“A mere toy, that Poe and Hawthorne played with in the old mesmerist days, and I don’t know how many others.” “I don’t play with it as they did, exactly,” said Ray. “Oh, I’ve no doubt you employ it to as new effect as the scientifics who are playing with it again. But how can you live in this camp of embattled forces, where luxury and misery are armed against each other, and every lover of his kind should give heart and brain to the solution of the riddle that is maddening brother against brother,--how can you live on here and be content with the artistic study of hysteria?” The strong words of the old man, which fell tingling with emotion, had no meaning for the soul of youth in Ray; he valued them æsthetically, but he could not make personal application of them. He had a kind of amusement in answering: “Well, I’m not quite so bad as you think, Mr. Hughes. I wrote my story several years ago. I don’t suppose I could do anything of the kind, now.” Hughes’s mouth seemed stopped for the moment by this excuse. He sat glaring at Ray’s bright, handsome face through his overhanging, shaggy eyebrows, and seemed waiting to gather strength for another onset, when his daughter Peace came silently into the room behind Ray. Her father did not give her time to greet their visitor. “Well,” he called out with a voice of stormy pathos, “how did you leave that poor woman?” “She is dead,” answered the girl. “Good!” said Hughes. “So far, so good. Who is living?” “There are several children. The people in the house are taking care of them.” “Of course! There, young man,” said Hughes, “is a psychological problem better worth your study than the phenomena of hypnotism: the ability of poverty to provide for want out of its very destitution. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is wrought here every day in the great tenement-houses. Those who have nothing for themselves can still find something for others. The direst want may be trusted to share its crust with those who have not a crust; and still something remains, as if Christ had blessed the bread and broken it among the famishing. Don’t you think that an interesting and romantic fact, a mystery meriting the attention of literary art?” It did strike Ray as a good notion; something might be done with it, say in a Christmas story, if you could get hold of a tenement-house incident of that kind, and keep it from becoming allegorical in the working out. This went through Ray’s mind as he stood thinking also how he should ask the girl for his manuscript and the criticisms on it without seeming foolishly eager. Her father’s formidable intervention had dispensed him from the usual greetings, and he could only say, “Oh! Miss Hughes, Mr. Brandreth told me I might come and get my story of you--_A Modern Romeo_--and the readers’ opinions. I--I thought I should like to look them over; and--and”--