.

"I think," said my wife to me, one morning at 2 A.M., "that the baby
will be born in an hour."

The announcement chilled me. There was but five cents in the house and
that was needed to telephone for the family physician. As I walked
down Chapel Street it seemed as if my heart was a nest of scorpions
spitting poison.

There was no breakfast in the house for the mother of the new-born
babe. The churches, the homes of the wealthy and the university filled
me with unutterable hate as I passed them. I was in the frame of mind
in which murder, theft, violence are committed.

I had held my integrity intact until that exigency. Then I only lacked
opportunity to smash my ideals--to bend my head, my back, my morals!

Cold sweat covered my body, my teeth chattered and my hands twitched.
My Socialist philosophy told me that society was in process of
evolution. Democracy at heart was correcting its own evils and like a
snake sloughing off its outworn skin. I was part of that process.
Reason pounded these things in on me but hate pushed them aside and
demanded something else. I wondered that morning whether after all
there weren't more reforms wrapped up in a stick of dynamite than in a
whole life of preaching and moralizing. In that fifteen-minute walk
there passed through my mind and heart all the elements of hell.

It was a new experience to me--I had not travelled that way before. I
went into a little restaurant to use the 'phone. I laid the nickel on
the counter, when I had finished, and as I did so the waiter said,
"It's a 'phone on me, Mr. Irvine;" and he rang up five cents in the
cash register.

"Ah," I said, "you know me then?"

"Sure thing," he said, "don't you know me?"

I shook my head.

"Gee!" he said, "you're sick. You look like hell!"

"I feel like it."

"What's up?"

"You heard me 'phone?"

"Sure--aint you glad?"

"Yes--but----"

"Say, have a cup of hot coffee, won't you?"

"Thank you, I think I will."

His intuition was keen enough to perceive that the trouble was mental
and as I took the coffee he said:

"Discouraged a bit, hey?"

Without waiting for a reply he proceeded to tell me how a few words of
mine at one of the trolleymen's midnight meetings had changed his
life. He went into details and as he went on I saw a look of
contentment on his face and as I watched, it changed the look on my
own.

I could not drink his coffee but I shared his comradeship and as I
went back home I b