" you would say reproachfully, "yesterday I
discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaures lurking behind my coffee-pot
and Fourier under the butter-dish. To-day I find Karl Kautsky in
ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls."

Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently,
through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles:

"So? Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away. I
give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, _und_ by and by
comes the little hole in your head."

Thank heaven the doctor next door didn't hear that!

Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but
consummate skill. Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes:

"It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one's tools,
to know exactly what to do and how to do it," she would sigh.
"'Tisn't everybody can be a master craftsman!"

"I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!" he said
proudly. "I do more yet by you," he added charitably, "then make
over for you chairs and tables and such, already: I make over for
you your little mind."

The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be. He
turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it
Sophronisba's tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged,
piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty.
If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a
period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old
table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you'll understand Alicia's
open rapture and my more sedate delight.

The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of
Hynds House. There wasn't any mantel: the fireplace was sunk into
the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a
space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house
contained--portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old
flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons. Above the fireplace hung the
portrait of Freeman Hynds--thin, dark, austere, more like a
Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of
life.

However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room
remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero.
Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben--there they were in
buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring
noses! The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father o