The papers wouldn’t print anything about it.  The book-keeper said he thought he knew why “editors never had any water bills.”  Some radicals got the big check printed in facsimile and scattered it abroad.  The aldermen had been bought; there was no doubt of that, but it was a matter of business.

The whole agitation came back on the reformers like a boomerang.  Leading politicians determined to do something to vindicate the leading citizen who had been accused.  They elected him to the State Senate!  A city of a hundred thousand can by either a positive or a negative process, destroy the usefulness of any man who would be its servant.

I felt my loneliness very keenly—­indeed, so much so that it was often as though I had committed a great crime.  Always, however, at the breaking-point came a word of cheer—­a note of approval.

Bishop Lines of Newark, New Jersey, who was then Rector of St. Paul’s church, sent me a note, that reached me in a dark hour.

“I do not suppose,” he said, “that I look at things as you do, in all respects, but I would like to assure you of my great regard for you and of my implicit faith in your sincerity and goodness.  I know that the world’s great sorrow rests upon your heart and that many men who feel it not sit in judgment upon you.”

The People’s Church dwindled to a vanishing point.  The farm produced nothing.  Autumn came and we lived largely upon apples.

“Make a break!” my wife said, but it seemed like running away from the fight.  The fight was already over and I was beaten—­beaten, but unaware of defeat.

One morning I was at the top of a big apple tree, shaking it for three Italian women whom we believed to be worse off than ourselves.  A branch broke and I fell on my back on a boulder.  I lay as one dead.  My wife found me there and hailed a passing grocer’s wagon.  The boy whipped up his horse to bring a doctor, but on the way spread the news that I had been killed by a fall.  Among the first callers after the accident were Donald G. Mitchell and his daughter, my neighbours.  I lay on a mattress on the lawn all afternoon in great agony.

Although it was with the greatest difficulty that we scraped together the twenty-five dollars a month for the farm, my wife, putting her philosophy of the New Thought to the test, had rented a house in the city at seventy dollars a month.  When she rented it, we hadn’t seventy cents.  We were to move into it the day of the accident.  I insisted that we proceed.

“Send for Jimmy Moohan,” I said.  Jimmy was a genial old Irish expressman whose stand was at the New Haven Green.  Jimmy came and looked me over.  Then came Bob Grant, a foreman from a near-by manufacturing concern, and after him four Socialist comrades on their way home from work.

“Ah, Mother o’ God,” Jimmy said, “shure it’s an ambulance yer riverence shud haave.”

“I want you, Jimmy; pile me in.”