e of organised society, he had quit work and had become what he
called an anarchist. His character was at that time quite formed, while
the young girl's was not. It was he who was to be the most important
factor in the conscious part of her education. But to explain his
influence on Marie, it is necessary to explain him,--his character, and
a part of his previous history.

CHAPTER VI

_Terry_

Terry is a perfect type of the idealist. We shall see how, in the midst
of what the world calls immorality and sordidness, this quality in him
was ever present; even when it led to harshness to persons or facts. Not
fitting into the world, his attitude toward it, his actions in it, and
his judgment of it, are keen and impassioned, but, not fitting the
actual facts, sometimes unjust and cruel. Tender and sensitive as a
child, his indignation is so uncompromising that it often involves
injustice and wrong. But the beauty in him is often startlingly pure,
and reveals itself in unexpected conditions and environment. I cannot do
better in an attempt to present him and his history than to quote
voluminously from his letters to me, adding only what is necessary for
the sake of clearness. He wrote for me the following poetic outline of
his life:[1]

"The fate of the immigrant, sprung from peasant stock, is to grow up in
the slums and tenements of the great city. Such a fate was mine. To
exchange the rack-rented but limitless fields of Irish landlordism for
the rickety and equally rack-rented tenements, with the checkerboard
streets, where all must keep moving, is only adding sordidness to spare
sadness. Surely, the birthday's injury is felt in a deep sense by the
poor. But the patient fatalism of the peasant (so fatal to himself) is
equal to every calamity.

"I came from an exceptionally well-to-do family of tenement-farmers, but
a few generations of prolific birth rate, with the help of successive
famines and successful landlordism, reduced us to the point of eviction.
Enough was saved from the wreck to pay for our passage in a sailing
vessel to America. After being successfully landed, or stranded, on New
York, my father, with the true instinct of the peasant, became a
squatter on the prairies of Goose Island. Here we put up, in the year
1864, a frame shanty of one room, in which the nine of us tried to live.
My father, the only bread-winner, made from seven to eight dollars a
week. Absolute communism in the deepest and mo