“I met David Hughes,” Kane continued, “after the final break-up of the community, when I was beginning to transcendentalize around Boston, and he wanted me to go into another with him, out West. He came out of his last community within the year; he founded it himself, upon a perfectly infallible principle. It was so impregnable to the logic either of metaphysics or events, that Hughes had to break it up himself, I understand. At sixty-nine he has discovered that his efforts to oblige his fellow-beings ever since he was twenty have been misdirected. It isn’t long for an error of that kind in the life of the race, but it hasn’t exactly left my old friend in the vigor of youth. However, his hope and good-will are as athletic as ever.” “It’s rather pathetic,” Ray suggested. “Why, I don’t know--I don’t know! Is it so? He hasn’t found out the wrong way without finding the right way at the same time, and he’s buoyantly hopeful in it, though he’s not only an old man; he’s a sick man, too. Of course, he’s poor. He never was a fellow to do things by halves, and when he dispersed his little following he divided nearly all his substance among his disciples. He sees now that the right way to universal prosperity and peace is the political way; and if he could live long enough, we should see him in Congress--if _we_ lived long enough. Naturally, he is paving the way with a book he’s writing.” Kane went on to speak of his friend at length; he suddenly glanced out of the car window, and said: “Ah, we’re just there. This is our station.” The avenue had been changing its character as they rushed along. It had ceased to be a street of three or four story houses, where for the most part the people lived over their shops, and where there was an effect of excessive use on everything, a worn-out and shabby look, rather than a squalid look. The cross-streets of towering tenement-houses, had come and gone, and now the buildings were low again, with greater or less gaps between them, while the railroad had climbed higher, and was like a line drawn through the air without reference to the localities which the train left swiftly behind. The houses had begun to be of wood here and there, and it was at a frame of two stories that Mr. Kane stopped with Ray, when they clambered down the long iron staircase of the station to the footway below. They pulled a bell that sounded faintly somewhere within, and the catch of the lock clicked as if it were trying to release itself; but when they tried the door it was still fast, and Mr. Kane rang again. Then a clatter of quick, impatient feet sounded on the stairs; the door was pulled sharply open, and they confronted a tall young man, with a handsome pale face, who bent on them a look of impartial gloom from clouded blue eyes under frowning brows. A heavy fringe of dull yellow hair almost touched their level with its straight line, which the lower lip of the impassioned mouth repeated.