This is the history of The Order of The Strict Observance:—For many years St. Friend has given himself, in true devotion, as a member of the Springfield Associated Charities, to provide for the handful of defectives, drug fiends, and those outlaws who are now classed with them by common consent:—the unskilled laborers. St. Friend finds in his heart a great Franciscan pity for them. He finds there a sharp social rebellion that there should be any outlaws or helpless ones whatever. So he has become, by acclamation, the perpetual head of the Associated Charities, and these feverish wanton ones have been cheerfully left to his over-solicitude. The entire contingent of the socially crippled cuts as small a figure on the general horizon of the city as did the group of the professional paupers in the days when blind men turned hand organs. The educational machinery is such that within the double city walls, built long ago by Ralph Adams Cram, the so-called “exploited” have long been kept out. People in general are well-fed, super-skilled laborers. And they have about all the carnal bread and all the carnal circuses they can well digest. But St. Friend, who in his youth wept for every fallen sparrow till he could weep no more, has long maintained his Order of the Blessed Bread of the Strict Observance for those left behind in the race, generally degenerate sons and daughters of old settlers. The order is properly called the “Brotherhood of the Blessed Bread.” Those who join eat of a bread baked from a special Sangamon County wheat, planted between the inner and the outer wall by some of the various sects of the Flower Religion and the Park Religion. St. Friend cares not what sect plants the wheat, so it be planted by those who believe in democracy and prayer. After due vigil, the bread is skilfully baked by the Thibetan boy, or other chosen members of the society. Those who eat of it are exhorted, but not commanded, to take the oath before John Boat, for the bread, till now, has been primarily intended for the Brotherhood of the Strict Observance. This oath before John Boat or other cooperating justice of the peace is printed in the little book of devotion that goes with the Strict Observance. The book and oath are intended for the most hopeless derelicts only. Presumably the bread is eaten for the first time by these, after the oath is administered.