ect of not having heard it. "I believe that he and Mr. Mitchell were
the only writers of your papers till Mr. Alden wrote the last?"

The Easy Chair responded, dryly, "You forget Aldrich."

"If I do, I am the only pebble on the shore of time that does or will,"
retorted the unreal editor. "But he wrote you for only two months. I
well remember what a pleasure he had in it. And he knew how to make his
readers share his pleasure! Still, it was Mr. Mitchell who invented you,
and it was Curtis who characterized you beyond all the rest."

"For a while," said the Easy Chair, with autobiographical relish, "they
wrote me together, but it was not long before Mr. Mitchell left off, and
Curtis kept on alone, and, as you say, he incomparably characterized me.
He had his millennial hopes as well as you. In his youth he trusted in a
time

'When the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law,'

and he never lost that faith. As he wrote in one of my best papers, the
famous paper on Brook Farm, 'Bound fast by the brazen age, we can see
that the way back to the age of gold lies through justice, which will
substitute co-operation for competition.' He expected the world to be
made over in the image of heaven some time, but meanwhile he was glad to
help make it even a little better and pleasanter than he found it. He
was ready to tighten a loose screw here and there, to pour a drop of oil
on the rusty machinery, to mend a broken wheel. He was not above putting
a patch on a rift where a whiff of infernal air came up from the
Bottomless Pit--"

"And I also believe in alleviations," the unreal editor interrupted. "I
love justice, but charity is far better than nothing; and it would be
abominable not to do all we can because we cannot at once do everything.
Let us have the expedients, the ameliorations, even the compromises, _en
attendant_ the millennium. Let us accept the provisional, the makeshift.
He who came on Christmas Day, and whose mission, as every Christmas Day
comes to remind us, was the brotherhood, the freedom, the equality of
men, did not He warn us against hastily putting new wine into old
bottles? To get the new bottles ready is slow work: that kind of bottle
must grow; it cannot be made; and in the mean time let us keep our
latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their
fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel