It was Dr. Lester, a young physician who had moved into the village only a few years before, but was already its leading medical authority, who broke this silence by saying, with a glance which, slowly circling the room, finally rested on Reuben Tracy: “All this does not help us. Our views on all sorts of matters are interesting, no doubt, but they are not vital just now. The question is not so much why you propose something, but what do you propose?” The answer came before the person addressed had arranged his words, and it came from Horace Boyce. This young gentleman had, with a self-restraint which he himself was most surprised at, taken no part in the previous conversation. “I think this is the idea,” he said now, pulling his chair forward into the edge of the open space under the light, and speaking with easy distinctness and fluency. “It will be time enough to determine just what we will do when we have put ourselves in the position to act together upon what we may decide to do. We are all proud and fond of our village; we are at one in our desire to serve and advance its interests. That is a platform broad enough, and yet specific enough, for us to start upon. Let us accept it as a beginning, and form an association, club, society--whatever it may be called--with this primary purpose in view: to get together in one body the gentlemen who represent what is most enlightened, most public-spirited, and at once most progressive and most conservative in Thessaly. All that we need at first is the skeleton of an organization, the most important feature of which would be the committee on membership. Much depends upon getting the right kind of men interested in the matter. Let the objects and work of this organization unfold and develop naturally and by degrees. It may take the form of a mechanics’ institute, a library, a gymnasium, a system of coffee-taverns, a lecture course With elevating popular exhibitions; and so I might go on, enumerating all the admirable things which similar bodies have inaugurated in other villages, both here and in Europe. I have made these matters, both at home and abroad, a subject of considerable observation; I am enthusiastic over the idea of setting some such machinery in motion here, and I am perfectly confident, once it is started, that the leading men of Thessaly will know how to make it produce results second to none in the whole worldwide field of philanthropic endeavor.” When young Mr. Boyce had finished, there was a moment’s hush. Then Reuben Tracy began to say that this expressed what he had in mind; but, before he had the words out, the match manufacturer exclaimed: “Whatever kind of organization we have, it will need a president, and I move that Mr. Horace Boyce be elected to that place.”