vourite preacher and an effective speaker from
advanced radical platforms.

Finally, there was Mr. James Stephens, a Manchester solicitor (junior
partner of Hickson, Ward, and Stephens), who was travelling to shake off
the effects of an attack of influenza. Stephens was a man who, in the
course of thirty years, had worked himself up from cleaning the firm's
windows to managing its business. For most of that long time he had been
absolutely immersed in dry, technical work, living with the one idea of
satisfying old clients and attracting new ones, until his mind and soul
had become as formal and precise as the laws which he expounded. A fine
and sensitive nature was in danger of being as warped as a busy city
man's is liable to become. His work had become an engrained habit, and,
being a bachelor, he had hardly an interest in life to draw him away
from it, so that his soul was being gradually bricked up like the body
of a mediaeval nun. But at last there came this kindly illness, and
Nature hustled James Stephens out of his groove, and sent him into the
broad world far away from roaring Manchester and his shelves full of
calf-skin authorities. At first he resented it deeply. Everything seemed
trivial to him compared to his own petty routine. But gradually his eyes
were opened, and he began dimly to see that it was his work which was
trivial when compared to this wonderful, varied, inexplicable world of
which he was so ignorant. Vaguely he realised that the interruption to
his career might be more important than the career itself. All sorts
of new interests took, possession of him; and the middle-aged lawyer
developed an after-glow of that youth which had been wasted among his
books. His character was too formed to admit of his being anything
but dry and precise in his ways, and a trifle pedantic in his mode of
speech; but he read and thought and observed, scoring his "Baedeker"
with underlinings and annotations as he had once done his "Prideaux's
Commentaries." He had travelled up from Cairo with the party, and
had contracted a friendship with Miss Adams and her niece. The young
American girl, with her chatter, her audacity, and her constant flow of
high spirits, amused and interested him, and she in turn felt a mixture
of respect and of pity for his knowledge and his limitations. So they
became good friends, and people smiled to see his clouded face and her
sunny one bending over the same guide-book.

The little _Koros