themselves, men do obey the laws of love and death. . . . But in such a way, such a halting, mean, decrepit, stealthy way!" Here the old fellow paused, and Serge said: "You have come to my contention that good and bad, for men and women, lie wholly in the use or the abuse of things." But old Lawrie was so intent on his own thoughts that he seemed not to hear Serge. They came to the bridge under the Collegiate Church and leaned against the parapet. Oily black the river ran under the dark walls of warehouses and mills. The lights of the windows and the street lamps shone and flickered in the greasy depths of the tainted water. "Yon river," said old Lawrie, "is like the life of a man. I know not where it rises, but it comes pure and sweet from the hill-side, meandering and murmuring through meadows, growing wider and ever wider in its irresistible and purposeful progress to the sea. In the towns and cities of men it becomes poisoned and poisonous, but, tainted as it is, it hastens onward to its goal. . . . I beg your pardon if I have obscured my meaning with parable. What I see, and what much bitter experience has taught me, is that there is evil enough lying in wait for men without their adding to the sum of it by mental and moral confusion. Say their place in the creation is the highest, say that in them life finds its keenest expression, should not their glory be the glory of service rather than the vain-glory of servitude? Why must they always be demanding applause for the work they do so ill? Is there any work that men have ever done--outside the arts--that could not have been done better? . . . I say there is none. And I have found the answer to all these questions only to-day, in my prison-cell. To a man diseased with egoism--and how many men are not?--love and death are hurtful things, for they are not flattering to his vanity. In the reflection of life in which men strive to live (for in that reflection their vanity can have free play, exactly as it can and always does when a man scans his features in a glass) love and death are not seen. All human codes of conduct and of morals, all dealings between man and man, are cut to fit the reflection and not life itself. . . . What, then, is human life?--what are the depths that sustain the yeasty turbulence of man's knavery and folly and dirtiness and hysteria? . . . A man is kin and comrade with all things living, from the great sun to the motes dancing in the sun's rays. He is a part of that radiance which rises from the centre of the universe and courses through the veins of every stone and every tree and every living thing. . . . Aye, such a power of life in a man, and such a comical small thing as he makes of himself! . . . Such a comical, small thing as I've made of myself! . . . Rapacity made this town what it is. Think what it might have been, what all towns might have been, if love had made them! . . . There'll come a time when Society will no longer