Leacraft soon tired of sums, schedules, names, and lists, and wandered away over the park through the scattered groups, many centred around one of those popular tribunes, who, by reason of a little more leisure, perhaps a little more application, and always much more labial facility, influence their class profoundly. The broad lawns were filled with these improvised parliaments, in which too banter, argument, retort, query, admonition bore a part. The perplexing thing was the average satisfaction shown by the people, a kind of holiday anticipation, as if they were off for an excursion. To them perhaps it seemed a new start in life, with the ground less encumbered by rivals, by restrictions, less shadowed by priority, and favors for a few, and by the intimidation of a necessary subserviency. They almost seemed happy in the thought of change. There was bitterness in this, and yet to Leacraft with his undissembling and emancipated mind it was understood. It meant _chance_ to these people--this removal; and to most of them chance never came, never could come as they were. And then to linger, was starvation, loneliness, disuse, death. The business of the country had enormously shrunken, its productive power had been halved, commerce was drifting in stronger and steadier currents elsewhere, and no where so strongly as to Germany, while the over mastering pre-eminence of America loomed up in proportions that paralysed conjecture. Pondering on all these things Leacraft, in his absorbed way, stumbled over a little girl on the edge of one of the shaded walks. He quickly stooped and picked her up, and confronted the young mother, already hastening to the rescue of her child. “I should have been more careful,” said the embarrassed gentleman. “Well, indeed we have all good reason to be thinking more than seeing, these times,” said the smiling mother, “I wonder what we’ll all be like this time, come twelve month.” “Oh, I dare say that we shall be doing much the same thing that we do here, in a different place--and then we shall be a year older;” the young woman laughed, and attested a complete willingness to talk more, as she raised the ruffled child from the grass and moved nearer to Leacraft. Nor was Leacraft indifferent. He felt nettled, and willful, with a subconsciousness of disappointment and fear. This human and healthy mother, with the fresh guerdon of her blushing youth in her arms, was a helpful companion, and then she carried the solace of some new story, perhaps a new need, and Leacraft was not averse to being sympathetic or helpful.