ency? Which should
come first, to return to the enigma before me, the grocer or the
chemist? Which is more certainly the stay of the city, the swift
chivalrous chemist or the benignant all-providing grocer? In such
ultimate spiritual doubts it is only possible to choose a side by the
higher instincts, and to abide the issue. In any case, I have made my
choice. May I be pardoned if I choose wrongly, but I choose the
grocer."

"Good morning, sir," said the grocer, who was a middle-aged man,
partially bald, with harsh red whiskers and beard, and forehead lined
with all the cares of the small tradesman. "What can I do for you,
sir?"

Wayne removed his hat on entering the shop, with a ceremonious
gesture, which, slight as it was, made the tradesman eye him with the
beginnings of wonder.

"I come, sir," he said soberly, "to appeal to your patriotism."

"Why, sir," said the grocer, "that sounds like the times when I was a
boy and we used to have elections."

"You will have them again," said Wayne, firmly, "and far greater
things. Listen, Mr. Mead. I know the temptations which a grocer has to
a too cosmopolitan philosophy. I can imagine what it must be to sit
all day as you do surrounded with wares from all the ends of the
earth, from strange seas that we have never sailed and strange forests
that we could not even picture. No Eastern king ever had such
argosies or such cargoes coming from the sunrise and the sunset, and
Solomon in all his glory was not enriched like one of you. India is at
your elbow," he cried, lifting his voice and pointing his stick at a
drawer of rice, the grocer making a movement of some alarm, "China is
before you, Demerara is behind you, America is above your head, and at
this very moment, like some old Spanish admiral, you hold Tunis in
your hands."

Mr. Mead dropped the box of dates which he was just lifting, and then
picked it up again vaguely.

Wayne went on with a heightened colour, but a lowered voice,

"I know, I say, the temptations of so international, so universal a
vision of wealth. I know that it must be your danger not to fall like
many tradesmen into too dusty and mechanical a narrowness, but rather
to be too broad, to be too general, too liberal. If a narrow
nationalism be the danger of the pastry-cook, who makes his own wares
under his own heavens, no less is cosmopolitanism the danger of the
grocer. But I come to you in the name of that patriotism which no
wanderings or enli