y helping the people, only serves to obscure the problems to be
solved, and to perpetuate the evils it affects to relieve.

AN EASTER EGG FOR CHRISTIANS. *

* April, 1893.

Christian Fellow Citizens,--

We are living together in this world, but I do not know whether we
shall live together in the next world. You probably consider yourself
as booked for heaven, and me as booked for the other establishment. But
that is a question I will not discuss at present. I will only remark
that you may be mistaken. Existence, you know, is full of surprises;
and, as the French say, it is always the unexpected that happens.

Well, my fellow citizens of this world, it is now the time when you
celebrate the death and resurrection of your "Savior." Not being of your
faith, I cannot join in the commemoration. I shall, however, regard the
season after a more primitive fashion. Your Church adopted an old
Pagan festival, the rejoicing at the renewal of the earth in the genial
springtide. At the vernal equinox the sun is increasing in power, the
world is astir with new life, and begins to reassume its mantle
of green. Such a time inspired jollity in the human breast. It was
commemorated with feast and dance and song. Perhaps it will be so again,
even in sombre England, when the gloom of your ascetic creed has lifted
and disappeared. Meanwhile I, as a "heathen man and a sinner," will
imitate as far as I may the example of the Pagans of old. I will not
sing, for I am no adept in that line; and my joints are getting too
stiff for dancing. But I will feast, within the bounds of reason; I will
leave this million-peopled Babylon and put myself in touch with Mother
Nature; I will feel, if only for a brief while, the spring of the turf
under my feet; I will breathe air purified by "the moving waters at
their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores";
I will watch the seahorses, with their white crests, in endless rank,
charging the shore; I will listen to the sound which Homer heard so long
before your Christ was born--the sound so monotonous, so melancholy, yet
so soothing and sustaining, which stirs a pulse of poetry in the very
dullest and most prosaic brain. But before I go I send you this Easter
egg, to show that I do not forget you. Keep it, I pray you; study well
its inscriptions; and perhaps, after all, you will not pelt me with it
at the finish.

I have said, my Christian fellow citizens, that your Church