there was any treasure aboard--which, I suppose, should be the
procedure of any well-regulated pirate.

"I'm going this way myself," I said, "and if you have no objections--"

He stood looking at me curiously, indeed suspiciously, through his round
spectacles.

"Have you got the passport?" he asked finally.

"The passport!" I exclaimed, mystified in my turn.

"Yes," said he, "the passport. Let me see your hand."

When I held out my hand he looked at it closely for a moment, and then
took it with a quick warm pressure in one of his, and gave it a little
shake, in a way not quite American.

"You are one of us," said he, "you work."

I thought at first that it was a bit of pleasantry, and I was about
to return it in kind when I saw plainly in his face a look of solemn
intent.

"So," he said, "we shall travel like comrades."

He thrust his scarred hand through my arm, and we walked up the road
side by side, his bulging pockets beating first against his legs and
then against mine, quite impartially.

"I think," said the stranger, "that we shall be arrested at Kilburn."

"We shall!" I exclaimed with something, I admit, of a shock.

"Yes," he said, "but it is all in the day's work."

"How is that?"

He stopped in the road and faced me. Throwing back his overcoat he
pointed to a small red button on his coat lapel.

"They don't want me in Kilburn," said he, "the mill men are strikin'
there, and the bosses have got armed men on every corner. Oh, the
capitalists are watchin' for me, all right."

I cannot convey the strange excitement I felt. It seemed as though these
words suddenly opened a whole new world around me--a world I had heard
about for years, but never entered. And the tone in which he had used
the word "capitalist!" I had almost to glance around to make sure that
there were no ravening capitalists hiding behind the trees.

"So you are a Socialist," I said.

"Yes," he answered. "I'm one of those dangerous persons."

First and last I have read much of Socialism, and thought about it, too,
from the quiet angle of my farm among the hills, but this was the first
time I had ever had a live Socialist on my arm. I could not have been
more surprised if the stranger had said, "Yes, I am Theodore Roosevelt."

One of the discoveries we keep making all our life long (provided we
remain humble) is the humorous discovery of the ordinariness of the
extraordinary. Here was this disrupter of society, this man o