On a fine day of early summer in a London garden, before the birds had lost their Spring song, or the pear trees dropped their last blossom, our friend said suddenly:

"Why! there's a goldfinch!" Blackbirds there were, thrushes, and tits in plenty, an owl at night, and a Christopher Columbus of a cuckoo, who solemnly, once a year, mistook this green island of trees for the main lands of Kent and Surrey, but a goldfinchnever! "I hear it over there!" and, getting up, he walked towards the house.

When he came back, our friend sat down again, and said:

"I didn't know that you kept a cagebird!" We admitted that the cook had a canary.

"A mule!" he remarked, shortly. There was silence. Some strong feeling had been aroused that neither of us could understand.

Suddenly he burst out:

"I can't bear things in cages; animals, birds, or men. I hate to see or think of them." And looking at us angrily, as though we had taken an advantage in drawing from him this confession, he went on quickly:

"I was staying in a German town some years ago, with a friend who was making enquiries into social matters. He asked me one day to go over a prison with him. I had never seen one, then, and I agreed. It was just such a day as this-perfectly clear sky, and with that cool, dancing sparkle on everything that you only see in some parts of Germany. This prison, which stood in the middle of the town, was one of those, shaped like a star, that have been built over there on the plan of Pentonville. system, they told us, was the same that you might have seen working here

The

many years ago. The Germans were then, and still no doubt, are, infatuated with the idea of muring their prisoners up in complete solitude. But it was a new toy to them then, and they were playing with it with that sort of fanatical thoroughness which the Germans give to everything they take up. I don't want to describe this prison, or what we saw in it; as far as an institution run on such dreadful lines can be, it was, I daresay, humane; the Governor, at all events, impressed me favorably. I'll simply tell you of the one thing which I shall never forget, because it symbolized to me for ever the caging of all creatures, animal or human, great or small."

Our friend paused; then, with an added irritation in his voice, as though aware of doing violence to his natural reserve, he went on:

"We had been all over the grizzly place, when the Governor asked my friend whether he would like to see one or two of the 'life' prisoners.

"I will show you one,' he said, 'who has been here twenty-seven years. He is, you will understand'-I remember his very words 'a little worn by his long confinement.' While we were going towards this prisoner's cell they told us his story. He had been a cabinet-maker's assistant, and, still quite a boy, became infatuated with the wife of his own employer. One night, being surprised at a stolen meeting with his inamorata, he blindly struck out and killed the husband on the spot. He was sentenced to death, but, on the intervention of some Royalty who had been upset by the sight of corpses, I believe at the battle of Sadowa, his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life.

"When we entered his cell he was standing perfectly still, gazing at his

work. He looked quite sixty, though he couldn't have been more than fortysix--a bent, trembling ruin of a figure, covered by a drab-colored apron. His face had the mealy hue and texture, as it were, of all prisoners' faces. He seemed to have no features; his cheeks were hollow; his eyes large, but, looking back, I can't remember their color -if, indeed, they had any color at all. As we passed in, one by one, through the iron door, he took off his round cap, drab-colored too, like everything about him, showing his dusty, nearlybald head, with a few short gray hairs on end, and stood in an attitude of "attention," humbly staring at us. He was like an owl surprised by daylight. Have you ever seen a little child ill for the first time-full of bewilderment at its own suffering? His face was like that, but so extraordinarily gentle! We had seen many of the prisoners, and he was the only one that had that awful gentleness. The sound of his voice, too: 'Ja, Herr Direktor-nein, Herr Direktor! soft and despairingI remember it now-there was not a breath of will-power left." Our friend paused, frowning in his effort to recreate the scene. "He held in his hand," he went on presently, "a sheet of stiff paper, on which he had been transcribing the New Testament in letters from a code of writing for the deaf and dumb. When he passed his thin fingers over the type to show us how easily the deaf and dumb could read it, you could see that his hands were dusty like a miller's. There was nothing in the cell to produce that dust, and in my belief it was not dust on his hands, but some excretion from that human plant running to seed; when he held the sheet of paper up it trembled like a moth's wing. One of us asked him who invented the system he was working at, mentioning some name or other. 'Nein, nein,' he said, and stood shivering with eagerness to

recollect the right name. At last he dropped his head, and mumbled out: 'Ah, Herr Direktor, ich kann nicht!' But all of a sudden the name came bursting from his lips. At that moment, for the first time, he actually looked like a man. I never before then realized the value of freedom; the real meaning of our relations with other human beings; the necessity for the mind's being burnished from minute to minute by sights and sounds, by the need for remembering and using what we remember. This fellow had no use, you see, for memory in his life; he was like a plant placed where no dew can possibly fall on it. To watch that look pass over his face at the mere remembrance of a name was like catching sight of a tiny scrap of green leaf left in the heart of a withered shrub. Man is really very wonderful--the most enduring creature that has ever been produced!" Our friend rose, and began pacing up and down. "His world was not a large one; about fourteen feet by eight. He'd lived in it for twenty-seven years, without a mouse even for his friend. They do things thoroughly in prisons. Think of the tremendous vital force that must go to the making of the human organism, for a man to live through that. What do you imagine," he went on, turning to us suddenly, "kept even a remnant of his reason alive? You don't know? While we were still looking at his 'deaf and dumb' writing, he suddenly handed us a piece of wood about the size of a large photograph-the painting of a young girl, seated in the very centre of a garden, with bright-colored flowers in her hand; in the background was a narrow, twisting stream with some rushes, and a queer bird. rather like a raven, standing on the bank. And by the side of the girl a tree with large hanging fruits, strangely symmetrical, unlike any tree

that ever grew, yet with something in it that is in all trees, a look as if they had spirits, and were the friends of man. The girl was staring straight at us with perfectly round, blue eyes, and the flowers she held in her hand seemed also to stare at us. The whole picture, it appeared to me, was full of -what shall I say?-a kind of wonder. It had all the crude color and drawing of an Early Italian painting, the same look of difficulty conquered by sheer devotion. One of us asked him if he had learnt to draw before his imprisonment; but the poor fellow misunderstood the question. "Nein, nein," he said, "the Herr Direktor knows I had no model. It is a fancy picture!" The smile he gave us would have made a devil weep! He had put into that picture all that his soul longed forwoman, flowers, birds, trees, blue sky, running water; and all the wonder of his spirit that he was cut off from them. He had been at work on it, they said, for eighteen years, destroying and repeating, until he had produced this hundredth version.

It was a masterpiece. There he had been, condemned for life to this living death-without scent, sight, hearing, or touch of any natural object, without even the memory of them, evolving from his starved soul this vision of a young girl with eyes full of wonder, and flowers in her hand. It's the greatest triumph of the human spirit, and the greatest testimony to the power of Art that I have ever seen." Our friend uttered a sharp, short laugh: "So thick-skinned, however, is a man's mind that I didn't even then grasp the agony of that man's life. But I did later. I happened to see his eyes as he was trying to answer some question of the Governor's about his health. To my dying day I shall never forget them. They were incarnate tragedy-all those eternities of solitude and silence he had lived

through, all the eternities he had still to live through before they buried him in the graveyard outside, were staring out of them. They had more sheer pitiful misery in them than all the eyes put together of all the free men I've ever seen. I couldn't stand the sight of them, and hurried out of the cell. I felt then, and ever since, what they say the Russians feel-for all their lapses into savagery-the sacredness of suffering. I felt that we ought all of us to have bowed down before him; that I, though I was free and righteous, was a charlatan and sinner in the face of that living crucifixion. Whatever crime he had committed-I don't care what it was-that poor lost creature had been so sinned against that I was as dirt beneath his feet. When I think of him-there still, for all I know I feel a sort of frenzy rising in me against my own kind. I feel the miserable aching of all the caged creatures in the world." Our friend turned his head away, and for quite a minute did not speak. "On our way back, I remember," he said at last, "we drove through the Stadt Park. There it was free and light enough; every kind of tree-limes, copper beeches, oaks, sycamores, poplars, birches, and apple trees in blossom, were giving out their scent; every branch and lea was glistening with happiness. The place was full of birds, the symbols of freedom, fluttering about and singing their loudest in the sun-it was all enchanted ground. And I well remember thinking that in the whole range of Nature only men and spiders torture other creatures in that long-drawn-out kind of way; and only men do it in cold blood to their own species. That-as far as I know-is a fact of natural history; I can tell you that to see, once for all, as I did, in that man's eyes, its unutterable misery, is never to feel the same towards your Own kind

read all about Wilbur Wright, and I've seen him on the bioscope, and I'm a first-class driver of a car, as you know. Half-an-hour's examination of the engines on the ground would be all I should want. Why, you've often said what a genius for mechanics I have. In any case one must begin some time, and that's where an old friend should come in. If anything goes wrong with the thing I'll buy you another, if you don't mind waiting for the money. A pal couldn't say more than that.

With kind regards to Miss Ferney, believe me, Yours sincerely,

Charles Hapgood.

Sir Henry Ferney, M.P., to Mr. Charles Hapgood. (Telegram.)

Sorry this week-end impossible. Ferney.

Miss Hapgood to Mr. Travis Pullman. My dear Mr. Pullman,—I don't know what it is that Charlie wants from you, but if you could possibly see your way to lend it I should be so happy. The poor boy is a wreck of disappointment, and it affects all of us. He says you are the only man who can do him this little favor, whatever it is. Please do