little in the crowded sections of the city where most of you are compelled to live; I suspect your cupboards are not so full of bread that you would care to trade even one loaf for a flower; and of course Mohammed did not mean, and I do not mean, for you to take this literally. But, comrades, there is a spiritual side of this whole fight of ours that we must not forget even in the hours of hateful poverty and oppresion. We must not let class hatred kill the soul out of us, and leave us mere animals fighting for food."

"That's the same old bunk the preachers have been handin' us all along," shouted a man from the crowd, "gettin' our eyes fixed on heaven while they pick our pockets."

Plainly, the crowd was disappointed. These men had expected he would talk about the crowd inside the church; instead he talked at the men before him, and they muttered their unmistakable disapproval.

"We'll never get anywhere by class hatred," Arewen went on, "and violence is a weapon that will turn in our hands and stab us to the heart."

"We thought you were one of us," shouted a voice from the crowd, derisively. "What are you trying to put over on us?"

"The comrade who heard me in the church," replied Arewen, "will tell you that I did not mince words with the men of wealth who were there.

As your

comrade, I pleaded your cause before them; but I am no less pleading your cause, our cause, now in what I am saying. I know the bitter experiences that have put this hatred in your hearts; I have tasted every one of those experiences. So I do not blame you; I counsel you. I tell you that class hatred not only makes your own lives ugly, but that it misses the whole point. You have let the insanity of a few men who, in their lust for power, have driven rough-shod over your rights as men blind you. You think that every man with power and property is plotting, with a devil's cunning and glee, to see how much oppression and misery he can perpetrate. But I tell you that the men of that class do not do the wrongs with which you charge them just for the fun

of doing them, but they are themselves the victims of social forces no less than you; they are free only within very narrow limits."

"Who's paying you to say this?" shouted an angry voice from the crowd. This cut Arewen to the quick. He had given his whole life to his class. His comrades who had lived with him for years understood his loyalty and listened to his counsel; so he was not prepared for this sort of reception at the hands of his own class. But he was too big to drag his own feelings into the matter.

"In the past, men have overworked and underpaid many of our comrades," Arewen continued earnestly, "but we must remember that many of these men have done this not because it was their personal wish, but because they were pushed along by the customs of their day. We must remember that in a world of competition the most ruthless man sets the pace. I know men of the class you hate who have yielded to such practices with a heavy heart. We have damned the upper classes for their failure to understand us; we must not fail victims to an equally stupid and perilous blindness. Our problem is not just a question of 'bad' men in places of power. What we must see is that it is the whole tone and system of modern life that must be lifted to a higher plane where there shall be no aristocracy but the aristocracy of accomplishment. We'll never do that alone. Our brothers of the propertied classes must join us in this work of regeneration. I know that little reform has ever come from the top, but what are we for if not to make new history? All of us, all classes, must continue to live together, whatever the outcome of our struggles may be. What good does it do for us to gain a few concessions now and then if we leave the world a battle-ground of classes, and have to stand eternal guard over what we have gained?"

"Take your dreams somewhere else," growled a battered figure near the soapbox; "we want bread."

"I tell you that violence is a mistake," Arewen said, with all the strength of his conviction. "The oppressors have used violence through the centuries to

gain and hold their privileges, and they are just now waking up to the fact that their senseless violence is pulling their own house down about their ears. Are we, just as they are throwing it away, to pick up this suicide's weapon?

But the crowd would hear no more. The tolerance of the mob was even less than the tolerance of the pew. Arewen was shoved unceremoniously from the soap-box, and the crowd broke up, with shouts of "Traitor!" and "Shame!"

Mackenzie and Rawlins had withdrawn to an opposite corner of the street to watch the outcome of the affair. The angry crowd quickly dispersed. Arewen was left alone. His shoulders drooped with more than a physical tiredness as he walked out on Fifth Avenue. He turned southward. It had grown dark. A winter fog had settled down over the city. The rays of the street lamps fingered the murky dampness. Mackenzie and Rawlins watched Arewen's figure slowly disappear in the fog -despised and rejected.

"I can't make him out," said Macken

zie. "Is he a trimmer? In the pulpit he defended the working class; on the soap-box he pleaded for sympathetic understanding of the upper classes."

"Look at the man, and you know he is n't a trimmer," Rawlins retorted, still looking down the avenue, where Arewen had disappeared. "If he were a trimmer, he would use other tactics. He won the hatred of each class by his defense of the other."

The two club men turned northward up the avenue toward their homes. The whole affair had been only a diverting incident to Mackenzie, but it had struck deeply into Rawlins's mind.

"Damn their yellow souls," he said hotly, "both of them! Neither crowd had the nerve or the honesty to stand up to the part of the truth they had left out of their thinking."

After which Manuel said, sighing:

"Even so my days consume, and my youth goes out of me, in a land where there are no maids so lovely as Olrun."

"No really nice girl," Math considered, "would be flying about the treetops and the tall, lonely mountains and the low, long marshes, with nobody to keep an eye on her. It is not proper, and I wonder at her parents."

"But, Sister, she is a princess!" "Just so; therefore I burned the

"Take shame to yourself, young rascal! Well, that would be Oldrun, the Unattainable Princess. Thus she comes from the far land of Valland in, they say, the appearance of a swan; and thus she bathes; and thus she slips into the robe of the Apsaras when it is high time to be leaving such impudent knaves as you have proved yourself to be."

"Yes, yes, a shift made all of shining white feathers, Sister. Here is a feather that was broken from it as I clutched at her."

Math turned the feather in her hand, "Now, to be sure! And did you ever see the like of it! Still, a broken feather is no good to anybody; and, as I have told you any number of times, I cannot have trash littering up my kitchen."

So Math dropped the shining white feather into the fire, on which she was warming over a pot of soup for Manuel's dinner, and they watched this feather burn.

persons of our station in life to be robbing princesses of anything, though it be only of a feather."

"Sister, that is the truth. It is not right to rob anybody of anything, and in taking that feather I have committed a crime."

"I do not doubt she thought you were attempting some crime or another," Math said sagaciously. "Therefore I burned the feather, lest it be recognized, and bring you to the gallows or to a worse place. So why did you not scrape your feet before coming into my kitchen? And how many times do you expect me to speak to you about that?"

Manuel said nothing, but he thought a great deal. In the upshot he went into the miller's chicken-yard and caught a goose and plucked from its wing a feather. Then Manuel put on his Sunday clothes, and, without taking leave of any one, set forth for the far land of Valland.

So did it come about that as King Hoel rode a-hunting under the hunter's moon he came upon a personable young fellow in decent black, who was wandering at adventure in the high woods of Dun

Vlechlan; and the king remembered what had been foretold.

Said King Hoel to Manuel the swineherd:

"What is that I see in your pocket wrapped in red silk?"

"It is a feather, King, wrapped in a bit of my sister's best petticoat."

"Now, glory be to God, friend, and at what price will you sell me that feather?"

"But a feather is no use to anybody, King, for, as you see, it is a quite ordinary feather."

"Come, come," the king said shrewdly, "do people anywhere wrap ordinary feathers in red silk? Friend, do not think to deceive King Hoel of the Peohtes, or it will be the worse for you. I perfectly recognize that feather as the feather which was molted in this forest by the Zhar Ptitza Bird in the old time before my grandfathers came into this country. For it was foretold that such a youth as you would bring to me, who have long been the silliest king that ever reigned over the Peohtes, this feather, which confers upon its owner perfect wisdom; and for you to dispute the prophecy would be blasphemous."

"I do not dispute your silliness, King Hoel, nor do I dispute anybody's prophecies in a world wherein nothing is certain."

"One thing at least is certain," remarked King Hoel, frowning uglily, "and that is that among the Peohtes all persons who dispute our prophecies are burned at the stake."

Manuel shivered slightly and he said: "It seems to me a quite ordinary feather; but your prophets, most deservedly, no doubt, are in higher repute for wisdom than I am, and burning is a discomfortable death. So, since you are assured that this is the Zhar Ptitza's feather, I will sell it to you for ten sequins."

King Hoel shook his little gray head. and said:

"That will not do at all, and your price is out of reason, because it was foretold that for this feather you would ask ten thousand sequins."

"Well, I have no desire to appear irreligious. So you may have it at your

own price rather than let the prophecies remain unfulfilled."

Then Manuel rode pillion with a king who was unwilling to let Manuel out of his sight, and they came thus to King Hoel's vine-covered palace. Heralds, in bright red tabards that were embroidered with golden thistles, proclaimed the fulfilment of the prophecy as to the Zhar Ptitza's feather, and the priests of the Peohtes gave thanks in all their curious underground temples. The common people, who had for the last score of years taken shame to themselves for living under such a foolish king, embraced one another and danced and sang patriotic songs at every street-corner: the Lower Council met, and voted that out of deference to his Majesty All Fools' day should be stricken from the calendar; and the queen declared there were two ways of looking at everything, the while she burned a quantity of private papers. Then at night were fireworks, the king made a speech, and Manuel was paid ten thousand sequins.

Thereafter Manuel abode for a month at the court of King Hoel, noting whatever to this side and to that side seemed most notable.

Hoel now wore the feather from the wing of the miller's goose affixed to the front of Hoel's second best crown, because that was the one he used to give judgments in. And now that it was noised abroad that King Hoel had the Zhar Ptitza's feather, the Peohtes came gladly to be judged, and the neighboring kings began to submit to him their more difficult cases, because everybody knew that King Hoel's wisdom was infallible, and beyond the criticism of ordinary persons.

And now that doubt of himself had gone out of his mind, Hoel lived untroubled, and his digestion improved, and his loving-kindness was great, because he could not be angry with the pitiful creatures haled before him, when he considered how little able they were to distinguish between wisdom and unwisdom where Hoel was omniscient; and all his doings were merciful and just, and his people praised him. Even the queen conceded that, once you were accustomed to his ways, and exercised some firmness about being made a door