family does. I have had enough of communities. The family we hope to found must include all men who are willing to work; it must recognize no aliens except the drones, and the drones must not be suffered to continue. They must either cease to exist by going to work, or by starving to death. But this great family-the real human family-must be no agglutinated structure, no mere federation of trades-unions; it must be a natural growth from indigenous stocks, which will gradually displace individual and corporate enterprises by pushing its roots and its branches out under and over them till they have no longer earth or air to live in. It will then slowly possess itself of the whole field of production and distribution."

to laugh. Ray saw Mrs. Denton put her hand on her mouth; her husband glowered silently; her sister sat with downcast eyes.

The debate went on, and it seemed as if there were almost as many opinions as there were people present. At times it interested Ray: at times it bored him; but at all times he kept thinking that if he could get those queer zealots into a book they would be amusing material, though he shuddered to find himself personally among them. Hughes coughed painfully in the air thickened with many breaths, and the windows had to be opened for him; then the rush of the elevated trains filled the room, and the windows were shut again. After one of these interludes, Ray was aware of Hughes appealing to some one in the same tone in which he had asked him to go and send in his whiskey and milk; he looked up, and saw that Hughes was appealing to him.

"Young man, have you nothing to say on all these questions? Is it possible that you have not thought of them?"

Ray was so startled that for a moment he could not speak. Then he said, hardily, but in the frank spirit of the discussion, "No, I have never thought of them at all."

"It is time you did," said Hughes. "All other interests must yield to them. We can have no true art, no real literature, no science worthy the name, till the money stamp of egoism is effaced from success, and it is honored, not paid.”

The others turned and stared at Ray; old Kane arched his eyebrows at him, and made rings of white round his eyes; he pursed his mouth as if he would like

ing-man; high tariff and large wages for the working-man. Whether we have high tariff or low, the working-man always wins. But he does not seem to prosper. He is poor; he is badly fed and housed; when he is out of work, he starves in his den till he is evicted with a ruthlessness unknown in the history of Irish oppression. Neither party means to do anything for the working-man, and he hasn't risen himself yet to the conception of anything more philosophical than more pay and fewer hours."

A sad-faced man spoke from a corner of the room. "We must have time to think, and something to eat to-day. We can't wait till to-morrow."

"That is true,' Hughes answered. "Many must perish by the way. But we must have patience."

His son-in-law spoke up, and his gloomy face darkened. "I have no heart for patience. When I see people perishing by the way, I ask myself how they shall be saved, not some other time, but now. Some one is guilty of the wrong they suffer. How shall the sin be remitted?" His voice shook with fanatical passion.

"We must have patience," Hughes repeated. "We are all guilty."

"It would be a good thing," said the man with the German accent, "if the low-tariff men would really cut off the duties. The high-tariff men don't put wages up because they have protection, but they would surely put them down if they didn't have it. Then you would see labor troubles everywhere.'

"Yes," said Hughes; "but such hopes

as that would make me hate the cause, if anything could. Evil that good may come? Never! Always good, and good for evil, that the good may come more and more! We must have the true America in the true American way, by reasons, by votes, by laws, and not otherwise."

The spirit which he rebuked had unlocked the passions of those around him. Ray had a vision of them in the stormy dispute which followed, as waves beating and dashing upon the old man; the head of the perfectly bald man was like a buoy among the breakers, as it turned and bobbed about, in his eagerness to follow all that was said.

Suddenly the impulses spent themselves and a calm succeeded. One of the men looked at his watch; they all rose one after another to go.

Hughes held them a little longer. "I don't believe the good time is so far off as we are apt to think in our indignation at wrong. It is coming soon, and its mere approach will bring sensible relief. We must have courage and patience.'

Ray and Kane went away together. Mrs. Denton looked at him with demure question in her eyes when they parted; Peace imparted no feeling in her still glance. Hughes took Ray's little hand in his large, loose grasp, and said, "Come again, young man; come again!"

XVIII.

"If ever I come again," Ray vowed to himself, when he got into the street, "I think I shall know it!" He abhorred all sorts of social outlandishness; he had always wished to be conformed, without and within, to the great world of smooth respectabilities. If for the present he was willing to Bohemianize a little, it was in his quality of author, and as part of a world-old tradition. To have been mixed up with a lot of howling dervishes like those people was intolerable. He tingled with a sense of personal injury from Hughes's asking him to take part in their discussion; and he was all the angrier because he could not resent it, even to Kane, on account of that young girl, who could not let him see that it distressed her, too; he felt bound to her by the tie of favor done which he must not allow to become painful.

He knew, as they walked rapidly down the avenue, crazy with the trains hurtling

by over the jingling horse-cars and the clattering holiday crowds, that old Kane was seeking out his with eyes brimming with laughter, but he would not look at him, and he would not see any fun in the affair. He would not speak, and he held his tongue the more resolutely because he believed Kane meant to make him speak first.

He had his way; it was Kane who broke the silence, after they left the avenue, and struck into one of the cross-streets leading to the Park. Piles of lumber and barrels of cement blocked two-thirds of its space, in front of half-built houses, which yawned upon it from cavernous depths. Boys were playing over the boards and barrels, and on the rocky hill-side behind the houses, where a portable engine stood at Sunday rest, and tall derricks rose and stretched their idle arms abroad. At the top of the hill a row of brown-stone fronts looked serenely down upon the havoc of stone thrown up by the blasting, as if it were a quiet pleasance.

"Amiable prospect, isn't it?" said Kane. "It looks as if Hughes's Afreet has got out of his bottle, and had a good time here, holding on for a rise, and then building on spec. But perhaps we oughtn't to judge of it at this stage, when everything is in transition. Think how beautiful it will be when it is all solidly built up here as it is down-town!" He passed his hand through Ray's lax arm, and leaned affectionately toward him as they walked on, after a little pause he made for this remark on the scenery. "Well, my dear young friend, what do you think of my dear old friend?"

"Of Mr. Hughes?" Ray asked, and he restrained himself in a pretended question. "Of Mr. Hughes, and of Mr. Hughes's friends."

Ray flashed out upon this. "I think his friends are a lot of cranks."

"Yes; very good; very excellent good! They are cranks. Are they the first you have met in New York?"

"No; the place seems to be full of them."

"Beginning with the elderly gentleman. whom you met the first morning?"

"Beginning with the young man who met the elderly gentleman."

We

Kane smiled with appreciation. "Well, we won't be harsh on those two. won't call them cranks. They are philosophical observers, or inspired dreamers, if you like. As I understand it we

are all dreamers. If we like a man's dream, we call him a prophet; if we don't like his dream, we call him a crank. Now, what is the matter with the dreams, severally and collectively, of my dear old friend and his friends? Can you deny that any one of their remedies, if taken faithfully according to the directions blown on the bottle, would cure the world of all its woes inside of six months?"

The question gave Ray a chance to vent his vexation impersonally. "What is the matter with the world ?" he burst out. "I don't see that the world is so very sick. Why isn't it going on very well? I don't understand what this talk is all about. I don't see what those people have got to complain of. All any one can ask is a fair chance to show how much his work is worth, and let the best man win. What's the trouble? Where's the wrong?" "Ah," said Kane, "what a pity you didn't set forth those ideas when Hughes called upon you!"

mean dependence, and David Hughes is proud."

They had passed through lofty ranks of flats, and they now came to the viaduct carrying the northern railways; one of its noble arches opened before them like a city gate, and the viaduct in its massy extent was like a wall that had stood a hundred sieges. Beyond they found open fields, with the old farm fences of stone still enclosing them, but with the cellars of city blocks dug out of the lots. In one place there was a spread of low sheds, neighbored by towering apartment-houses; some old cart-horses were cropping the belated grass; and comfortable companies of hens and groups of turkeys were picking about the stableyard; a shambling cottage fronted on the avenue next the park, and drooped behind its dusty, leafless vines.

You would call them a crew, then? Perhaps they were a crew," said Kane. "I don't know why a reformer should be so grotesque; but he is, and he is always the easy prey of caricature. I couldn't help feeling to-day how very like the burlesque reformers the real reformers are. And they are always the same, from generation to generation. For all outward difference, those men and brethren of both sexes at poor David's were very like a group of old-time abolitionists conscientiously qualifying themselves for tar and feathers. Perhaps you don't like being spoken to in meeting?"

"No, I don't," said Ray, bluntly.

'I fancied a certain reluctance in you at the time, but I don't think poor David meant any harm. He preaches patience, but I think he secretly feels that he's got to hurry, if he's going to have the kingdom of heaven on earth; and he wants every one to lend a hand."

For the reason, or from the instinct, that forbade Ray to let out his wrath directly against Hughes, he now concealed his pity. He asked stiffly: "Couldn't he be got into some better place? Where he wouldn't be stunned when he tried to keep from suffocating?"

"No, I don't know that he could," said Kane, with a pensive singleness rare in him. "Any help of that kind would

to get in his work."

"Wouldn't it be rather too much like that eremitism which he's so down on?" asked Ray, with a persistence in his effect of indifference.

"Perhaps it would, perhaps it would," Kane consented, as they struck across into the Park. The grass was still very green, though here and there a little sallow; the leaves, which had dropped from the trees in the October rains, had lost their fire, and lay dull and brown in the little hollows and at the edges of the paths and the bases of the rocks; the oaks kept theirs, but in death; on some of the ash-trees and lindens the leaves hung in a pale reminiscence of their summer green.

He

"I understood the son-in-law to want a hermitage somewhere-a co-operative hermitage, I suppose," Ray went on. did not feel bound to spare the son-in-law, and he put contempt into his tone. "Ah, yes," said Kane. "What did you make of the son-in-law?"

"I don't know. He's a gloomy sprite. What is he, anyway? His wife spoke of his work."

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'Why, it's rather a romantic story. I believe," said Kane. "He was a young fellow who stopped at the community on his way to a place where he was going to find work; he's a wood-engraver. I believe he's always had the notion that the

the lines of truth. I don't justify Nature altogether. She is not free from certain little foibles, caprices; perhaps that's why we call her she. But I don't think that, with all her faults, she's quite so bad as Business. In that we seem to have gone to Nature for her defects. Why copy her weakness and bad faith? Why not study her

"Well, I don't know! But if it isn't evident to you that Mrs. Denton is hardly fitted to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of such a man-"

Ray would not pursue this branch of the inquiry. "His notion of what the world wanted was to have its cities eliminated. Then he thought it would be all serene." "Ah, that wouldn't do," said Kane. "Cities are a vice, but they are essential to us now. We could not live without them; perhaps we are to be saved by them. But it is well to return to Nature from time to time."

"I thought I heard you saying some rather disparaging things of Nature a little while ago," said Ray, with a remaining grudge against Kane, and with a young man's willingness to convict his elder of any inconsistency, serious or unserious.

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Oh, primeval Nature, yes. But I have nothing but praise for this kindthe kind that man controls and guides. It is outlaw Nature that I object to, the savage survival from chaos, the mother of earthquakes and cyclones, blizzards and untimely frosts, inundations and indigestions. But ordered Nature the Nature of the rolling year; night and day, and seed-time and harvest—”

"The seasons," Ray broke in, scornfully, from the resentment still souring in his soul, "turn themselves upside down and wrong end to, about as often as financial panics occur, and the farmer that has to rely on them is as apt to get left as the husbandman that sows and reaps in Wall Street."

"Ah!" sighed Kane. "That was well said. I wish I had thought of it for my second series of Hard Sayings."

"Oh, you're welcome to it!"

"Are you so rich in paradoxes? But I will contrive to credit it somehow to the gifted author of A New Romeo. Is that what you call it?"

ence in laying the bases of civilization? We don't go to her for the justification of murder, incest, robbery, gluttony, though you can find them all in her. We have our little prejudice against these things, and we seem to derive it from somewhere outside of what we call Nature. Why not go to that Somewhere for the law of economic life? But come," Kane broke off, gayly, "let us babble of green fields; as for God, God, I hope we have no need to think of such things yet. Please Heaven, our noses are not as sharp as pens, by a long way. I don't wonder you find it a beautiful and beneficent world, in spite of our friends yonder, who want to make it prettier and better, in their way." Kane put his arm across Ray's shoulder, and pulled him affectionately towards him. "Are you vexed with me for having introduced you to those people? I have been imagining something of the kind.”

"Oh, no--" Ray began.

"I didn't really mean to stay for Hughes's conventicle," said Kane. "Chapley was wise, and went in time, before he could feel the wild charm of those visionaries; it was too much for me; when they began to come, I couldn't go. I forgot how repugnant the golden age has always been to the heart of youth, which likes the nineteenth century much better. The fact is, I forgot that I had brought you till it was too late to take you away." He laughed, and Ray, more reluctantly, laughed with him.

"I have often wondered," he went on, "how it is we lose the youthful point of view. We have it some night, and the next morning we haven't it; and we can hardly remember what it was. I don't suppose you could tell me what the youthful point of view of the present day is, though I should recognize that of forty years ago. I-"

young fellows, mounted on perfectly groomed trotters, whose round haunches trembled and dimpled with their hard

pace.

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a

"Perhaps that is the youthful point of view now: the healthy, the wealthy, the physically strong, the materially rich. Well, I think ours was better; pallid and poor in person and in purse as we imagined the condition of the ideal man to be. There is something," said Kane, little more expressive of the insolence of money in one of those brutes than in the most glittering carriage and pair. I think if I had in me the material for really hating a fellow-man, I should apply it to the detestation of the rider of one of those animals. But I haven't. I am not in prospective need even, and I am at the moment no hungrier than a gentleman ought to be who is going to lunch with a lady in the Mandan Flats. By-the-way! Why shouldn't you come with me? They would be delighted to see you. A brilliant young widow, with a pretty stepdaughter, is not to be lunched with every day, and I can answer for your wel

Ray did not go to deliver any of his letters that afternoon; he decided now that it would be out of taste to do so on Sunday, as he had already doubted that it would be, in the morning. He passed the afternoon in his room, trying from time to time to reduce the turmoil of his reveries to intelligible terms in verse, and in poetic prose. He did nothing with them; in the end, though, he was aware of a new ideal, and he resolved that if he

could get his story back from Chapley & Co., he would rewrite the passages that characterized the heroine, and make it less like the every-day, simple prettiness of his first love. He had always known that this did not suit the character he had imagined; he now saw that it required a more complex and mystical charm. But he did not allow himself to formulate these volitions and perceptions, any more than his conviction that he had now a double reason for keeping away from Mr. Brandreth and from Miss Hughes. He spent the week in a sort of ecstasy of forbearance. On Saturday afternoon he feigned the necessity of going to ask Mr. Brandreth how he thought a novel in verse, treating a strictly American subject in a fantastic way, would succeed. He really wished to learn something without seeming to wish it about his manuscript, but he called so late in the afternoon that he found Mr. Brandreth putting his desk in order just before starting home. He professed a great pleasure at sight of Ray, and said he wished he would come part of the way home with him: he wanted to have a little talk.

As if the word home had roused the latent forces of hospitality in him, he added, "I want to have you up at my place, some day, as soon as we can get turned round. Mrs. Brandreth is doing first-rate, now; and that boy-well, sir, he's a perfect Titan. I wish you could see him undressed. He's just like the figure of the infant Hercules strangling the serpent when he grips the nurse's finger. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I believe that fellow recognizes me, and distinguishes between me and his mother. I suppose it's my hat-I come in with my hat on, you know, just to try him; and when he catches sight of that hat, you ought to see his arms go!"

The paternal rhapsodies continued a long time after they were in the street, and Ray got no chance to bring in either his real or pretended business. He listened with mechanical smiles and hollow laughter, alert at the same time for the slightest vantage which Mr. Brandreth should give him. But the publisher said. of his own motion,

"Oh, by-the-way, you'll be interested to know that our readers' reports on your story are in."

"Are they?" Ray gasped. He could not get out any more.