bruptly.

"Please show this gentleman out!" said His Grace.

* * * * *

"So you persist in disowning your daughter?" asked the man, looking hard
at the portly, pleasant-faced matron who was dandling her thirteenth
infant on her knees. "You will show her no mercy, now she asks it at
your hands?"

"She has disgraced me--I will never forgive her!" said the woman. "Let
her starve with her brat. It will be well when they are dead."

"She has disgraced you, you say? But has she disgraced Nature? I thought
it was Nature who was responsible for her sex and its instincts. She has
obeyed the one and fulfilled the other. And they have been paramount
considerations with you also, I perceive."

"Did she owe no duty, then, to her parents? Was I to count in her life
merely as the soil to the plant?"

"In the scales of justice, as I saw them adjusted in heaven, the claim
against the parents weighed the heaviest," said the man. "You suckled
her at your breasts; but you brought her there to suckle. In your
bringing her there, lies the onus of her claim."

"I tell you, she has disgraced me, and I will never forgive her!"

"_'Never'_ is a long day for a mortal. You will be judged yourself
before you reach the end of it," said the man.

* * * * *

"Three months' imprisonment with hard labour," said the magistrate.

"For taking a loaf of bread when he was starving!" cried the man.

"Even so," said the magistrate, with his hands on his paunch.

"But surely this is a monstrous perversion of justice. Or, rather, let
me call it a monstrous _in_justice!"

"The laws of the community must be respected," said the magistrate.

"Here is a man--alive by no fault of his own, and poor, even to
starvation, through absolute want of work: and yet you begrudge him the
necessaries of life! If he tries to commit suicide, you pillory and
chastise him, and if he tries to keep life in him out of the
superfluities of others, you pass on him this monstrous sentence!" cried
the man. "Surely here is some fault in the structure of your society."

"It is the law of the community!" said the magistrate, pompously.

"And in what way is the law of the community so very sacred, that it
should be counted of higher price than the life and welfare of a man?
The law of the community may be a very pretty idol to play before, but
in heaven it counts for nothing," said the quiet old man.

"This man