob.

“She was absent at supper, without leave or notice, and hasn’t been seen since. I am afraid Tina has had a bad turn, that’s all. Gretchen would not do such a thing unless she had to.”

“Shall I step around and see?”

“No: you’re tired. I’ll go myself. I ain’t had a breath of air to-day, outside the back yard, and it’ll do me good. Polly, there, has the accounts to do. They ought to been ready for the board-meeting; but Gretchen she’s been so put back in her work lately by Tina’s bein’ sick.”

“I’ve nearly done,” said Polly, with a vigorous dip of her pen in the inkstand; “and if you’re not too tired, Louis, you might wait and leave these books at the board-room, as you go to bed. It’s as near as any other way, and I promised to send them.”

The boy threw himself obediently into a chair, and watched—still with Pinkie’s eyes—while Miss Sally adorned herself with a bonnet and shawl of strange and intricate construction. How the brown eyes would have laughed at Miss Sally’s bonnet, thought Louis.

Then Polly closed her books with a bang. “There, that’s done!” she said. “The Bible says we must bear one another’s burdens; and I’ve had my share of it this day. I hate accounts.”

“Let me do them for you next time,” said Louis, looking down at Polly’s flushed face and tumbled hair, and the soiled gingham apron she had been too busy to change.

“I hope there won’t be a next time,” replied Polly. “If there is, we must get another cashier; that’s all. But Gretchen is real reliable generally.”

“I hope nothing has happened to her,” said Louis uneasily, thinking of two figures that had vanished round a corner in North Micklegard, as the Ark of the Covenant drew nigh. The man was, he felt sure, Frank Randolph, and the girl had on a blue dress, just the color of Gretchen’s Sunday one.

“Oh! nothing ever happens to Gretchen,” said Polly, laughing. “Tina is the one I’m anxious about.”

“So?” said the boy slowly. Twenty-four, nay, twelve hours earlier he would have spoken at once of the blue dress; but—after all, there were plenty of blue dresses in the world;—and—then—were classes so widely separated in America,—Republican America, that—Louis shrunk from formulating, even to himself, the thought in his mind.

He took the books, and carried them away in silence.

His modest tap at the door of the board-room was answered by a summons to enter; and when he deposited his burden upon the plain, deal table, with its covering of oilcloth, round which the managers sat upon much worn wooden chairs,—for there was little effort at luxury at “Prices,”—there was not a face in the room but wore a smile to greet him. They were gray-haired men, all of them, who had known him all his life, and they could not let him go without a pleasant word.

“Have you turned book-keeper, Herr Louis?” asked one. “We missed you at supper-time,” said another. “Ah! he was better employed, perhaps I hope she is pretty.” “Did you give her a good hug and a sounding kiss?” “Ah! leave that to him, he knows very well how these things are managed.” “He has a face to help him better with the girls than any of your advice.”

These were some of the things that were said to him before his father broke in roughly, “Hold your tongues, all of you! would you quite turn the boy’s head? What does it matter, a face! Hands are what we need in shoemaking.”

“The boy looks tired,” said the old president gently; “and you are all wrong, meine Herren. He has been doing works of charity, not courting. I saw you up-town, Louis, with your lame friend.”

“Yes, he enjoyed the ride,” said Louis. “I am glad to be of use to him, Herr President; they have all been so kind to me.”

“Quite right, my boy,” said the old man benignly; and, after a few more words, Louis took his leave.

For perhaps the first time in his life he stepped into the elevator; he who usually ran up the long, steep stairs as fleetly as a gazelle. Then, reaching his own little room, under the roof, he sat down, slowly and heavily, and looked about him. It was spotlessly clean, but with no attempt at beauty, except one or two of Freddy’s drawings; and, to the boy’s new sense of sight, repulsively bare and comfortless. He let his head sink hopelessly upon his hands. Look where he would, there was no place at “Prices” for Pinkie. With his best efforts he could not think her into his workaday world. It was not her fault, of course; the hardy arbor vitæ stands erect amidst the snows from which the rose must be carefully protected. Is the rose to blame? No, it is only a question of corresponding with one’s environment. Pinkie was, clearly and self-evidently, not created or evolved to correspond with any such environment as “Prices.”

He was sitting in the same position when his father entered, half an hour later, with an elate expression, which changed suddenly at sight of Louis’ smile; an old smile on a boyish face.

“So!” said Karl Metzerott; “but it is my blame for sending you as a child among those people! Ah! what a fool I was! What has she done to thee, Louis, to send thee home with a face like that?”

“It is not her fault, father, nor mine, nor any one’s, for that matter.”

“Tell me that! Nothing is her fault at thy age, Louis. Tell me about it, and let me be the judge. Have I not always warned thee? A man’s own senses might tell him that a bit of pink and white wax-work is not the wife for a workingman.”

Louis sighed. “It is true,” he said. “Father, I have thought and thought, but I cannot imagine her here,—or—myself anywhere else. For see! I have grown up at ‘Prices,’ father; these dear friends are my friends, part of my life; if I could leave it, only half of my heart could go with me; if I could rise into her world”—

“Rise? that is, lie, cheat, steal, do anything to get money! For it is money alone that makes equals in that world, my boy; have I not seen it?”

Louis bowed his head once more in sad acquiescence. His thoughts were too chaotic for words, but he felt dimly and confusedly that his father was right. Polly’s mercenariness was a nobler thing than Pinkie’s scorn of expense; nay, if he had known it, even the rough raillery of the board-room, quite as delicate as much schoolgirl teasing. “Prices” might be—was—in essentials the higher world; but since it was not Pinkie’s world the result was practically the same. Louis glanced around the plain, bare room, and thought of Alice’s dainty parlor, of the pink and white nest that sheltered his bird, of which he had once had an accidental glimpse,—and he sighed heavily.

“Why should you fancy her here?” asked Metzerott, interpreting the sigh aright. “She doesn’t suit you, and that’s all there is about it. Rise into her world indeed! I hope your father is an honest man, which is more than can be said of hers!”

“Oh! if you come to fathers!” said Louis proudly. “But there’s more in it than that, if I could only make you see it. I’ve been brought up in both worlds, father, and I know. Ours—yes, we are working for each other at ‘Prices,’ while in hers they work for themselves; that makes us higher; yet in some ways they are higher than us.”

“They’ve more money,” said his father scornfully, “and finer clothes”—

“Not Mrs. Richards,” said Louis; “but it’s in things money won’t buy that I see the difference. I can’t put it into words, but you would understand it, father, if you could see Mrs. Richards standing beside—Aunt Sally, for instance. They are equally good, perhaps, and I love them equally well, so it’s a good example. It’s not Pinkie’s fault, father, it’s just because hers is a different world.”

“Was she so unkind to you to-day?”

“Far from it,” said the boy, a deep flush rising to his fair brow; “but her father—I think because of me—will take her to Paris, and put her into a convent-school. I only saw her a little while, for he took her for a drive, and to supper at his hotel; but—she loves me, father.”

“Does she?” said Karl Metzerott. “But I dare say she does. Poor girl, poor girl.”

He was too wise to say any more. Louis was, he saw, fully alive to the situation, and comment would only wound without helping him. But he was inwardly relieved at the escape from this trouble promised by the Parisian school, which would, he persuaded himself, effectually put an end to the whole affair. They were only children, and would be in love half a dozen times apiece before they were married.

Yet—Louis was his own son,—his who had “loved one woman only,” and clave to her in death as in life. And how dared Henry Randolph scorn his boy, his noble, beautiful Louis, worth a hundred little gypsies, such as the one on whom he had set his young heart? With these mixed and contradictory emotions struggling in his bosom, Karl Metzerott stood for some moments with folded arms, looking down upon his son. Suddenly he laid one large, rough, toil-worn hand very softly upon the bowed head.

“Don’t break thy heart for her, Louis,” he said; “there’s not a woman in the world—now—worth that.”

“Ah! now,” said Louis. “Was there ever, father?”

“Never,” replied the shoemaker sturdily. “Did I break my heart for thy mother—yet if ever woman were worth—but I lived on, and not quite for nothing, nicht wahr?”

“You had me,” said Louis, springing to his feet, and clasping like a child his father’s brown neck; “you had me, and I have you. We won’t break our hearts while we have each other, father.”

Henry Randolph was not a man to let the grass grow under his feet, when he had once made up his mind to a certain definite course. Most of his successes on Wall Street had been won by prompt and decided action; and within a week from the moment when he had decided that Pinkie’s intimacy with the “little shoemaker” must be broken off, he, she, and Miss Dare were on the high seas.

During the short interval before their departure, Louis never once saw Pinkie alone, by what he considered a series of unfortunate chances; which the young lady more acutely ascribed to the silent watchfulness of uncle, aunt, father, and brother. Freddy would have been heart and soul on the side of the lovers, if they had been sufficiently of one mind to possess anything that, by the utmost stretch of partisan spirit, could be called a side at all. As it was, he was ready at any moment to further any plan or project that Louis might devise; and Louis was too young and too much in love not to long and innocently to scheme for a repetition of that last interview, with its tears and tenderness.

But such schemes as his were by no means difficult to see through and quietly frustrate; nor in truth could any one of the relatives on either side have been justly blamed for wishing that their mutual inclination, innocent and beautiful as it was, should die a natural death.

Perhaps it was a laudable desire to foster his daughter’s good qualities, to enlist her pride on the right side, and appeal silently to her common sense by showing her Louis’ daily life, that brought Mr. Randolph from his hotel quite early one morning, with a proposition to spend the day in a visit to “Prices.”

“Of course we’ve all been there,” he said, “but I, for one, only know one or two shops and departments, here and there. What I wish to do is to understand the working of the whole institution; for I may see others while we are abroad, and, by knowing the peculiarities of this one, might bring home valuable hints.”

“Then you’d better go alone,” said Pinkie, who always smelt a scheme when her papa became explanatory; “you can’t study workings at a picnic.”

“But I particularly wish you to go,” said Mr. Randolph. “Co-operation has come to stay, Pinkie, and, as a woman who will inherit considerable wealth, it is your duty to know all about it. Besides, I have already invited your friend Miss Dare to accompany us. I stopped at her house on my way down, and promised that the carriage should call for her in an hour’s time.”

Miss Dare! Virgie! who was by no means averse to an occasional tête-à-tête with Louis, or in fact anything else masculine that came in her way. Pinkie concluded that she would go, and revenged herself by wearing her very prettiest “spring suit,” of pearl-gray and rose-color, in which she felt quite able to hold her own against any Dare that ever breathed.

“We’ll give the day to it, and dine there,” said Mr. Randolph with benevolent airiness. “Of course it will be rather primitive; but we can stand it well enough for one day. If they stick their knives in the butter, it won’t matter to us, so it isn’t our butter.”

“Oh! do they do such things as that?” said Miss Dare with a shudder.

It was a warm day, a very warm day for the end of March; consequently the furnaces at “Prices” were several degrees hotter than usual. The shoemaker’s work-room, what with this heat, the smell of leather, and the presence of six overheated human beings, was stifling to a degree scarcely bearable to Louis’ youthful vitality. His hand, blackened with work and the soots of Micklegard, had several times brushed away the drops from his forehead, not without leaving traces of the operation; his face was pale, and his fair hair disordered; when suddenly a breath of cooler air made him look up, and there in the doorway, fresh and sweet as her own royal flower, stood Pinkie, as though fallen from heaven.

What happened next, Louis could never afterwards clearly recollect. Did he spring towards her? or was it only that his heart gave one glad, strong leap, to sink again heavy as lead—nay, heavy as sorrow and loneliness and a loveless old age—before the scorn, the horrified disgust upon her fair young face? In truth, Pinkie was to be pitied far more than he. An atmosphere of dainty, fastidious refinement may be best for one’s moral lungs; but it is surely not one of its consequences to prevent us from distinguishing the “Ding-an-sich” from mere phenomena. Such blindness is due to a spiritual indigestion, one would imagine, caused by—ah! who shall say by what admixture of mortal clay with the Bread of Life!

As in a dream, Louis went blindly on with his work, not of cream-hued kid and fairy-like proportions. It was a huge, heavy workman’s shoe into the sole of which he drove peg after peg, with such fierce, unconscious energy. There were words passing, something about permission to inspect the establishment, and a guide; then a whisper from Fritz Rolf, who sat beside him, to which he replied, without understanding it, by a shake of the head. Then he heard Fritz’s gay voice offering himself as a guide, in right, as he averred, of being one of the original founders; and then all were gone, and only the monotonous tap, tap, sounded again around him.

It seemed scarcely five minutes, though in fact nearly three hours had passed, and he had never worked better or faster, when Karl Metzerott rose, and said gruffly that he supposed they were all quite ready to dine with the aristocrats. In a second the men were gone; but Karl lingered to say slowly,—

“As for you, Louis”—

“I shall go to dinner,” said the boy, looking up with wide, bright eyes, dry lips, and burning cheeks. “You are not ashamed of me, father?”

The man gave a short, angry laugh.

“I should be,” he said, “if I saw you running after a girl who turns up her nose at your working clothes, and kisses you in your Sunday coat. She’s not worth a thought, Louis.”

“I have thought of her all my life,” the boy said simply; “but don’t speak of it, please, papa.”

“That way it sinks deeper,” the shoemaker said, as one who knew. They washed their hands, and drew on their coats, in the wash-room, between their rooms and the carpenter shop, and serving the use of both; and so it happened that Louis entered the dining-room with Ernest Clare’s arm over his shoulders.

“There’s that handsome man again,” said Miss Dare, who had not disdained the explanations of such a fine young fellow as Fritz Rolf.

“Didn’t you tell us he was of noble birth?”

“Lineal descendant of Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, surnamed Strongbow,” replied Fritz. “Louis found it in the history-book, and told me. I’m not a scholar myself,” he added agreeably.

“I never could remember history,” replied Miss Dare, “it’s such stupid stuff, but if he was an earl—!”

“He conquered Ireland, and was an awful rebel; ought to have been hanged, only he wasn’t,” observed Pinkie succinctly.

“And now we see why,” said Mr. Randolph; “he was spared to be the ancestor of our friend the carpenter.”

“Do you really believe that, papa?”

Henry Randolph waved the matter aside with a pleasant smile. “Well,” he said, “I never knew an Irishman who wasn’t descended from one king or another, and there were certainly plenty to choose from. Besides, what does it matter? The sooner you girls learn that blood is absolutely valueless in America, the better off you will be.”

As he spoke, they had been slowly approaching their table, which, not without malice prepense on Mr. Randolph’s part, was very near that called after the “Founders,” with which and the “Parsons’ Table” it formed a triangle; and as the speech ended they were sufficiently near for Karl Metzerott to glance around with what I refrain from calling a scowl.

“Nicht wahr, Herr Metzerott?” said the millionnaire blandly.

“Blood?” growled the shoemaker, declining promptly to converse with Henry Randolph in German; English was good enough for him,—“blood? well, I’ve seen the time when I wanted it,—wanted it bad, too; gallons of it; I can’t say that it is absolutely valueless.”

“Sure, I wance knowed a man that had too much of it,” said Father McClosky, his brogue more obtrusive than usual, in honor of the distinguished guests, “and it wint to his head, bad luck to it! and killed him with the appleplexy.”

There was a general laugh, as the groups divided and seated themselves. Mr. Randolph did not exert, during the meal, all those conversational powers for which he was so justly celebrated. Perhaps he was tired, after three hours of statistics; for he had gone very thoroughly, as he had promised, into the “workings” of “Prices;” and his note-book contained neat rows of figures and cabalistic signs furnished him by the heads of departments. “Perhaps I may bring you home some ideas from abroad,” he had said, genuinely surprised to find that the promise was not received with enthusiasm. In fact, Frau Anna Rolf, the head of the clothing department, which included dressmaking, tailors’, and milliners’ shops, had replied somewhat curtly that there were ideas in plenty at “Prices.” What they needed was means to carry them out, and room to grow.

“Why, how much more room do you want?” Pinkie had asked rather pettishly. “I never saw such a big place as this.”

“America is a bigger place,” Frau Anna had answered, with her solemn, gloomy eyes burning upon the girl’s young face; “America is bigger, and so is the world.”

Then Mr. Randolph had pressed her shoulder significantly, and Pinkie had said no more.

From the point of view of a party of pleasure, Pinkie’s day had not been a success. She had been shocked and disgusted, frightened, and, always and above all, thoroughly and intensely bored. The number of barrels of flour consumed a week, the sale for jewelry, above all, the prices of leather and the demand for shoes,—what was all this to Pinkie, aged sixteen, and on the verge of a trip to Paris, but a weariness of the flesh? “Prices” had presented its least attractive face to the little heiress, that morning, not, perhaps, without the knowledge and consent of her wise papa. But at dinner Mr. Randolph indulged himself in a well-earned silence. The humors of the dining-hall could, he felt, be safely left to the conduct of Miss Dare, whose pale, prominent eyes seemed everywhere at once, while the low-toned sarcasms flowed on as unceasingly as Tennyson’s “Brook.”

“Girls, girls! don’t laugh at these good people! They will see you, and feel hurt,” interposed at gentle intervals the Machiavelli of rough-running love-affairs.

Pinkie was not anxious about the feelings of “these good people.” Louis was sitting not a dozen feet from her, beside a sweet, gentle-faced girl, who seemed to absorb more of his attention than his dinner. Moreover, his color was unusually bright, which gave him a very cheerful and animated appearance; and Pinkie felt that if any one at “Prices” had any feelings at all, it would be a satisfaction to wound them as deeply as possible. Meanwhile there were eyes to see and hearts to remember at every table around, and many an ill seed, to bear fruit an hundred-fold thereafter, was sown amid girlish laughter, during that short half-hour.

“Well,” asked Karl Metzerott as he rose from the table, “have you finished your inspection? or do you want that boy of mine again this afternoon?”

“Thanks, I think we have seen everything,” replied the guest in his courteous manner; “I hope the interruption has not been a serious annoyance to you!”

“Well, good workmen don’t grow on trees, and we have plenty of work on hand,” said the shoemaker.

“Ah!” affirmatively, yet somehow conveying to the shoemaker that he had been a bear. “I assure you the morning has been one both of pleasure and profit to me; but I want to ask you just one question. Are you a Socialist?”

“I’m a Socialist bred and a Socialist born, and when I’m dead there’s a Socialist gone,” replied the shoemaker with grim humor.

“And you would like to see the United States of America one great commune?”

“I intend to see it.”

“Then don’t you see that such institutions as ‘Prices,’ by making the workingman more contented, and his life an easier one, are really defeating your own object?”

“He don’t,” said Father McClosky, indicating Mr. Clare, whose blue eyes suddenly flamed up; “but, then, he never argues.”

“It depends upon what Mr. Metzerott’s object is,” said the carpenter parson quietly. “As I understand it, ‘Prices’ took its rise in the endeavor to make life not only easier but possible to those whose name it bears. If the Commune come, or when it comes, ‘Prices’ will be found to have done good work in training citizens for it; meanwhile, life is made easier for hundreds.”

“Didn’t I say so?” cried the priest triumphantly. “He never argues, he only convinces.”

“Yet I am sorry to say that I am still unconvinced,” said the rich man, smiling. “History is against you, Mr. Clare. A people never rebel until their wrongs have become unbearable; take the French Revolution, for example, or even our own, a hundred years ago. I hope you don’t pretend that the American workingman is oppressed as the French peasant was.”

“My friend has told you that I never argue,” replied Ernest Clare, smiling, “certainly not here, with you, and on that subject.”

“I see no objection,” was Mr. Randolph’s reply, “for I consider the American workingman exceptionally well off. And as to wrong”—

“Oh, papa, what does it matter? Rights or wrongs, who cares?” cried Pinkie despairingly; “you have smothered me with bales of cloth, and stifled me with barrels of sugar and bags of coffee, all the morning; but when it comes to the American workingman, I can stand it no longer; my wrongs become unbearable and I rebel.”

“So you take no interest in working-people?” asked Karl Metzerott meaningly.

Rosalie Randolph looked at him with eyes of haughty surprise.

“Not the slightest,” she said distinctly.

“Ah! your interest is reserved for your dolls as yet, my dear,” said her indulgent papa; “public affairs will come later. Good-morning then, Mr. Metzerott; thank you very much for your kindness. Mr. Clare, I am glad you did not convince me, as at present I feel inclined to assist ‘Prices’ to the best of my ability, and yet I object to the Commune. A ‘divide’ is the last thing I should crave.”

“It would be the last thing you’d get, in all probability,” growled Metzerott, “except”—

“‘Les aristocrates à la lanterne, eh?’” said the millionnaire, with his glorious laugh. “Well, the best dog will probably find his way to the top, as usual. Friend Fritz, may I speak to you a moment?”

“You have been very kind and polite,” continued the millionnaire courteously, when he had drawn Fritz aside from the rest, “and I should like to feel that you would not be a loser by it. Is there any favor I can do for you?”

“Well,” said Fritz, after a moment’s thought, “there’s nothing mean about me; so if you should happen to stray into a railroad office, and see a pass to New York lying about handy, why, I don’t know but I might find use for it.”

“You shall have it; that is, if I have the influence I ought to have. For two?”

“Well, yes; in case of a bridal tour, you know,” said the young man, laughing.

Henry Randolph slapped him on the shoulder genially. “It’s that pretty Miss Gretchen, I’ll bet a cookie,” he said. “I saw how it was this morning; if I hadn’t, the young ladies would have opened my eyes. Let me know in time, and I’ll send you a bridal present from Paris.”

“I will, for a fact,” said Fritz Rolf.

Mr. Randolph was sincerely glad to hear that Gretchen had so good a guardian as this wide-awake young Fritz. Frank was to be left in Micklegard as manager of the Randolph nail-mill, a position which he had, in fact, filled to the satisfaction of everybody but the hands, for several years. For he had a good business head, and much of his father’s “luck” at turning an honest penny, though he was by no means so popular as his genial sire.

But did it never occur to this same courteous, genial, warm-hearted gentleman, who wished so exceedingly well to everybody, that an outspoken warning, either to his son, to Gretchen, or to her friends, might possibly have been in place?

“If the Commune come, or when it comes,” said Dr. Richards; “and meanwhile ‘Prices’ is acting as training-school, eh? I should like to make Mr. Clare’s acquaintance, Louis. Suppose you tell him that my old enemy, rheumatism, has me by the heels again, so that it is impossible for me to call upon him, and ask him to come and dine with us on Sunday. I’d write a note if I could hold a pen; or you might write for me, Alice.”

“He’s not one to stand on ceremony if he thought you really wanted him to come,” replied Louis. “Don’t bother Mrs. Richards. I’ll tell him.”

“And the little priest,” said Dr. Richards, “Father McClosky. I don’t know a more well-meaning little man; bring him along, my boy. And Harrison and his son”—

“Do you feel quite able for such a large party, Fred?” asked Mrs. Richards gently. She was sewing diligently, and her face had a careworn look, which deepened as her husband enumerated his guests, in a way that did not escape at least one pair of watchful, tender eyes.

“If it puts you out, my dear,” returned her husband, somewhat testily—he was in his great arm-chair, poor man! unable to put a foot to the ground or move a finger without pain—“if it puts you out at all—but I don’t see how it can. Just order the whole dinner bodily from ‘Prices,’ and have done with it.”

Mrs. Richards gave a rather difficult smile. The rules at “Prices” involved strictly cash payments, and cash was just now by no means a drug in the market. But she could not give this reason to her husband.

“There doesn’t seem to be much object,” she said instead, “in asking persons to dine, and ordering exactly the dinner they would have at home.”

“That can’t possibly apply to the Harrisons; but if you are too high-toned to ask a carpenter to your house”—

“She don’t mind a shoemaker,” interposed Louis, smiling. “Dr. Harrison and Mr. Edgar are pretty sure to drop in during the afternoon, you know, doctor; and don’t you think you could study Mr. Clare to better advantage if you had him all to himself?”

“Oh! we couldn’t spare Father McClosky,” said Alice, with a grateful glance at the boy; “he is so merry and good-humored, he puts new life into one.”

“I believe you two are in league,” grumbled the doctor. “Whatever one of you says the other one swears to.”

He would have been thoroughly convinced of it had he been present at an interview that took place between them before Louis went home that night.

“What we are to do, how we are to manage, Louis, I really can’t see,” said poor Alice. “The doctor has some bills out, but I can’t say when they will be paid, and, until then, I have literally not a penny—that I can use—except what I can earn by the sewing you got for me to do.”

“Frau Anna can give you as much as you want,” replied Louis; “her department is doing a big business just now. I hope you won’t be angry, Mrs. Richards, but I talked matters over with Miss Sally, and she made some very practical suggestions.”

“Did she!” replied Alice rather coldly; but Louis was not easily discouraged, and went on to say that Miss Sally had averred that dealing at “Prices” was no economy unless one made a thorough job of it. “Buying a cake here and a loaf of bread there is all nonsense,” Miss Sally had said; “let her shut up her kitchen and discharge her cook, and she’ll see the difference.”

“It will save work as well as money,” said Louis. “By the by, should you mind if Freddy could get some work to do?”

“Freddy! what could he do, poor boy!”

“Well,” replied Louis, reddening deeply, “it seems that the slippers I—we—made for—for—Miss Randolph were very much admired. Miss Dare ordered a pair just like them before she left, to be sent after her to Paris, but her mother will pay for them; and at least twenty pairs have been ordered since then, for Commencement slippers. Annie Rolf, you know, works in the pottery, in the decorating-room; and of course hasn’t time for such a job as that; and if Freddy could do it, we could get a good price for him, for the extra work, and it would be a great accommodation to us.”

“Freddy will be delighted,” said Alice quietly; “and—you know what a help the money will be, Louis.” She stroked the fair hair from his brow with a motherly touch, thinking how much older and paler he had grown in these last weeks. But Alice did not know how her own troubles had helped Louis. His was the temperament to resist the first force of any shock, and sink beneath the consequent re-action. He had not resented or despised Pinkie’s scorn, for there was no anger in his heart towards her; but he had rallied his forces to the defence of a life, a world, which he felt intuitively were in essentials, in aim and possibility, nobler and purer than that from which she ventured to look down upon him. Only when she was far away did he realize that hope, light, and color had gone out of his life so utterly as is only possible at eighteen. Then, he had one day found Alice in tears, and, when his tender questioning had drawn her troubles from her, Louis had gained a new object to live for.

So now when she said, “I don’t know what I should do without you, Louis,” he clasped and kissed her like a son.

“I don’t believe I could have loved my own mamma better than I do you,” he said; “why can’t I work for you as a son would do?”

But Alice shook her head. Not while they could keep body and soul together in any other way, she said, and perhaps she judged rightly as to what was best for herself, though Louis’ suggestion might have been best for him. But one cannot receive benefits involving money—or often confer them—under our present social system, without certain moral deterioration; it will be different when the next development of the kingdom has made it impossible to look upon one’s own things without looking also on the things of others.

Louis did not know, however, of the one Tantalus-drop in Alice’s cup. Henry Randolph, upon leaving home, had been careful to inform her of a very liberal sum of money which lay in bank subject to her order. She had told her husband of it; for it was very bitter to her to be obliged to conceal from him even a thought; and—he had left her at liberty to do as she would.

“A useless wretch like me,” he had said, “unable to take care of his own family, has no right to quarrel with the hand that saves them from starvation. Only—don’t tell me, Alice, which loaf of bread is bought with that money, for I think a crumb of it would choke me.”

“I will never touch a penny of it, Fred, until it is a question of starvation,” she had answered quietly. Then he had kissed her, and called her his good little wife, but no power on earth could have kept him in the house that day, though the March wind was keen to the dividing asunder of bone and marrow, and the rain heavy enough to drown a cuttle-fish.

So the consequence had been a sharp attack of rheumatism, from which he was only beginning to recover. And it was only human that, in the first glow of convalescence, he should feel aggrieved at having his social impulses curbed by a pecuniary bridle. For, indeed, never having in his life felt the sting of genuine poortith cauld, it was always difficult for Dr. Richards to remember that five dollars are only equal, after all, to five hundred cents; and that, while actually having nothing, a man cannot, in our present stage of development, virtually possess all things.

The Sunday dinner was a perfect success, Louis having spurred on Miss Sally to the concocting of a new, and, as she called it, “researchy,” bill of fare.

“And if they could have had just the same at ‘Prices’ they’ll never know it,” Louis had said to the giver of the feast; “for they’ve never had just these dishes there yet, and in all probability never will, all at the same time; so you see it will be the same to them as if you had cooked it all yourself.”

“And a good deal better to me,” said Alice, laughing.

The guests were in fine spirits and appetite, and cleared their plates in royal style, Father McClosky averring that preaching was a mighty fine thing for the appetite, av it was bad intirely for the pocketbook.

“On that score, I’ve only a right to half-rations,” said Ernest Clare, laughing; “for though I have offered my services to a certain overworked rector in our neighborhood, he only trusted me to read the lessons this morning.”

“Sure he was afraid ye’d be after preaching Socialism if he let ye into his pulpit, from the text of the eleventh commandment, ‘Thou shalt surely divide,’” said Father McClosky.

“I wouldn’t have done it,” returned the other; “there is only one rich man in the congregation, and it would have been decidedly personal. However, if I had preached from ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ I don’t know that he could have taken offence.”

“And you think they mean the same?” asked Dr. Richards.

“Don’t you?” returned the man who never argued.

“In so far as neither one is practised or practicable, I suppose they do.”

“You are entirely right, Dr. Richards. My text should have been ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy strength;’ then the other would follow as a practical consequence.”

“Humph! I suppose you mean that in a Pickwickian sense?”

“Did you ever know a man who loved God with heart, soul, and strength, and did not love his neighbor as himself?”

“I never knew—anything about it. Great heavens! can I read a man’s heart, and say whom he loves?”

“Only your own,” said Ernest Clare, half smiling, yet meeting the doctor’s eyes with all the full, sweet, solemn power of his own.

The eyes fell, their owner hesitated how to reply. It was impossible to consider the clergyman a presuming meddler; he had pried into no man’s individual consciousness; nay, had even quietly stated his conviction that the sacred penetralia could be entered only by the man himself.

Consciousness.

Did not the word itself—knowing with—imply another Presence within that Holy of holies?

Dr. Richards, as I have said before, was not a practised etymologist.

But had his emphatic denial of all power to read another man’s heart been entirely sincere? Had not a sudden glory in a pair of liquid brown eyes beside him answered for one at least who loved both God and his neighbor? This thought, it is certain, came to the father’s heart, and, because it came, he could not reply lightly or scoffingly to that sudden argumentum ad hominem.

Mr. Clare did not wait to be answered. When the doctor was again ready to listen, he found a brisk discussion going on of a certain book which had of late appeared, purporting to describe a Socialistic Utopia in the year of our Lord 2000.

“Oh! go away with your Socialism,” Father McClosky was saying vehemently; “sorra a word but ‘the Nation’ is in the man’s mouth from first to last; and a mighty fine word it is, too, with a history and a meaning in the old country, and without the bad associations of Socialism.”

“Right, Father McClosky!” exclaimed the doctor. “When Socialists re-organize under the name of Nationalists, they will play a very strong card.”

“I’m not a particularly brilliant statesman,” said Mr. Clare, “and you may be quite right about the strong card; but, from my point of view, I confess I should be sorry to see it played. There is too much organization now, on that side of the fence.”

Dr. Richards took time for thought before he replied to this. He had come to feel a little shy of contradicting the man who never argued.

“As political parties now stand in this country,” he said slowly, “another one would but add so much more to the corruption and bribery at present existing. Is that what you mean?”

“Precisely. As matters now stand, the ideas which I am quite willing to call National are gaining new adherents every day, irrespective of party. And when a plant has once taken root, it isn’t well to be digging it up every day or two, to see how the process is going on.”

“You are as sanguine as Bellamy himself, Mr. Clare,” said Alice. “I wonder if he really believes in his Boston of the future?”

“He takes care to slur over the embryonic stages,” observed the doctor, laughing, “and present to us his Phœnix, the Nation, fully grown.”

“You must remember we are passing through the embryonic stage now,” said Mr. Clare, “though, I confess, I should have liked a few particulars of our chipping the shell, and just how we looked when we first came out.”

“Ah! there you put your finger on the weak point. He insists that the shell was chipped, not cut by the sword; and I don’t see the slightest possibility of that.”

“One never does till the hour strikes.”

“The hour!” said Father McClosky, “sure, it’s the hour and the Man, too, that we want. Where’s the Man?”

“Perhaps not yet born,” said Ernest Clare, smiling; “perhaps a baby in his mother’s arms; perhaps a schoolboy, studying the Monroe Doctrine and parsing the Declaration of Independence; perhaps working at some trade or profession: guiding the plough, like Cincinnatus; surveying his native land, like Washington; or practising law, like Abraham Lincoln.”

“You are very sanguine,” said Dr. Richards, between a smile and a sigh; “I wish I were half so much so. But, whatever I might wish, I don’t venture to hope for the establishment of a Commune, at least in my time or without violence. It doesn’t seem to me at all a practicable idea.”

“The abolition of slavery was not practicable, Dr. Richards; it was simply done.”

“And done by the sword, Mr. Clare. Although you never argue, you will be able to remember, perhaps,” said the doctor, smiling, “that I don’t dispute the possibility of establishing, by violence, a Commune that should be as short-lived as those Parisian affairs.”

“Our own Republic was founded by the sword,” said Alice.

“But with a difference, and in different times,” returned the clergyman. “One must always take one’s century into account, you know; though in any age it is lawful and right to kick a man out who has broken into one’s house. But, as to slavery, do you call the negro question a settled one?”

“Well, they are legally their own masters, but whether they are better off in essentials is an open question.”

“Some day, Dr. Richards, take up some thoughtful history which you already know pretty thoroughly, and read it with this question in your mind, ‘Is any question ever so decided by the sword as to leave everybody better off all round?’ Isn’t there always a residuum of evil to somebody—and usually to everybody—caused by the very means used to effect a cure?”

“Just as the homœopaths say of allopathic remedies,” interposed Alice roguishly; “one must recover from the disease first, and the medicine afterwards.”

“Passing over that slur on my profession, which I scorn to notice,” said the doctor, with a disdainful glance at his wife, “I agree with you entirely, Mr. Clare; but might not one say the same of everything else in the world, besides war and allopathy? Is not the true reading of the curse laid on Adam, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, and it shall not agree with thee after thou eatest it’?”

“Well, no,” replied Ernest Clare, laughing; “bread always agrees with a healthy stomach, I think, when it is pure. The trouble in the slavery business was that the bread was not pure, in fact, was scarcely to be called bread at all, and the stomachs were not healthy.”

“Southern fire-eaters!” observed the doctor with a smile.

“And Northern interference,” said the other. “Of course, the question was not a simple one between slavery and freedom, but was complicated by demagogy and sectional prejudice, as well as the old story of Cavalier and Puritan. But, leaving these points out of sight for the moment, it seems to me that the fault of the war lay chiefly with the side which on other grounds I sympathize with most cordially, the abolition party.”

“Do you think it well to discuss those old questions?” asked Alice. “The war is over and done with, and in my opinion ought to be forgotten.”

“If it were done with,” said Mr. Clare. “But ought the past ever to be forgotten? For my part, I can never look upon it as a ‘dead past,’ but as a wise, living teacher, whose lessons are very necessary and full of significance. But, of course, no subject can be discussed at your table that is disagreeable to you,” he added courteously.

“Oh! I was merely speaking generally,” she said, smiling; “don’t let me interrupt you. Dr. Richards’s pessimism is contagious, perhaps; but if the war can really teach us any valuable lessons, it would be a pity not at least to know what they are.”

Ernest Clare looked at her very gravely, very kindly before he replied. There was to him something infinitely touching in the atmosphere of this home, its intellect, its refinement, purity, and brave self-devotion, and its utter hopelessness. After a moment he said gently,—

“We should be poor indeed without the past, Mrs. Richards; our own individual past, I mean. Don’t you remember Dickens’s ‘Haunted Man’?” Then, with a sudden change of tone,—

“I think I learned my horror of organization from the abolitionists, though I am not sure that that was their mistake. If every man’s motives had been pure, and every man’s heart full of love to white and black brother alike, they might have organized and welcome; but it is hard to have a party without party spirit, and with every member added the difficulty as to loving the sinner and hating the sin increases in a geometrical ratio.”

“That’s because it’s so much aisier to love the sin and hate the sinner,” put in Father McClosky, whose orator’s appetite was, by this time, partially satisfied.

“I should not object to a party,” said Dr. Richards thoughtfully, “nor to party spirit, provided it kept within bounds. But I think we ought to have followed England’s example, and indemnified our slave-holders.”

“Even though they could not show a clear title to human souls?” asked Mr. Clare suggestively.

“Souls! I really can’t say, as I have never dissected one, what a soul is. But, as to title, I might not be able to show a clear title to this house; yet I inherited it from my father, and he built it, or, rather, had it built by another man. Now, suppose the other man stole the materials or the money to buy them; the house would, no doubt, by moral right belong to him from whom the money was stolen. Would the government be, therefore, justified in forcibly ejecting me, for his benefit, I and mine being entirely innocent in the matter?”

“The point is, it seems to me,” said Mr. Clare, “whether we aim to get rid of evil in itself, or only of a wrong to some individual or class. In this case, the wrong to the slave was abolished at the expense of another wrong to the slaveholder, a wrong forbidden by the law which bids us to overcome evil with good, the only method by which it can be overcome. The old abolition party tried to overcome it with evil, by stirring up strife and preaching insurrection; then the Southern pride and obstinacy determined to fight for their peculiar institution, and the result is that the large majority of our negroes are worse off, morally and physically, than they were as slaves; and the negro question is a more puzzling problem to-day than it was in ’61.”

“But would not their condition have been the same had they been set free by purchase?” asked Alice.

“No; for the most thoughtful minds on both sides favored their gradual enfranchisement and colonization in Liberia, which would have been the making of them as a nation. But I see no hope of anything like that now, unless we get the Commune without violence: in which case, among so many sweeping changes, one more or less will not signify materially,” said Mr. Clare.

“We seem to return to our muttons, whether we would or no,” observed the doctor. “Here is Monsieur Tonson come again. But I think I see what you mean by your lessons of the past; only, how the wrongs of the poor man are to be redressed without violence or wrong to the rich, is too hard a nut for me to crack.”

“Gradual enfranchisement,” said Mr. Clare, “and brotherly love on both sides.”

Dr. Richards shrugged his shoulders. “It is a question of ‘next things,’” said the clergyman. “Some day I will read you a little poem, if you like, about that. The idea is, that we can see only one step at a time, can live but one moment at a time; and that, if each of these is clearly right, the end must be the same. Of course, the application is only to individual life, but I think it is also true of nations; we can see but one step at a time. It has been objected to Socialism that no practicable plan for securing it has ever been suggested. To my mind, that is its most hopeful feature.”

“My dear sir, do you wish to stun us with your paradoxes?”

“The kingdom of God cometh as a thief in the night,” said Mr. Clare earnestly. “I think though—in fact, I am sure—that we can see the next step clearly enough,” he added.

“And that is?”—

“A more equitable division of profits between employer and employed, which, by the definition, would certainly wrong nobody, and could not be carried out by violence,” he added, smiling. “Public opinion is steadily growing in that direction, and by and by it will become a matter for legislation; for one good result of our election-machine is that if the great mass of the people want any definite thing they will infallibly get it.”

“And the result will be that most of the employers and stockholders will find out that the change has been to their interest as well as that of their employés,” said the doctor. “Go on, Mr. Clare; you would convert me to optimism if—I had a leetle more confidence in human nature.”

“Sure, human nature is capable of infinite pawsibilitees,” said Father McClosky; “though, when it comes to probabilitees,” he added thoughtfully, “a man must look out for storms.”

“I don’t overlook the danger of storms,” said Mr. Clare; “on the contrary, I have pointed it out.”

“Well, well, meteorology notwithstanding,” interposed Dr. Richards, “when you had secured your division of profits, Mr. Clare, and thus, we will say, obviated all future strikes and commercial crises, as, I presume, would be the result”—

“I suppose it would, Dr. Richards.”

“Well, what would you do next?”

If he hoped to catch Ernest Clare tripping, he missed his mark.

“I’ll tell you, when it is next,” the other replied, smiling. “Perhaps, some restriction upon the amount of property which a man may leave by will to any one heir”—

“Would that be equitable?” asked Alice.

“If the law claims—as it does—the right to regulate testamentary dispositions at all, I don’t see why one should draw the line just here,” replied Mr. Clare. “However, I don’t lay much stress on such a regulation as that; there would be so many ways of evading it, unless it were so worded as to be tyrannous. The next step that I fancy I see sometimes, when the clouds lift a little, is a modified and modern version of the old Jewish land-laws; the main principle of which was that the land belonged, not to individuals, but to the nation or tribe.”

“Eh? I might be better up than I am in Hebrew antiquities, but I thought that at the Jubilee the land, if it had been sold, reverted to the heirs of the original possessor,” said the doctor.

“The fact that he was unable to alienate the land shows that he possessed merely a life-interest. And you know that not one inch of ground was allowed to pass from one tribe to another.”

“I see,” said Dr. Richards; “well! but if the step from the present régime to your modified Hebraism equals one hundred, from modified Hebraism to Socialism equals only about one. I see only a solitary obstacle; but that will make one equal to the m’th power of one hundred.”

“An impossible equation,” said Mr. Clare, smiling. “What is the obstacle?”

“This. Given your equitable division and your Jewish land-laws—why, the people would be too well contented to take any more steps until that state of society had become as rotten as the present.”

“Revolutions never go backward,” returned the other, “and, rotten as our present state of society may be, we are farther on than any nation of the world, and our real progress so far has been steadily in the right direction.”

“Humph! as you never argue, I suppose you can’t prove that.”

“Oh, no! but I can give you a few instances,” said the clergyman, laughing. “Take the idea of duty or allegiance to a man—or woman—who claims it simply as his birthright, because his ancestors oppressed ours, whom they allowed only such rights as were actually extorted from them. Unless your mother was an Englishwoman, as mine was, Dr. Richards, you can hardly realize how utterly obsolete such an idea has become in America. I don’t deny that we feel a sneaking kindness for the royal family of Great Britain; but anything like duty or loyalty”—

“Why should we be loyal to Queen Victoria or Kaiser Wilhelm, either?” asked Louis, speaking for the first time. “She’s a good woman, and he’s a great soldier; but that has nothing to do with us.”

“That is exactly what I mean,” said Ernest Clare. “The idea of superiority of birth is rapidly decaying, Dr. Richards; we have almost come to believe that all men are created free and equal; after a bit, we shall come to the ‘inalienable rights.’ I am not at all afraid but that the Declaration will take care of itself. As for your impossible equation, you must bear in mind the conditions of the problem. If ‘gradual enfranchisement’ equal x, and brotherly love on both sides equal y, then, indeed, 1 + y = x + 100^m might be possible and welcome! I won’t stickle for the form of a commune, so long as I have the spirit.”

“Ah—h!” cried Father McClosky, “ye’ve got to firm ground at last, ye bog-trotter! the very ground where the Church has been intrenched for eighteen hundred years!”

“And high time,” said Ernest Clare with quiet intensity, “that she should take up the ark of the Lord, and bear it across Jordan into the Promised Land.”

“I don’t quite understand you,” said the doctor curiously. He was intensely interested in the theories and beliefs of his new friend, which, as the reader may have observed, he only opposed to draw out more fully.

“Why, you know, of course, that communism is the theory of the Church,” said Mr. Clare. “Marion Crawford brings that out very well in his ‘Saracinesca;’ but Crawford—I hope I don’t do him injustice—seems to me a dilettante in religion and politics, who doesn’t believe anything deeply enough to fight for it.”

“Aha!” cried Father McClosky, “there’s the blood of ould Ireland at last!”

“Fighting with one’s pen is quite in accordance with the spirit of the age,” replied Mr. Clare calmly.

“But not argument, hey?”

“Not unless you are sure of convincing your man,” was the reply. “Well, Dr. Richards, to take up our subject where it was broken off by this discourteous Irishman, I have sometimes fancied that one of the differences of opinion between St. Paul and the Church of Jerusalem may have been that they wished to insist on the Gentile converts holding all their possessions in common, as did those at Jerusalem, while St. Paul, as a man of the world, saw that this was inexpedient, if not impossible, at that time.”

“A bit of original exegesis that is truly edifying,” observed Father McClosky.

“I don’t preach it as truth, only suggest it as an hypothesis,” said Mr. Clare good-humoredly; “but, there is some authority for it, ’tis of a piece with his treatment of the slave question, and—not impossible, which, I suppose, is the most one can say for it. He was not one to throw an unnecessary stumbling-block in a weak brother’s path; and, besides, it is only the spirit of Communism that is essential to Christianity.”

“Do you ever contradict yourself just a little bit?” asked the doctor.

“As an Irishman, no doubt I do,” was the reply, “but in this case the contradiction is only in seeming. For I believe—though perhaps wrongly—that the time is at hand when we may have both the form and the spirit. Nay, I think—I am sure—that if the human race is to advance much farther than it has done, money must be abolished, the temple of Mammon overthrown, and the Almighty Dollar perish in the ruins. That is the crusade in which I would engage every man, woman, and child who bears the name of Christian, officered by those who call themselves God’s ambassadors.”

“I don’t know,” said Alice doubtfully; “one can do so much good with money.”

“One must do harm with it,” was the reply. “Besides, there ought not to be the need of doing good—of that sort; and under the Commune, where alone it would be possible to dispense with money, there would be no good to be done except with love.”

“Mr. Clare,” said Alice, “what would you do if you were a rich man?”

“I thank God I am not,” he replied; “but if I had inherited wealth that was honestly come by in the first instance, I hope I should do my duty in that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call me.”

“And if the money were coined from the blood and tears of your fellow-beings,” asked the doctor, “would you take it, or starve?”

“Starve!” said Ernest Clare. “Ah! Mrs. Richards shakes her head, she thinks me a terrible fanatic; but only because she doesn’t understand that every age has its own battles to fight, and this against Mammon is ours. I see a very pretty little bronze statuette of the flying Mercury on the bracket yonder, Mrs. Richards, and there is a head of the Capitoline Jove on my own mantel-piece, which I value exceedingly. Yet what would a Christian of the first century have thought of possessing such images? they who would not sit at meat in an idol’s temple, and died in agony rather than offer one grain of incense before an idol’s altar! That, you see, was their battle. Mammon is our enemy. Truly ‘an idol is nothing in this world; and there is none other God but one’; yet, ‘if meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.’”

He was silent for a moment; for the look exchanged between husband and wife told him that he had spoken more wisely than he knew. Then Dr. Richards said lightly,—

“Well, if ever I turn Christian, Mr. Clare, you shall have the glory of my conversion.”