a month."

Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have
given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and
soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they
can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that
way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy
to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side
with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in
hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that
with Unions was the working-man's only present hope of standing up like a
man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was
afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very
last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great
humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk
could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in
literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
'Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.'

XII.

Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One
night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I
can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head
thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of
his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and
amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
journey with a night's