ought he would change the
subject. "It's curious how like my mother you are; I mean, your ways.
She was always saying to me, 'Don't be too anxious to make money, Peter.
Too much wealth is as bad as too much poverty.' You're very like her."

After a while Peter said, bending over a little towards the stranger,
"If you don't want to make money, what did you come to this land for? No
one comes here for anything else. Are you in with the Portuguese?"

"I am not more with one people than with another," said the stranger.
"The Frenchman is not more to me than the Englishman, the Englishman
than the Kaffir, the Kaffir than the Chinaman. I have heard," said the
stranger, "the black infant cry as it crept on its mother's body and
sought for her breast as she lay dead in the roadway. I have heard also
the rich man's child wail in the palace. I hear all cries."

Peter looked intently at him. "Why, who are you?" he said; then, bending
nearer to the stranger and looking up, he added, "What is it that you
are doing here?"

"I belong," said the stranger, "to the strongest company on earth."

"Oh," said Peter, sitting up, the look of wonder passing from his face.
"So that's it, is it? Is it diamonds, or gold, or lands?"

"We are the most vast of all companies on the earth," said the stranger;
"and we are always growing. We have among us men of every race and from
every land; the Esquimo, the Chinaman, the Turk, and the Englishman, we
have of them all. We have men of every religion, Buddhists, Mahomedans,
Confucians, Freethinkers, Atheists, Christians, Jews. It matters to us
nothing by what name the man is named, so he be one of us."

And Peter said, "It must be hard for you all to understand one another,
if you are of so many different kinds?"

The stranger answered, "There is a sign by which we all know one
another, and by which all the world may know us." (By this shall all men
know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.)

And Peter said, "What is that sign?"

But the stranger was silent.

"Oh, a kind of freemasonry!" said Peter, leaning on his elbow towards
the stranger, and looking up at him from under his pointed cap. "Are
there any more of you here in this country?"

"There are," said the stranger. Then he pointed with his hand into the
darkness. "There in a cave were two women. When you blew the cave up
they were left unhurt behind a fallen rock. When you took away all the
grain, and burnt what yo