t poverty, which is the
antithesis of fraternity, shall abound less and less.

'Now is the time, now is the time,
Now is the hour of golden prime'

for asking one's self, not how much one has given in goods or moneys
during the past year, but how much one has given in thought and will to
remove forever the wrong and shame of hopeless need; and to consider
what one may do in the coming year to help put the poor lastingly beyond
the need of help.

"To despair of somehow, sometime doing this is to sin against the light
of Christmas Day, to confess its ideal a delusion, its practice a
failure. If on no other day of all the three hundred and sixty-five, we
must on this day renew our faith in justice, which is the highest
mercy."

The Easy Chair no longer interrupted, and the unreal editor, having made
his point, went on after the manner of preachers, when they are also
editors, to make it over again, and to repeat himself pitilessly,
unsparingly. He did not observe that the Easy Chair had shrunk forward
until all its leathern seat was wrinkled and its carven top was bent
over its old red back. When he stopped at last, the warehouse agent
asked in whisper,

"What do you want done with it, sir?"

"Oh," said the unreal editor, "send it back to Franklin Square"; and
then, with a sudden realization of the fact, he softly added, "Don't
wake it."

There in Franklin Square, still dreaming, it was set up in the rear of
the magazine, where it has become not only the place, but the stuff of
dreams such as men are made of. From month to month, ever since, its
reveries, its illusions, which some may call deliverances, have gone on
with more and more a disposition to dramatize themselves. It has seemed
to the occupant of the Easy Chair, at times, as if he had suffered with
it some sort of land-change from a sole entity to a multiple personality
in which his several selves conversed with one another, and came and
went unbidden. At first, after a moment of question whether his
imagination was not frequented by the phantoms of delight which in the
flesh had formerly filled his place, whether the spirits which haunted
him in it were not those of Mitchell, of Curtis, of Aldrich, he became
satisfied from their multitude and nature that they were the
subdivisions of his own ego, and as such he has more and more frankly
treated them.

II

A YEAR OF SPRING AND A LIFE OF YOUTH

On one of those fine days which the April