enator's" Blair's throat ... the dirty sycophant! The
lousy bootlicker! the nasty, putty-bodied slug!

* * * * *

Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden. He told me his
wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would
be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....

Jested? I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.

* * * * *

Though I was possessed of a curious premonitory warning that I must not
accept his invitation and was, besides, settled in a hut by the lake
shore, yet I was tempted to go to Eden....

For one thing, Perfection City was no longer the place of ideals it had
been ... it was now a locality where the poorer bourgeoisie sent their
wives and children, for an inexpensive summer outing....

Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.

"Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning. John Gregory."

* * * * *

Not far from the little suburban station to which I had changed, lay the
Single Tax Colony of Eden. When I dropped off the train and found no one
to greet me, I was slightly piqued. Of a labourer in a nearby field I
inquired the way to Eden. He straightened his back, paused in his work.

He gave me the direction--"and there by the roadside you'll find a sort
of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the
path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community. But
what do want to go to Eden for? they're all a bunch of nuts there!"

"Maybe I might be a nut, too!"

The old man laughed.

"Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny."

Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly
with manuscripts....

A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest;
boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between. In
interspaces of trees wild flowers grew. Luxuriant summer was abroad.

I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community. It was in a
beautiful open space like a natural meadow.

There stood the houses of the colonists--Single Taxers, Anarchists,
Socialists, Communists,--folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who
here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back
again to pastoral simplicity.

It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a
medieval turn of mind might have conceived. It was the