Abner's book comprised a dozen short stories--twelve clods of earth gathered, as it were, from the very fields across which he himself, a farmer's boy, had once guided the plough. The soil itself spoke, the intimate, humble ground; warmed by his own passionate sense of right, it steamed incense-like aloft and cried to the blue skies for justice. He pleaded for the farmer, the first, the oldest, the most necessary of all the world's workers; for the man who was the foundation of civilized society, yet who was yearly gravitating downward through new depths of slighting indifference, of careless contempt, of rank injustice and gross tyranny; for the man who sowed so plenteously, so laboriously, yet reaped so scantily and in such bitter and benumbing toil; for the man who lived indeed beneath the heavens, yet must forever fasten his solicitous eye upon the earth. All this revolted Abner; the indignation of a youth that had not yet made its compromise with the world burned on every page. Some of his stories seemed written not so much by the hand as by the fist, a fist quivering from the tension of muscles and sinews fully ready to act for truth and right; and there were paragraphs upon which the intent and blazing eye of the writer appeared to rest with no less fierceness, coldly printed as they were, than it had rested upon the manuscript itself. "Men shall hear me--and heed me," Abner declared stoutly. A few of those who read his book happened to meet him personally, and one or two of this number--clever but inconspicuous people--lucidly apprehended him for what he was: that rare phenomenon, the artist (such he was already calling himself)--the artist whose personality, whose opinions and whose work are in exact accord. The reading public--a body rather captious and blase, possibly--overlooked his rugged diction in favour of his novel point of view; and when word was passed around that the new author was actually in town a number of the _illuminati_ expressed their gracious desire to meet him. II