On the open front of the stage, darkened with smoke and foul with offensive odors of noxious gases, the squire is hotly engaged with the great dragon, in close rencontre, and at the same time assailed above, around, in flank and rear, by harpies, fiery serpents, and other forms of terror—the battle of life translated into coarse _diablerie_. The sentiment and significance of the play in this take great liberties with the regular charities and practical reforms of our social system. The sorts of evil which these monsters so uncouthly represent are such as physical suffering, drunkenness, violence, fraud, and the thousand shapes of slavery, personal and political, and of all castes and colors. They are represented as greedy and ugly, and full of mocking and malignity, but with little intrinsic capability of mischief, for they are really unattractive in temptation and extremely awkward in battle, and much more remarkable for thick-skinned insensibility to assault than for any adroitness in the combat. The squire bravely deals his blows upon the great dragon. Horror, fear and hatred of the monster, earnest devotion to the “great cause,” with the courage of full commitment, and, perhaps, some regard for his reputation as a hard-hitter, put life and metal in his veins, and right lustily he mauls away. The earliest effects of his prowess are remarkable. The dragon, defending his own ground as confidently and angrily as if the empire of evil were really a rightful one wherever sanctioned by antiquity of possession, dashes his ponderous jaws at the reckless agitator, opened wide enough to swallow him, with all his weapons and armor at a gulp; but he manages to elude the clumsy wrath, and, nothing daunted and nothing doubting, deals his blows with energy in the ratio of the rage they rouse. Curiously, but conformably enough, at every stroke another ring of the monster’s tail unrolls. At first he was an unwieldy, but not an utterly misshapen brute; now he has become a serpent and a scarecrow; the head and tail are as incongruous as the pretended righteousness of his cause and his villainous method of defending it. The strife goes on, and grows only the worse and wickeder for its continuance, till it is plain that the beast is not to be mastered with hard blows, and if he yields it is because his huge, unwieldy bulk is exhausted with the protracted effort of defense, and he subsides at last rather than submits. So ends the battle, and then comes the triumph. The valorous victor, claiming all the honors he has won, mounts his sometime foe in the new character of hobby, and rides him grandly off the stage in a blaze of gaseous glory, cheered most vociferously by the boys and affording not a little merriment, mixed with admiration, to the old folks. What a figure that procession made! and how exact a figure, too, of many another that the world witnesses admiringly. The squire is, however, none the less a hero