hearing that
Goldsmith had debts of several thousand pounds, in admiration exclaimed,
"Was ever poet so trusted before!" Other good friends ascertained the
amount of the claim and paid it, just as Colonel H. H. Rogers graciously
cleared up the liabilities of Mark Twain, after the author of
"Huckleberry Finn" had landed his business craft on a sandbar.

And so Plato went free, arriving back in Athens, aged forty, a wiser and
a better man than when he left.

* * * * *

Nothing absolves a reputation like silence and absence, or what the
village editors call "the grim reaper." To live is always more or less
of an offense, especially if you have thoughts and express them. Athens
exists, in degree, because she killed Socrates, just as Jerusalem is
unforgetable for a similar reason. The South did not realize that
Lincoln was her best friend until the assassin's bullet had found his
brain. Many good men in Chicago did not cease to revile their chiefest
citizen, until the ears of Altgeld were stopped and his hands stiffened
by death. The lips of the dead are eloquent.

Plato's ten years of absence had given him prestige. He was honored
because he had been the near and dear friend of Socrates, a great and
good man who was killed through mistake.

Most murders and killings of men, judicial and otherwise, are matters of
misunderstandings.

Plato had been driven out of Syracuse for the very reasons that Socrates
had been killed at Athens. And now behold, when Dionysius saw how Athens
was honoring Plato, he discovered that it was all a mistake of his
bookkeeper, so he wrote to Plato to come back and all would be
forgiven.

* * * * *

Those who set out to live the Ideal Life have a hard trail to travel.
The road to Jericho is a rocky one--especially if we are a little in
doubt as to whether it really is the road to Jericho or not. Perhaps if
we ever find the man who lives the Ideal Life he will be quite unaware
of it, so occupied will he be in his work--so forgetful of self.

Time had taught Plato diplomacy. He now saw that to teach people who did
not want to be taught was an error in judgment for which one might
forfeit his head.

Socrates was the first Democrat: he stood for the demos--the people.
Plato would have done the same, but he saw that the business was extra
hazardous, to use the phrase of our insurance friends. He who works for
the people will be d