s ago, she would tell the story of how her
only boy had been brought home dead one night from an accident at his
workshop, she would fix the date by saying, "It was about six o'clock at
night, and I'd just got a nice little bit of liver and bacon cooking for
your father's dinner, when there came a knock at the door ..."
Sometimes it was, "I'd just sent Liz out for a little bit of fish," or
it would be Spanish onions maybe, or a lovely little rabbit, that
marked the day.

The night when the attack on Coalchester was planned was marked, as I
have said, by rabbit-pie. Mrs. Talbot would hardly have understood the
significance of that rabbit-pie, though in the course of her occasional
bobbings in and out of the room, to see that the young men were doing
justice to her food,--she had a curious notion that young men never ate
enough,--she would hear snatches of what she called "deep talk," or
shake her old head at her coming son-in-law, whom she already adored and
mothered, with a "Law! what a boy it is!" She wasn't quite sure
sometimes as to the soundness of his "doctrine," but wisely decided that
her business was rather with his stomach than his brains,--which no
doubt God Almighty would look after for himself.

Wit at the expense of Coalchester can only be of interest to
Coalchester wits and their butts, so I shall not record the bright and
animated talk which helped to digest Mrs. Talbot's rabbit-pie, but
confine myself to a practical outcome of it.

What interests me specially about these young men was their rare
practicality. They were no mere dreamers, helpless visionaries, with
ideas they had no notion how to embody. Dreamers, of course, they
were,--otherwise there had been no point in their being practical,--but
they were dreamers who understood something of how dreams are best got
on to the market of realities.

Characteristically, it was the poet of the party from whom the most
practical suggestion came. In itself, of course, there was no great
originality in the idea of a weekly paper to be called "The Dawn,"
devoted to the dissemination of the new light on every possible
subject,--politics and municipal misgovernment; the new social ideals;
the newest and most delicate forms of art, music, and literature. It
was in the suggested method of publication and circulation that the
originality lay. The paper was to be given away and made to pay its
expenses by tradesmen's advertisements, a guarantee of a certain mini