ne place to another--to ministers,
lawyers, judges, legislators, etc. Nothing could be done. They were
all the personal friends of the officials.

The papers wouldn't print anything about it. The book-keeper said he
thought he knew why "editors never had any water bills." Some radicals
got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad. The
aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a
matter of business.

The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang.
Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the
leading citizen who had been accused. They elected him to the State
Senate! A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a
negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its
servant.

I felt my loneliness very keenly--indeed, so much so that it was often
as though I had committed a great crime. Always, however, at the
breaking-point came a word of cheer--a note of approval.

Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul's
church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour.

"I do not suppose," he said, "that I look at things as you do, in all
respects, but I would like to assure you of my great regard for you
and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness. I know that
the world's great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who
feel it not sit in judgment upon you."

The People's Church dwindled to a vanishing point. The farm produced
nothing. Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples.

"Make a break!" my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the
fight. The fight was already over and I was beaten--beaten, but
unaware of defeat.

One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three
Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves. A
branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder. I lay as one dead. My
wife found me there and hailed a passing grocer's wagon. The boy
whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news
that I had been killed by a fall. Among the first callers after the
accident were Donald G. Mitchell and his daughter, my neighbours. I
lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony.

Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we scraped together
the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her
philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the
ci