millions of the discontented and the impoverished are ours," the
socialists said. "The Grangers have come over to us, the farmers, the
middle class, and the laborers. The capitalist system will fall to
pieces. In another month we send fifty men to Congress. Two years
hence every office will be ours, from the President down to the local
dog-catcher."

To all of which Ernest would shake his head and say:

"How many rifles have you got? Do you know where you can get plenty
of lead? When it comes to powder, chemical mixtures are better than
mechanical mixtures, you take my word."

CHAPTER XVI

THE END

When it came time for Ernest and me to go to Washington, father did not
accompany us. He had become enamoured of proletarian life. He looked
upon our slum neighborhood as a great sociological laboratory, and
he had embarked upon an apparently endless orgy of investigation. He
chummed with the laborers, and was an intimate in scores of homes.
Also, he worked at odd jobs, and the work was play as well as learned
investigation, for he delighted in it and was always returning home with
copious notes and bubbling over with new adventures. He was the perfect
scientist.

There was no need for his working at all, because Ernest managed to earn
enough from his translating to take care of the three of us. But father
insisted on pursuing his favorite phantom, and a protean phantom it was,
judging from the jobs he worked at. I shall never forget the evening he
brought home his street pedler's outfit of shoe-laces and suspenders,
nor the time I went into the little corner grocery to make some purchase
and had him wait on me. After that I was not surprised when he tended
bar for a week in the saloon across the street. He worked as a night
watchman, hawked potatoes on the street, pasted labels in a cannery
warehouse, was utility man in a paper-box factory, and water-carrier
for a street railway construction gang, and even joined the Dishwashers'
Union just before it fell to pieces.

I think the Bishop's example, so far as wearing apparel was concerned,
must have fascinated father, for he wore the cheap cotton shirt of the
laborer and the overalls with the narrow strap about the hips. Yet one
habit remained to him from the old life; he always dressed for dinner,
or supper, rather.

I could be happy anywhere with Ernest; and father's happiness in our
changed circumstances rounded out my own happiness.

"When I was a boy," f