a bank teller;
$50,000 gone.--The coal barons decide to advance the price of coal and
reduce production.--Speculators engineering a great wheat corner at
Chicago.--A clique forcing up the price of coffee.--Enormous land-grabs
of Western syndicates.--Revelations of shocking corruption among
Chicago officials. Systematic bribery.--The trials of the Boodle
aldermen to go on at New York.--Large failures of business houses.
Fears of a business crisis.--A large grist of burglaries and
larcenies.--A woman murdered in cold blood for her money at New
Haven.--A householder shot by a burglar in this city last night.--A man
shoots himself in Worcester because he could not get work. A large
family left destitute.--An aged couple in New Jersey commit suicide
rather than go to the poor-house.--Pitiable destitution among the women
wage-workers in the great cities.--Startling growth of illiteracy in
Massachusetts.--More insane asylums wanted.--Decoration Day addresses.
Professor Brown's oration on the moral grandeur of nineteenth century
civilization."

It was indeed the nineteenth century to which I had awaked; there could
be no kind of doubt about that. Its complete microcosm this summary of
the day's news had presented, even to that last unmistakable touch of
fatuous self-complacency. Coming after such a damning indictment of the
age as that one day's chronicle of world-wide bloodshed, greed, and
tyranny, was a bit of cynicism worthy of Mephistopheles, and yet of all
whose eyes it had met this morning I was, perhaps, the only one who
perceived the cynicism, and but yesterday I should have perceived it no
more than the others. That strange dream it was which had made all the
difference. For I know not how long, I forgot my surroundings after
this, and was again in fancy moving in that vivid dream-world, in that
glorious city, with its homes of simple comfort and its gorgeous public
palaces. Around me were again faces unmarred by arrogance or servility,
by envy or greed, by anxious care or feverish ambition, and stately
forms of men and women who had never known fear of a fellow man or
depended on his favor, but always, in the words of that sermon which
still rang in my ears, had "stood up straight before God."

With a profound sigh and a sense of irreparable loss, not the less
poignant that it was a loss of what had never really been, I roused at
last from my reverie, and soon after left the house.

A dozen times between my door an