him, caught him from his morning sleep every morning of .his life, save Sunday, and swung him inexorably into the factory?  He looked around and saw that no one was released, except through death or illness or incompetence.  And the incompetent starved.  Any child in Budge Street with a grain of sense knew that.  There was no release.  He, son of a prince, would work for ever and ever in Bludston.  His heart failed him.  And there was no one to whom he could tell the tragic and romantic story of his birth.  One or two happy gleams of brightness, however, lightened his darkness and prevented the Vision from fading entirely into the greyness of the factory sky.  Once the Owner, an unspeakable god with a bald pink head and a paunch vastly chained with gold, conducted a party of ladies over the works.  One of the latter, a very grand lady, noticed him at his bench and came-and spoke kindly to him.  Her voice had the same sweet timbre as his goddess’s.  After she had left him his quick ears caught her question to the Owner:  “Where did you get your young Apollo?  Not out of Lancashire, surely?  He’s wonderful.”  And just before she passed out of sight she turned and looked at him and smiled.  He learned on inquiry that she was the Marchioness of Chudley.  The instant recognition of him by one of his own aristocratic caste revived his faith.  The day would assuredly come.  Suppose it had been his own mother, instead of the Marchioness?  Stranger things happened in the books.  The other gleam proceeded from one of the workmen at his bench, a serious and socialistic person who occasionally lent him something to read:  Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs,” “Mill on Liberty,” Bellamy’s “Looking Backward,” at that time at the height of its popularity.  And sometimes he would talk to Paul about collectivism and the new era that was coming when there would be no such words as rich and poor, because there would be no such classes as they denoted.

Paul would say:  “Then a prince will be no better than a factory hand?”

“There won’t be any princes, I tell thee,” his friend would reply, and launch out into a denunciation of tyrants.

But this did not suit Paul.  If there were to be no princes, where, would he come in?  So, while grateful to the evangelist for talking to him and treating him as a human being, he totally rejected his gospel.  It struck at the very foundations of his visionary destiny.  He was afraid to argue, for his friend was vehement.  Also confession of aristocratic prejudices might turn friendship into enmity.  But his passionate antagonism to the communistic theory, all the more intense through suppression, strengthened his fantastic faith.  Still, the transient smile of a marchioness and the political economy of a sour-avised operative are not enough to keep alive the romance of underfed, ill-clad, overdriven childhood.  And after a while he was deprived even of the latter consolation, his friend being shifted to another end of the factory.  In despair he turned to Ada, the eldest of the little Buttons, who now had reached years of comparative discretion, and strove to interest her in his dreams, veiling his identity under a fictitious name; but Ada, an unimaginative and practical child with a growing family to look after, either listened stupidly or consigned him, in the local vernacular, to perdition.