ving forced a way out of the actual common-sense world
by sheer force of whims and vagaries, and to have pre-empted a homestead
for myself in some dream-land, where neither he nor the tax-gatherer can
enter.

"It won't do," he said to-day, when I was there (for I use his books now
and then). "Old Pere Bonhours, you're poring over? Put it down, and come
take some clam soup. Much those fellows knew about life! Zachary!
Zachary! you have kept company with shadows these forty years, until you
have grown peaked and gaunt yourself. When will you go to work and be a
live man?"

I knew we were going to have the daily drill which Josiah gave to his
ideas; so I rolled the book up to take with me, while he rubbed his
spectacles angrily, and went on.

"I tell you, the world's a great property-exchanging machine, where
everything has its weight and value; a great, inexorable machine,--and
whoever tries to shirk his work in it will be crushed! Crushed! Think
of your old friend Knowles!"

I began to hurry on my old overcoat; I never had but two or three
friends, and I could not hear their names from Josiah's mouth. But he
was not quick to see when he had hurt people.

"Why, the poet,"--more sententious than before,--"the poet sells his
song; he knows that the airiest visions must resolve into trade-laws.
You cannot escape from them. I see your wrinkled old face, red as a
boy's, over the newspapers sometimes. There was the daring of that Rebel
Jackson, Fremont's proclamation, Shaw's death; you claimed those things
as heroic, prophetic. They were mere facts tending to solve the great
problem of Capital _vs._ Labor. There was one work for which the breath
was put into our nostrils,--to grow, and make the world grow by giving
and taking. Give and take; and the wisest man gives the least and gains
the most."

I left him as soon as I could escape. I respect Josiah: his advice would
be invaluable to any man; but I am content that we should live
apart,--quite content. I went down to Yorke's for my solitary chop. The
old prophet Solomon somewhere talks of the conies or ants as "a feeble
folk who prepare their meat in the summer." I joke to myself about that
sometimes, thinking I should claim kindred with them; for, looking back
over the sixty years of Zack Humphreys's life, they seem to me to have
pretty much gone in preparing the bread and meat from day to day. I see
but little result of all the efforts of that time beyond that solitar