He listened to the workmen's foot-falls. The solitary sound and steady motion of their feet were eloquent of early morning in a city, not less than the changes of light in heaven above the roofs. With the golden light came numbers, workmen still. Their tread on the stones roused some of his working thoughts, like an old tune in his head, and he watched the scattered files passing on, disciplined by their daily necessities, easily manageable if their necessities are but justly considered. These numbers are the brute force of earth, which must have the earth in time, as they had it in the dawn of our world, and then they entered into bondage for not knowing how to use it. They will have it again: they have it partially, at times, in the despot, who is only the reflex of their brute force, and can give them only a shadow of their claim. They will have it all, when they have illumination to see and trust to the leadership of a greater force than they--in force of brain, in the spiritual force of ideas; ideas founded on justice; and not the justice of these days of the governing few whose wits are bent to steady our column of civilized humanity by a combination of props and jugglers' arts, but a justice coming of the recognized needs of majorities, which will base the column on a broad plinth for safety-broad as the base of yonder mountain's towering white immensity--and will be the guarantee for the solid uplifting of our civilization at last. 'Right, thou!' he apostrophized--the old Ironer, at a point of his meditation. 'And right, thou! more largely right!' he thought, further advanced in it, of the great Giuseppe, the Genoese. 'And right am I too, between that metal- rail of a politician and the deep dreamer, each of them incomplete for want of an element of the other!' Practically and in vision right was Alvan, for those two opposites met fusing in him: like the former, he counted on the supremacy of might; like the latter, he distinguished where it lay in perpetuity. During his younger years he had been like neither in the moral curb they could put on themselves--particularly the southern-blooded man. He had resembled the naturally impatient northerner most, though not so supple for business as he. But now he possessed the calmness of the Genoese; he had strong self-command now; he had the principle that life is too short for the indulgence of public fretfulness or of private quarrels; too valuable for fruitless risks; too sacred, one may say, for the shedding of blood on personal grounds. Oh! he had himself well under, fear not.