sniffing ecstatically, a Fraser worshiping at the shrine of the Fraser broth. He could n't do it. Never, if she trod him in the dust, never could he hurt her like that. He turned away, his heart sick and lonely, his soul bereft and bitter. She was no longer his. No longer the woman who believed in him.

But there would be no more hiding behind a wall. He would speak to her about the collars. He would have it out with her. He turned back and asked in a voice sharp-edged, because it was so near to breaking:

did n't know. The foolish woman did n't know! She thought a collar was an "easy bit." She had always believed in him. In face of everything, she still believed that he was right. Oh, she was a foolish, feckless woman, with her blindness about collars and her folly about broth. But he loved her. The very pattern of his soul was woven with the threads of hers, dear, blind, trusting woman that she was. She did n't know. And now she would never know.

collars and

Her feet as she stepped about setting the table made a happy, homelike

A flicker of alarm came into her eyes, but she finished the sip of broth she had in the spoon before answering, and then her voice came with easy as

surance:

"Weel, ye 'll never be able to trust him wi' trousers; so ye can give him the coats and waistcoats to do."

"An' the collars," he said bitingly. "Aye, an' the collars, an' other easy bits," she answered, with lazy

ease.

Collars and other easy bits! So she

She paused at the table with an extra plate and spoon, and looked toward him questioningly. He had been so silent, she was not sure that she had won him over yet, so her voice was timorous and a little pleading:

"Could I ask him, Perney?"

"Aye, lass, ask him," he agreed. Then, searching in his flowing heart for words to tell her how he loved her, he said, "An' I 'm thinkin' he has never tasted the like o' the broth he'll taste this day."

M

EN like Smith must be considered in a democracy.

I never knew what town or county bred him and lent him to Manhattan, where during our entire acquaintance he carried on his singular researches. He was not, I now guess, from New England, since he lacked any instinct whatever, when he suddenly discovered he had grown too confidential, to draw an iron curtain of reserve down over his face with the awkward haste of a true Yankee. Neither had he the tempered insolence of a New-Yorker nor the archaic touches of speech and manner which might have assigned him to the older South. Hardly expansive enough to have come from the Far West, hardly energetic enough to have been born in the Mississippi valley, he possibly sprang-if that is not too violent a term for Smith-from some such characterless region as I have always imagined to exist between the Hudson and the Great Lakes. But no matter what the mere locality of his origin, he had, before I met him, shaken its peculiar dust from his feet in his quest for a moral or intellectual neighborhood where he could feel unmistakably at home.

That he could not find this congenial neighborhood was his grief and, indeed, his tragedy. Yet his associates, most of them, either understood his

plight as comic or else did not understand it at all. I remember that I was bored with him before I began to be interested. And before I began to be bored, I could barely remember him at all from one meeting to another. Indeed, the first definite item of my recollection is not a thing Smith did or said, but a remark I heard addressed to him.

I was sitting in the lounge of Livingston Hall, not quite sure how to spend the evening, when a robust voice behind me said:

"Smith, the trouble with you is that every wind of doctrine blows you over. And then when you get up again, you are pointed the wrong way."

Turning, I saw Smith hunched eagerly on the edge of a chair into which probably any other man in the university would have sunk down, relaxed, though disputative. His large, serious face, larger and more serious than usual, was tormented in its effort to bring forth some answer which should be sufficient to meet what he evidently regarded as a painful accusation. I remember thinking, while he struggled, that so impressive a brow and chin as he had ought to go with a more impressive nose and mouth.

"No," he said, "it is n't that. I can stand all the winds that blow. What worries me is that I can't find any great causes any more."

"Great causes! Great God! You have a fresh cause every week. You can make two grow where only one ever grew before. I keep thinking that you have found the last one on earth, and then you turn up another. It's lucky for you that you can never stick to any one of them long. If you did, you'd soon have so many on your back you could n't budge."

I knew Powell, Smith's companion, well enough to know that he was amusing himself, but I could see that Smith was in dead earnest and was suffering. He entered upon some explanation which I have quite forgotten, except that it interested me in him as an odd creature who was as lost even in the university as an owl might be in the most glorious sunshine.

$2

A few days later I learned all I ever knew of Smith's earlier career. Powell, hailing me as I passed, introduced me in his impudent way.

"Do you know Smith? He is a man to watch. He started out to be a missionary, with a slogan. It was "The evangelization of the world in this generation.' But he found he could not stand the evangelists. So he turned himself into a patriot and got a new slogan. It was 'America for the Americans.' But poor Smith found he could n't stand the Americans. So he's on the loose again. If you have a cause or a slogan to spare, tell Smith about it and save a soul."

Though Smith was plainly worried at the caricature which Powell had drawn, I then suspected, and now feel sure, that it was correct in its principal outlines. With a character cut so obviously from one piece as his was, he must have had the sort of past

which the troubles of his maturity suggested. The picture of his youth which I have formed seems to me, as I look back, to have contructed itself without any deliberate effort on my part. It shows Smith at fifteen or sixteen, his face as large and as serious as it was ever to be, listening in a square, bare church to the plangent tones of some missionary returned from the foreign field with news of the dreadful state of the heathen to whom no one had brought the light. How could the boy not thrill to the plea? Generous as became his age, he longed to give some part of his abundance to those who lacked it. Adventurous, also, he dreamed of journeying to distant regions, in the face of picturesque hardships, scattering the truth among the children of error. With what distress, then, he must have grown aware of the doubts which rose in him as he reflected further! He could perhaps overcome his distaste for the too singleminded missionaries whom he met, he could even stomach the reformed heathen or the unmassacred Armenians who were exhibited in his church as proofs that the great cause was marching on; but sooner or later Smith had to learn something about the dark religions which the true faith was to supplant, and then he had gradually to realize, whatever his hesitation and his sense of apostacy, that the issue was not so clear as he had thought. He could not be sure that it was the duty of all devout men to labor to bring the world into one fold. He could not be sure that the alien breeds would be better off within the gospel law. He could not be sure but that he rather sympathized with the heathen.

Poor Smith indeed! Some instinct which he could no more control than

the beating of his heart made him a dissenter from the first majority in which he found himself.

Nor was it better with him when he turned to patriotism for a cause which might enlist his devotion. Imagine him, when a mere child, reading about the peremptory way the early settlers had with the Indians. As a patriot he would have heard that he must rejoice over the fate of the aborigines, but as a person he would discover that he could not. There could occur to him such rudimentary thoughts as that the red men had been first on the ground or that the white men had not always been satisfied with defending themselves. Similarly, Smith might well have had difficulty with the Revolution. For instance, there were the loyalists, some of them good enough men and women, whose chief offense lay in their belonging to what was, virtually, a minority. I suspect that the adolescent Smith, by reason of his fatal weakness, winced at hearing how many of these cattle were told to go to Halifax and leave their goods behind in the new republic. So, doubtless, with all sorts of historical matters and later with many contemporary events: Smith could not do his patriotic duty and believe that majorities are always right, even American majorities. He was more than dubious about the wars with Mexico and with Spain. Regarding the Civil War he could never quite get it out of his head that the Confederate States had been invaded. And he was forever worrying that same head, as his large, serious face betrayed, over the impetuous native customs of tarring and feathering, of riding by night with masks, of lynching on any reasonably adequate occasion.

This trait of character in Smith had

led him, before the days of our intimacy, to set about his remarkable monograph on the history of American minorities. The book is so well known that I need not describe it, but I should like to correct one mistake which has crept into the accepted opinion concerning it. That mistake is the notion that it was written with delight, or out of any desire to vex the heirs of the various majorities which so often fare badly in the record.

§3

Powell, I remember, voiced the accepted opinion as soon as the book was published. This was at breakfast at the commons the first time he saw Smith after reading his history.

"All I object to in your work is the title. You should have called it the annals of the steam roller in a democratic country. But why do you have a passion for the worms who have been run over? They had a lot of fun being in the minority. So have you, writing about them."

Smith's protests had no effect upon Powell, who merely laughed as they grew more earnest. When he had left the table, Smith tried to explain himself to me.

"I did n't enjoy writing it. Most of the time I hated it. I think it is perverse always to side with the defeated. If I am perverse in that way now and then, it is n't because I approve of the attitude. It's because I can't help it. Majorities ought to rule, I know. Only, I wish minorities did n't always have such good arguments on their side."

I said something flat about seeing the better, but choosing the worse, antagonist in a controversy. Smith sighed. At the time I had not real

ized how sensitive he was to platitudes, how they hurt him when he encountered them. The more I think about his strange case, the more I come to believe that it was the catchwords of majorities which turned him against them. He could n't stand their cant. Minorities, of course, have their cant phrases, too, but they naturally make less noise in the world than the others. The noise, the noisy reiteration, was too much for Smith. For this reason he had become an historian of minorities more or less in spite of himself, at the very time when he was looking for some majority which should be overwhelming enough to sweep him away.

What he might have done next there is now no chance of knowing, for the war came within a few weeks after his book was published, and deranged his plans, as it deranged those of many less divided spirits. Without question he had what were for him a few glorious hours and days during the late July and early August of that fateful year. Being a historian of a sort did not keep him, as it did not keep historians of many sorts, from falling into the trap which rumor then laid, and from, consequently, looking upon the European conflict as a melodrama so pure that the villain was all black and the hero all white and the victims all pitiful. Thus viewing the matter, Smith had his hour and day. His large, serious face shone with a light I have never seen on any other. He was Perceval, and he saw his Grail.

I remember a walk I had with him during this heyday, along the Drive late at night, under a bland moon which touched the Hudson so luminously that the New Jersey shore was only a dim blaze. After a sultry twilight the wind had begun to stir

and had broken the fiery grip which the heat had had upon the city since noon. But for Smith, so far as I could see, the fierce sun had meant nothing, any more than the change to a comfortable midnight. By comparison with the fire within him, the sun was a pale star and the moon a mere ornament in the sky.

"Germany can't win. She will raise enemies faster than she can beat them, no matter how ready she may be. All Europe will join against her. She must n't win. If she should by any miracle get through to Paris and then to London, we shall have to enter the war. What will there be left to live for if we don't? This is n't an international affair only. It's a cosmic issue. Justice itself is fighting. It has simply got to be victorious. Nothing else on earth is important now. It would be better for half the men alive to die than for justice to die."

For one malicious moment I was tempted to say, "Justice lost, all is lost," or to remind Smith how much favor the gods have shown strong battalions in their time; but I respected his ardor, feeling it would be too cruel to prick him with a catchword at such a moment. I wish, however, I had done it, for I might have caused him less pain than he suffered when the same thing was done, quite ruthlessly, by Powell only a few days afterward.

Smith, it seems, with a promptness worthy of H. G. Wells, had begun an article on the moral aspects of the war which was to set forth the case for justice as fully as he felt that it deserved. Talking about it one evening in Livingston Hall, he had the mishap to bore Powell, and the downfall of the enthusiast began.