and shut in, with the liquor
stains over everything. And outside, I saw the pasty-faced crowd waiting
to get in, and all the Sunday litter in the road. Parson, I got the
smell of it, the sick, stale smell of it, right here--in Paradise; I got
the frowsy smell of it, and heard the waily children squabbling, and--I
can't tell you any more of what I saw. If you'd ever seen it, you'd
know.'

"And there he stopped again, until I moved. Then he said: 'Parson, if
you saw a fellow starving on a bit of land over there that wouldn't feed
a prairie-chick, and you knew of a free homestead across the creek,
where he could raise five and twenty bushels to the acre and live like a
man, would you leave him to rot on his bare patch? Not you. That's why
I'm going Home--to Battersea.'

"If Hare had been a married man I might have advised him otherwise. But
he was married only to the farm he had wrought so well, and it did not
seem to me part of my business to come between a man and his duty--as he
saw it. That man came Home, and took the cheapest lodging he could get
in Battersea. He had sold his farm well. Now he took to street
preaching, and what he preached was, not religion, but the prairie.
'Lord sake, young folk!' he used to say to the lads and girls when they
turned toward the public-houses. 'Hold on! Wait a minute! I want to tell
you something!' And he would tell them what four years' clean work had
given him in Canada.

"He got into touch with various emigration agencies. The money he had
lasted him, living as he did, for five years. In that time he was the
means of sending nine hundred and twenty men and five hundred and forty
women and girls to a free and independent life in Canada. Just before
his money was exhausted, England's affliction, England's chastisement,
came upon her like God's anger in a thunderbolt. Hare had meant to
return to Canada to make another start, and earn money enough to return
to his work here. Instead of that, my friends, instead of what he called
Paradise in Manitoba, God took him straight into Heaven. He left his
body beside the North London entrenchments, where, so one of his
comrades told me, he fought like ten men for England, knowing well that,
if captured, he would be shot out of hand as a civilian bearing arms.
One may say of Edward Hare, I think, that he saw his duty very
clearly--and did it.

* * * * *

"But what of us? What of you, and I, my friends? How