nning. The idea of indefinite progress
in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in
nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration
of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion
of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to
plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

This, of course, was an extreme opinion, but I remember serious men
among my acquaintances who, in discussing the signs of the times,
adopted a very similar tone. It was no doubt the common opinion of
thoughtful men that society was approaching a critical period which
might result in great changes. The labor troubles, their causes,
course, and cure, took lead of all other topics in the public prints,
and in serious conversation.

The nervous tension of the public mind could not have been more
strikingly illustrated than it was by the alarm resulting from the talk
of a small band of men who called themselves anarchists, and proposed
to terrify the American people into adopting their ideas by threats of
violence, as if a mighty nation which had but just put down a rebellion
of half its own numbers, in order to maintain its political system,
were likely to adopt a new social system out of fear.

As one of the wealthy, with a large stake in the existing order of
things, I naturally shared the apprehensions of my class. The
particular grievance I had against the working classes at the time of
which I write, on account of the effect of their strikes in postponing
my wedded bliss, no doubt lent a special animosity to my feeling toward
them.

Chapter 2

The thirtieth day of May, 1887, fell on a Monday. It was one of the
annual holidays of the nation in the latter third of the nineteenth
century, being set apart under the name of Decoration Day, for doing
honor to the memory of the soldiers of the North who took part in the
war for the preservation of the union of the States. The survivors of
the war, escorted by military and civic processions and bands of music,
were wont on this occasion to visit the cemeteries and lay wreaths of
flowers upon the graves of their dead comrades, the ceremony being a
very solemn and touching one. The eldest brother of Edith Bartlett had
fallen in the war, and on Decoration Day the family was in the habit of
making a visit to Mount Auburn, where he lay.

I had asked permission to make one of the party