h threatened them with a new order of
things. They opposed all needful changes. They opposed emancipation for
those who had nothing in the world. They behaved as though society had
from eternity been ordained for them, as though they could say 'Thus
far and no farther.'

"You will understand that I have learnt all these ideas from my
intercourse with him. I could after my own fashion make all his
speeches, and that more fluently; but I believe that this exchanging
one word for another, and his perpetually halting over it, made the
words that he finally did choose more significant. For my part, I have
written down everything that happened in our short life together."

"Everything?"

"I mean everything that mattered at all. Everything, everything. He
never wrote a line, he said he had no time, he despised it. And when
death took him from me and from us all, what had I better to do?
No--don't interrupt me--let me go on telling you! He repeated the same
thought from the religious point of view. It was his way to look at the
same idea from every side. He said that to-day he had been to see an
old woman who said that she couldn't go to church because she had no
shoes. There was no end of trouble to get her some, for the two
shoe-shops wouldn't sell any on Sunday, but she got them. He saw her
afterwards go to church, just at the same time as the Queen and her
suite.

"And he thought, there are so many who sit in church with wretched
shoes on, and so many at home, who dare not venture to church because
of their miserable shoes, or the rest of their miserable garments. Who
are they who have such wretched shoes and clothing? They who have
worked most, worked until they are broken with toil.

"But those who have not worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have
a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not
been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as
though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had
shoes should give them to those who had none. You would gather from the
preaching that Jesus Himself had taught it, Jesus had come to make all
men happy, and this was the best way! For it is written, 'He went about
doing good.'

"But they all went home from church just as they came; and no exchange
of shoes took place, nor exchange of clothing either. One went back to
his superfluity of leisure, the other to his poverty and want, and
those who had not been able