Before him in the distance he had looked into the windows of a huge factory, the black smoke from which added to the gloom of the scene that lay before him. Through the windows of the factory, dimly seen, workers ran here and there, appearing and disappearing, the glare of the furnace fire lighting now one, now another of them, sharply. At his feet the tumbling waters that rolled and pitched over a little dam fascinated him. Looking closely at the racing waters his head, light from physical weariness, reeled, and in fear of falling he had been compelled to grip firmly the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For an hour Sam had looked at the scene, letting his eyes wander from the river to the grey sky and to the factory belching forth its black smoke. He had thought that the two feebly struggling fowls, immersed in their pointless struggle in the midst of such mighty force, epitomised much of man’s struggle in the world, and, turning, had gone along the sidewalks and to the village hotel, feeling old and tired. Now on the bench in the little park, with the early morning sun shining down through the glistening rain drops clinging to the red leaves of the trees, he began to lose the sense of depression that had clung to him through the night. A young man who walked in the park saw him idly watching the hurrying workers, and stopped to sit beside him. “On the road, brother?” he asked. Sam shook his head, and the other began talking. “Fools and slaves,” he said earnestly, pointing to the men and women passing on the sidewalk. “See them going like beasts to their bondage? What do they get for it? What kind of lives do they lead? The lives of dogs.” He looked at Sam for approval of the sentiment he had voiced. “We are all fools and slaves,” said Sam, stoutly. Jumping to his feet the young man began waving his arms about. “There, you talk sense,” he cried. “Welcome to our town, stranger. We have no thinkers here. The workers are like dogs. There is no solidarity among them. Come and have breakfast with me.” In the restaurant the young man began talking of himself. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. His father had died while he was yet in school and had left him a modest fortune, upon the income of which he lived with his mother. He did no work and was enormously proud of the fact. “I refuse to work! I scorn it!” he declared, shaking a breakfast roll in the air.