In this spiritual kind of travelling he seemed ever to have moved by two concurrent roads, paths now rutted and worn, running into and overlapping each other. One of them was everywhere marked “Allen.” Of the other, the Seton Avenue Assembly and the grey volume, “The Inner Republic,” might be called signboards, or statements of condition. Even there might be noted the deep groove of the path marked “Allen,” crossing and following the path of his convictions and interpretations, showing itself here and there in some touch of bitterness, some personal sense of the confusion and mockery of life, in a feeling for dishonoured humanity as if it were a personal dishonour, and so in a passionate championship of wrecked and aimless people. He spoke of them as if they were private and near. One champions kindred with little question of their deserts. This was part of the secret of Alcott's power on the platform. Over his success, as well as his failures, was written “Allen.” “Why do you go apart from me?” he asks in the grey volume. “Are you sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible? I am sensual, thievish, violent, irresponsible. If it troubles you that my coat is too new and my books too many, I will burn them and sit down in the gutter. It does not matter. Nothing matters except that you walk apart from me. For though I know that some effort one must make, somehow conspire to grasp this sorry scheme of things and remould it nearer to the heart's desire, yet I am no socialist. I know that the evil is not social, but human,--and I know not how I shall grasp it if we go apart.” The groove of the path marked “Allen” seems plain enough here. Allen, present, had wrecked his life more than once. Allen, lost, gave his speech the passion that gave it power. Mixed impatience and remorse drove Allen to cast himself loose, a broken spar, to disappear over the next wave. Alcott hungered and thirsted to find him again. Allen had ruined his career; and Allen had made for himself his career; there was no jest in that irony. The coloured thread “Allen” was woven so thickly into the woof of his life that it tinged the whole pattern. The day after the death of Wood Alcott passed through Bank Street and met Charlie Carroll, that valuable and spasmodic editor. Carroll glittered with malice. “Say, that man's name was Hicks.” “What of it?” “Why, he's one of your heelers.” “Don't know him.” “Didn't you ever see him? Well, Tom Berry knows him. He lived in Muscadine Street, over the river. Tom Berry says he used to sit 'way back under your gallery, curled up like a muskrat, eating his beard and drinking eloquence like raw brandy. Say, he looks like it.” “Do you think I recommended him to shoot Wood?” “Well, not exactly.” “Been writing some buckshot paragraphs on me, then?” Carroll shook his head.