worth the living, in order that he may boast a heavy balance at his banker's! "Yes, I was a good business man--a smart and shrewd business man, as business men go--and I know much of such men and of their transactions; and I tell you that, since the days of Judas Iscariot, the money-lover and grubber who sold his God for thirty pieces of silver, as thousands are selling their infinite souls this day, there have been no more soulless and selfish creatures upon God's earth, than the men who have made what should be a means to an end an end in itself, and who live _for_ business, instead of _by_ it. "They go to church, many of them, on Sundays, and subscribe liberally to coal clubs and soup kitchens, thinking, poor fools! to offer such acts as those as a set-off to God for the sordid self-seeking which has been the secret of their success in their commercial calling; never suspecting that in their respectable selfishness and sordidness of spirit, they are lower in the scale of being and farther from the kingdom of heaven than is the lurking prostitute shivering at the street corner, or the drunken sot reeling home after a night's debauch. "That they must die out at their deaths, as do the beasts, I am convinced, for what can God find for such men to do in heaven?--men to whom the earth, its prototype, is nothing but a gigantic shop, and to whom Music, Art, and Song are but as dead letters and foolishness; men who are susceptible to no emotion save the greed for gain; and who have let the infinite soul within them pine away and perish for the want of the wherewithal to keep that soul alive. "And I, I am one of them, and am of the dead who die! I have bartered away love and life and happiness for such Dead Sea fruit as this; I who once was young, and not altogether, as I now am, a soulless creature of clay! For I can remember the time when flowers, pictures, beautiful faces and music set stirring always some strong emotion within me, in which it seemed that I saw hidden away in a crystal cell in the depths of my own strange heart, the shining form of a white-robed Soul-maiden, who cried out to me, 'Ah! cannot you make your life as pure and beautiful as the flowers and the music, that so you may set me free?' "But I chose the ignoble part, and gave myself up body and soul to the greed for gain. And often in the hour when, tempted by an evil thought, I turned to do some shameful or selfish action, I seemed to see the white arms of the Soul-maiden uplifted in piteous entreaty to heaven, until at last the time came when her voice was silent, and when I knew that I had thrust her down and down into a darkness whence she would never again come forth! "And now nor picture, nor poem, nor music moves me more, for the soul of me is dead!--is dead! and I have become like unto the beasts that perish, and know not that at any moment I may flicker out like a spent taper, and become as the dead who die!"