tions were granite," rejoined the old man with nervous
eagerness,--"granite, not the slime of yesterday. When you found
empires, go to work as God worked."

The Doctor did not answer; sat looking, instead, out into the dark
indifferently, as if the heresies which the old man hurled at him were
some old worn-out song. Seeing, however, that the school-master's
flush of enthusiasm seemed on the point of dying out, he roused himself
to gibe it into life.

"Well, Mr. Howth, what will you have? If the trodden rights of the
human soul are the slime of yesterday, how shall we found our empire to
last? On despotism? Civil or theocratic?"

"Any despotism is better than that of newly enfranchised serfs,"
replied the school-master.

The Doctor laughed.

"What a successful politician you would have made? You would have had
such a winning way to the hearts of the great unwashed!"

Mrs. Howth laid down her knitting.

"My dear," she said, timidly, "I think that is treason."

The angry heat died out of his face instantly, as he turned to her,
without the glimmer of a covert smile at her simplicity. She was a
woman; and when he spoke to the Doctor, it was in a tone less sharp.

"What is it the boys used to declaim, their Yankee hearts throbbing
under their round-aborts? 'Happy, proud America!' Somehow in that way.
'Cursed, abased America!' better if they had said. Look at her, in the
warm vigour of her youth, most vigorous in decay! Look at the germs
and dregs of nations, creeds, religions, fermenting together! As for
the theory of self-government, it will muddle down here, as in the
three great archetypes of the experiment, into a paling, miserable
failure!"

The Doctor did not hear. Some sharper shadow seemed to haunt him than
the downfall of the Republic. What help did he seek in this girl? His
keen, deep eyes never left her unconscious face.

"No," Mr. Howth went on, having the field to himself,--"we left Order
back there in the ages you call dark, and Progress will trumpet the
world into the ditch."

"Comte!" growled the Doctor.

The school-master's cane beat an angry tattoo on the hearth.

"You sneer at Comte? Because, having the clearest eye, the widest
sweeping eye ever given to man, he had no more? It was to show how far
flesh can go alone. Could he help it, if God refused the prophet's
vision?"

"I'm sure, Samuel," interrupted his wife with a sorrowful earnestness,
"your own eyes were as stro