nging with
her her own champagne and butter, with both of which she insisted on
providing her friends also. My cabin, though small, was perfect in the
way of decoration. An ormolu reading lamp stood by the silken curtains
of the bed. The washing basin was of pink marble.

Before returning to England I had settled on spending some solitary
months in Brittany, during which it was my object to bring my
forthcoming work to completion. I spent a week in Paris, where my French
servant rejoined me, whom I had left to enjoy during my absence a
holiday, with his family near Grenoble. I never in my life met anyone
with more satisfaction.

Paris is notoriously congenial to the upper classes of America; and yet
between Paris and New York there is one subtle and pervading difference.
Paris has behind it in its buildings and the ways of its people what New
York has not--a thousand years of history. The influence of the past is
even more apparent in Brittany; and New York became something hardly
credible when I found myself in a little hotel--at which I had engaged
rooms--an hotel girdled by the ramparts and medieval towers of Dinan. I
remained there for six weeks, during which time my book, to which I gave
the name _A Critical Examination of Socialism_, was very nearly
completed. In spite, however, of my labor, I from time to time found
leisure for pilgrimages to moated chateaux, which seemed still to be
enjoying a siesta of social and religious peace, unbroken by revolutions
and even undisturbed by republics. Of these chateaux one was the home of
Chateaubriand. Another, which I traveled a hundred miles to see, was the
Chateau de Kerjaen, its gray gates approached by three huge converging
avenues, and the outer walls by which the chateau itself is sheltered
measuring seven hundred by four hundred feet. Though parts of it are
habitable and inhabited, Kerjaen is partly ruinous, but its ruin was not
due to violence. It was due to an accidental fire which took place when
Robespierre was still in his cradle and even in his dreams was
"guiltless of his country's blood." Coming, as I did, fresh from the New
World, there was for me in Brittany something of the magic of Hungary.

_A Critical Examination of Socialism_ was published a few months after
my return to England, where Socialist agitation meanwhile had become
more active than ever, and I presently discovered that certain attempts
were being made to establish some organized body for