of the law or so, down in
Philadelphia, who were as glad of a chance to molest a radical colony as
of an opportunity to put over a good joke....

Baxter, Grahame, Bedell, and others of the prominent members of the
community were haled in to court ... and, to the surprise of everyone,
sentenced to forty-eight hours hard labour on the rock-pile, in the
workhouse....

And Jones sang triumphant snatches of song and hammered away merrily at
shoes in his little shack along the road, while unused hands gathered
water blisters making big stones into little ones, with other and
heavier hammers.

The newspapers made a great to-do about the matter. The affair was just
serio-comic enough to attract nation-wide attention. And the story was a
good one--the story of the anarchist-shoemaker who invoked the use of
archaic, reactionary laws, in his battle against his less radical
antagonists, the Single Taxers and Socialists.

Story after story was also written about our curious little colony.

Penton Baxter shared honours with the shoemaker. Reporters swarmed over
his front porch and into his house to interview him, on the triumphant
return of the party when they had served their forty-eight hours.

Penton gave out interview after interview. And, to his credit let it be
said, though he revelled in the notice accorded him, he also effected
two serious results from what had begun as almost a practical joke ...
he started a fight on the absurd Blue Laws by focusing publicity on them
... and he exposed the bad prison conditions his unknown fellow
prisoners lived under, who had _not_ gone to the workhouse in a jocular
mood because of resurrected Blue Laws.

Jones was willing to let the matter rest, as well as were his other
opponents ... but Baxter kept the fight going as long as he could. He
was accused of loving notoriety. His attitude toward it was mixed. He
did love notoriety ... he enjoyed every clipping about himself with
infinite gusto. But he also used publicity as a lever to get things done
with, that would otherwise never have been noticed. The others were
willing to consider what had happened to them, as a private affair.
Penton gracelessly used that, and every private adventure for
propaganda--turned it sincerely in the way he thought it might benefit
people....

He gave the papers a very bad poem--_The Prison Night_. I remember but
one line of it--

"The convict rasped his vermin-haunted hide."

* *