it.  That pretty, dollar-crusted young Republican wants an aristocracy, . . she will engraft it on the old roots here,—­in fact, she has already begun to engraft it.  It is even on the cards that she may need a Monarchy—­if she does, she will plant it..  Here!  Then it will be time for Englishmen to adopt another country, and forget, if they can, their own disgraced nationality.  And yet, if, as Shakespeare says, England were to herself but true,—­if she had great statesmen as of yore,—­intellectual, earnest, self-abnegating, fearless, unhesitating workers, who would devote themselves heart and soul to her welfare, she might gather, not only her Colonies, but America also, to her knee, as a mother gathers children, and the most magnificent Christian Empire the world has ever seen might rise up, a supreme marvel of civilization and union that would make all other nations wonder and revere.  But the selfishness of the day, and the ruling passion of gain, are the fatal obstructions in the path of such a desirable millennium.”

He ended abruptly—­he had unburdened his mind to one who he knew understood him and sympathized with him, and he turned to the perusal of some letters just received.

The two friends were sitting that morning in the breakfast-room,—­ a charming little octagonal apartment, looking out on a small, very small garden, which, despite the London atmosphere, looked just now very bright with tastefully arranged parterres of white and yellow crocuses, mingled with the soft blue of the dainty hepatica,—­that frank-faced little blossom which seems to express such an honest confidence in the goodness of God’s sky.  A few sparrows of dissipated appearance were bathing their sooty plumes in a pool of equally sooty water left in the garden as a token of last night’s rain, and they splashed and twittered and debated and fussed with each other concerning their ablutions, with almost as much importance as could have been displayed by the effeminate Romans of the Augustan era when disporting themselves in their sumptuous Thermae.  Alwyn’s eyes rested on them unseeingly,—­his thoughts were very far away from all his surroundings.  Before his imagination rose a Gehenna-like picture of the world in which he had to live,—­the world of fashion and form and usage,—­the world he was to try and rouse to a sense of better things.  A Promethean task indeed! to fill human life with new symbols of hope,—­to set up a white standard of faith amid the swift rushing on and reckless tramping down of desperate battle,—­to pour out on all, rich or poor, worthy or unworthy, the divine-born balm of Sympathy, which, when given freely and sincerely from man to man, serves often as a check to vice—­a silent, yet all eloquent, rebuke to crime,—­and can more easily instill into refractory intelligences things of God and desires for good, than any preacher’s argument, no matter how finely worded.  To touch the big, wayward, better heart of Humanity! ... could he in very truth do it? ...  Or was the work too vast for his ability?  Tormented by various cross-currents of feeling, he gave vent to a troubled sigh and looked dubiously at his friend.