nature would be better and happier if it were not human nature, but something else.  Some of the writers believed that this result might be attained by making many laws and some of them were of the opinion that the way to it was to undo a majority of the laws that were already made.  All admitted that the world was very badly off and that something must be done, and done very quickly, to relieve it—­but the trouble was that each writer’s remedy was different from every other writer’s, and yet each writer’s was the imperative, the essential one.  There was a single point on which they agreed, and that was that human nature would be better and happier if it were different.  But poor human nature, having known this ever since it left the tree-tops, went on, just the same, being all the time the thing that it was obliged to be.

“There’s no help for me here,” said Abel, and moving away from the shelf, he leaned his arms in the window, and looked out on the dripping wheel and the crooked sycamore, which was decorated with little round greenish balls of flowers.  On the hot agony in his heart the languorous Southern spring laid a cooling and delicate touch.  Beneath the throb of his pain he felt the stirring of formless, indefinite longings, half spiritual, half physical, which seemed older and more universal than his immediate suffering.

For six weeks the canker gnawed at his heart, and he gave no sign of its presence.  Then relief came to him for a few hours one day when he drifted into a local meeting in Applegate and entered into a discussion of politics.  At the end he spoke for twenty minutes, and when his speech was over, he told himself that at last he had found something that might take the place of love in his life.  The game of politics showed itself to him in all the exciting allurement of a passion.

A gentle mannered old clergyman, with a dream-haunted face and the patient waiting attitude of one who had watched for miracles for fifty years, spoke to him when the meeting was breaking up, and after a brief conversation, invited him to address a club of workingmen on the following Friday.  Though the old clergyman had spent half a century in a futile endeavour to persuade every man to love his neighbour as himself, and thereby save society the worry and the expense of its criminal code, he still hoped on with the divine far-sighted hope of the visionary—­hoped not because he saw anything particularly encouraging in his immediate outlook, but because it was his nature to hope and he would probably have continued to do so had Fate been so unjust as to consign him to an Inferno.  He was one of those in whom goodness is a natural instinct, and whose existence, even in a more or less inglorious obscurity, leavens the entire lump of humanity.  Mr. Mullen, who regarded him with the active suspicion with which he viewed all living examples of Christian charity, spoke of him condescendingly as a “man of impracticable ideas”—­a