arcel of one's being, second nature.
The Red Virgin is reported to have been one of the most
adept in the art, to which must be ascribed her long and
successful career.

It was at this time that my father disappeared. His letters, which had
come to me regularly, ceased. He no longer appeared at our Pell Street
quarters. Our comrades sought him everywhere. Through our secret service
we ransacked every prison in the land. But he was lost as completely as
if the earth had swallowed him up, and to this day no clew to his end
has been discovered.*

* Disappearance was one of the horrors of the time. As a
motif, in song and story, it constantly crops up. It was an
inevitable concomitant of the subterranean warfare that
raged through those three centuries. This phenomenon was
almost as common in the oligarch class and the labor castes,
as it was in the ranks of the revolutionists. Without
warning, without trace, men and women, and even children,
disappeared and were seen no more, their end shrouded in
mystery.

Six lonely months I spent in the refuge, but they were not idle months.
Our organization went on apace, and there were mountains of work always
waiting to be done. Ernest and his fellow-leaders, from their prisons,
decided what should be done; and it remained for us on the outside to
do it. There was the organization of the mouth-to-mouth propaganda;
the organization, with all its ramifications, of our spy system; the
establishment of our secret printing-presses; and the establishment of
our underground railways, which meant the knitting together of all our
myriads of places of refuge, and the formation of new refuges where
links were missing in the chains we ran over all the land.

So I say, the work was never done. At the end of six months my
loneliness was broken by the arrival of two comrades. They were young
girls, brave souls and passionate lovers of liberty: Lora Peterson, who
disappeared in 1922, and Kate Bierce, who later married Du Bois,* and
who is still with us with eyes lifted to to-morrow's sun, that heralds
in the new age.

* Du Bois, the present librarian of Ardis, is a lineal
descendant of this revolutionary pair.

The two girls arrived in a flurry of excitement, danger, and sudden
death. In the crew of the fishing boat that conveyed them across San
Pablo Bay was a spy. A creature of the Iron Heel, he had successfully
mas