d and passed in.

Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on
the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo--a happy angel
with finger upon his lip.

And when the dream had gone, and I was once more alone, I said 'Jim is
working, Siss is waiting, and I--am eating borrowed oysters.'

Then I took out the sovereign and looked at it, for it was now symbolic.
Outside, above the street, a star was shining. I had filched a beam of
Siss's star. Was it less bright tonight? Had she missed this sovereign?

It had been symbolic before--a sovereign's-worth of the world, the flesh,
and the devil; now it was a sovereign's-worth of holy love and home. Every
penny I spent of it dimmed that star, delayed that home. In my pocket it
meant a sovereign's-worth more working and waiting. Pay it back again into
that star, and it was a sovereign nearer home. Yes, it was a
sovereign's-worth of that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those
burning candles, that photograph, that ivory-white door, those
sweet-smelling flowers, a sovereign's-worth of that angel, I was keeping
in my pocket.

Out on it! God forgive me. I had not thought it meant that to borrow a
sovereign from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed oysters.
Nevertheless, they had not been all an immoral indulgence. Even oysters
may be the instruments of virtue in the hands of Providence.

The shopman knew me, so I 'confounded it' and told him I had come out
without my purse. It was all right. Pay next time, Jim's theatre was
close by, it was but a stone's-throw to the stage-door. Easy to leave him
a note. What will he think, I wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign
rolls out: 'Dear old man, forgive me--I forgot it was a sovereign's-worth
of home.'

Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did this thing.

ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY

(A FABLE FOR SOCIALISTS)

Having occasion recently to re-arrange my books, they lay in bewildering
jumbled heaps upon my study floor; and, having in vain puzzled over this
plan and that which should give the little collection a continuity such as
it had never attained before, I at length gave it up in despair, and sat,
with my head in my hands, hopeless. Presently I seemed to hear small
voices talking in whispers, a curious papery tone, like the fluttering of
leaves, and listening I heard distinctly these words:--'The great era of
universal equality and redistribution has dawned at last. No one boo