Then, at last, even this region of speculative horrors came to an end, giving place to a wide country road that grew more and more beautiful as they left the town far behind. McCann's eyebrows were knotted in a scowl. The ghastly nonsense, like a horrible practical joke, that the city had been to him, excited, as it always did, all the antagonism within his rebellious nature. Slowly and grimly he said to himself, yet half aloud, in a tone of deliberation, as though he were cursing solemnly the town he had left: "I hope from my soul that I may live to see the day when that damned city will be a desolate wilderness; when those chimneys shall rise smokeless; when those streets shall be stony valleys between grisly ridges of fallen brick; when Nature itself shall shrink from repairing the evil that man has wrought; when the wild birds shall sweep widely around that desolation that they may not pass above; when only rats and small snakes shall crawl through the ruin of that 'thriving commercial and manufacturing metropolis;' when the very name it bore in the days of its dirty glory shall have become a synonym for horror and despair!" Having thus relieved himself he laughed softly, and felt better. Presently a flash of recollection passed over his face, and he eagerly dropped his hand into a side pocket, pulling therefrom a brierwood pipe, discovered with a sigh of satisfaction that a sweet heel of "Dills Best" still lurked in the bottom of the bowl, and, regardless of the amazement of the immaculate footman, lighted it, and sank back in the cushions, well content. As he smoked, his thoughts went back to Aurelian with some uneasiness. "I am afraid he is a backslider," he mused seriously. "Now, when I went over to England a couple of years ago, he was a good socialist, the best pupil I ever had. He would rail at the world in good set terms, better than I myself. And now he runs a trap like this, with a coon slave for a driver and a footman beside him. Now, I _can't_ lose a man like that; he was a born leader of men, when leaders are what we lack. Besides, he had a lot of money, and we need money as badly as we need leaders. I must get him back some way, if gone he is; and I very much expect bad news from the boy when I get to--Now, what did he call his place?" he pulled a letter from his pocket, shaking tobacco ashes out of its folds. "Oh, yes, 'Vita Nuova.' Now, why the devil did he name his place that?"