slowly followed. In the cherry-tree, which was laden with red cherries a
little over ripe, birds were quarrelling, and for a minute she could not
separate the sound of Abel's voice from the confusion around her. Then
his figure, standing under a stunted cedar on a small raised platform,
which was used for school celebrations or out-of-door concerts, appeared
to gather to itself all that was magnetic and alive in the atmosphere.
Of the whole crowd, including Gay, the speaker in his blue shirt, with
his head thrown back enkindled from the fire of his enthusiasm, seemed
the one masculine and dominating intelligence. To Molly he represented
neither orator nor reformer, but a compelling force which she felt
rather than heard. What he said she was hardly aware of--for it was
emotion not thought that he aroused in her.

"That's good!" said Jonathan quietly at her side, and glancing at him
she realized that Gay was regarding merely a picturesque embodiment
of the economic upheaval of society. Judging the scene from Gay's
standpoint, she saw that it was, after all, only the ordinary political
gathering of a thinly settled community. The words, she knew now, were
familiar. It was the personality of the speaker which charged them with
freshness, with inspiration. What was it but the old plea for social
regeneration through political purity--an appeal to put the dream of the
idealist into the actual working of the State, since it is only through
the brain of the dreamer that a fact may be born into the world.

"He can speak all right," observed Gay carelessly, "there's no doubt
about that."

"I'd like to go, if you don't mind," answered Molly, and turning she
rode softly away from the picnic grounds through the scattered hamlet,
too small to be called a village. An old man, killing slugs in a potato
field, stared after them with his long stemmed corn-cob pipe hanging
loosely between his lips. Then when they had disappeared, he shook his
head twice very solemnly, spat on the ground, and went on patiently
murdering slugs.

"'Tis that fly-up-the-creek miller as they've come arter," he muttered.
"Things warn't so in my day, so they oughtn't to be so now. I ain't got
no use for anything that ain't never been befo'."

And in different language, the same thought was stirring in Gay's mind.
"It's all stuff and nonsense, these hifaluting radical theories. There's
never been a fairer distribution of property and there's never going to
b