"The Angel-'? Slightly." My heart was now quite warm. "Who called her so?"

"She said she knew you. I look after some of her friends for her."

"Who called her the Angel of the Lost Children'?"

"A friend of mine-Leo Wolffert, who works in the slums-a writer."

"Leo Wolffert! Do you know him?" "I guess we all know him, don't we, Doc?" put in the other man.

"Rather."

earlier than he had expected. In my distress about Dix I consulted my friend the very next day and he undertook to get him back. I told him I had not a cent to pay him with at present, but some day I should have it and then

"You'll never owe me a cent as long as you live," he said. "Besides, I'd like to find that dog. I remember him. He's a good one. You say you used the back stairway at times, opening on the alley near Mick Raffity's?"

"Yes."

He looked away out of the window with a placid expression.

"I wouldn't go down that way too often at night," he said promptly.

"Why?"

I was so much interested in this part of the conversation that I forgot at the moment to ask the doctor where he had known John Marvel and Wolffert.

I, however, asked him what I owed him, and he replied,

"Not a cent. Any of Langton's friends here or John Marvel's friends, or (after a pause) Miss Leigh's friends may command me. I am only too glad to be able to serve them. It's the only way I can help."

"That's what I told him," said my friend, whose name I heard for the first time. "I told him you weren't one of these Jew doctors that appraise a man as soon as he puts his nose in the door and skin him clean."

men have done it.”

"Oh! I'll be careful," I laughed. "I'm pretty sure-footed."

"You need to be there. You say your dog's a good fighter?"

"He's a paladin. Can whip any dog I ever saw. I never fought him, but I had a negro boy who used to take him off till I stopped him."

"Well, I'll find him-that is, I'll find where he went."

I thanked him and strolled over across town to try to get a glimpse of the “Angel of the Lost Children." I saw her in a carriage with another young girl, and as I gazed at her she suddenly turned her eyes and looked straight at me, quite as if she had expected to see me, and the smile she

"No; but there are plenty of 'em." I came away feeling that I had made two friends well worth making.

When I parted from my friend he took out of his pocket-book a card. "For my friends," he said, as he handed it to me. When I got to the light I read this name:

"Wm. Langton, Private Detective." It was not until long afterwards that I knew that the man he was following when he sprang on the car and I saved him was myself, and that I owed the attention first to my kinsman, and secondly to Mr. Leigh, to whom Peck had given a rather sad account of me.

I called on my new friend, Langton,

thought wings, lighted my heart for a week. A day or two later my detective friend dropped into my office.

"Well, I have found him." His face showed that placid expression which, with him, meant deep satisfaction. "The police have him-are holding him in a case, but you can identify and get him. He was in the hands of a negro dog-stealer and they got him in a raid. They pulled one of the toughest joints in town when there was a fight going on and pinched a full load. The nigger was among them. He put up a pretty stiff fight and they had to hammer him good before they quieted him. He'll go down for ninety days sure. He was a fighter, they said."

"I'm glad they hammered him-you're sure it's Dix?"

"Sure; he claimed the dog; said he'd raised him. But it didn't go. I knew he'd stolen him because he said he knew you." "Knew me a negro? What did he say his name was?"

"They told me-let me see-Professor Jeams-something."

"Not Woodson ?" "Yes, that's it."

"Well, for once in his life he told the truth. He sold me the dog. You say he's in jail? I must go and get him out." "You'll find it hard work. Fighting the police is a serious crime in this city. A man had better steal, rob, or kill anybody else than fight an officer."

"Who has most pull down there?" "Well, Coll McSheen has considerable. He runs the police. He may be next Mayor."

I determined, of course, to go at once and see what I could do to get Jeams out of his trouble. I found him in the common ward among the toughest criminals in the jail-a massive and forbidding looking structureto get into which appeared for a time almost as difficult as to get out. But on expressing my wish to be accorded an interview with him, I was referred from one official to another, until, with my back to the wall, I came to a heavy, bloated, ill-looking creature who went by the name of Sergeant Byle. I preferred my request to him. I might as well have undertaken to argue with the stone images which were rudely carved as Caryatides beside the entrance. He simply puffed his big black cigar in silence, shook his head and looked away from me; and my urging had no other effect than to bring a snicker of amusement from a couple of dog-faced shysters who had entered and with nod to him had sunk into greasy chairs.

"Who do you know here?"

A name suddenly occurred to me, and I used it.

"Among others, I know Mr. McSheen," and as I saw his countenance fall, I added, "and he is enough for the present." I looked him sternly in the eye.

He got up out of his seat and actually walked across the room, opened a cupboard and took out a key, then rang a bell. "Why didn't you say you were a friend

of his?" he asked surlily. "A friend of Mr. McSheen can see any one he wants here."

I have discovered that civility will answer with nine-tenths or even nineteentwentieths of the world, but there is a class of intractable brutes who yield only to force and who are influenced only by fear, and of them was this drunken ruffian. He led the way now subserviently enough, growling from time to time some explanation, which I took to be his method of apologizing. When, after going through a number of corridors, which were fairly clean and well ventilated, we came at length to the ward where my unfortunate client was confined, the atmosphere was wholly different: hot and fetid and intolerable. The air struck me like a blast from some infernal region, and behind the grating which shut off the miscreants within from even the modified freedom of the outer court, was a mass of humanity, foul enough in appearance to have come from hell.

At the call of the turnkey, there was some interest manifested in their evil faces and some of them shouted back, repeating the name of Jim Woodson; some half derisively, others with more kindliness. At length, out of the mob emerged poor Jeams, but, like Lucifer, Oh, how changed! His head was bandaged with an old cloth, soiled and stained; his mien was dejected, and his face was swollen and bruised. At sight of me, however, he suddenly gave a cry, and springing forward tried to thrust his hands through the bars of the grating to grasp mine. "Lord, God!" he exclaimed. "If it ain't de Captain. Glory be to God! Marse Hen, I knowed you'd come, if you jes' heard 'bout me. Git me out of dis, fur de Lord's sake. Dis is de wuss place I ever has been in in my life. Dey done beat me up and put hand-cuffs on me, and chain me, and fling me in de patrol-wagon, and lock me up and sweat me and put me through the third degree, till I thought if de Lord didn't take mercy 'pon me, I would be gone for sho. Can't you git me out o' dis right away?"

I explained the impossibility of doing this immediately, but assured him that he would soon be gotten out and that I would look after his case and see that he got justice.

"Yes, sir, that is what I want-jesticeI don't ax nothin' but jestice."

"How did you get here?" I demanded. And even in his misery, I could not help being amused to see his countenance fall. "Dey fetched me here in de patrolwagon," he said evasively.

"I know that. I mean, for what?" "Well, dey say, Captain, dat I wus desorderly an' drunk, but you know I don' drink nothin'."

"I know you do, you fool," I said, with some exasperation. "I have no doubt you were what they say, but what I mean is, where is Dix and how did you get hold of him?"

"Well, you see, Marse Hen, it's dthis way," said Jeams, falteringly. "I come here huntin' fur you and I couldn' fin' you anywhere, so then I got a place, and while I wus lookin' 'roun' fur you one day, I come 'pon Dix, an' as he wus lost, jes' like you wus, an' he didn't know where you wus, an' you didn't know where he wus, I tuk him along to tek care of him till I could fin' you."

"And incidentally to fight him?" I said. Again Jeams's countenance fell. "No, sir, that I didn't," he declared stoutly. "Does you think I'd fight dthat dog after what you tol' me?"

"Yes, I do. I know you did, so stop lying about it and tell me where he is, or I will leave you in here to rot till they send you down to the rockpile or the penitentiary."

"Yes, sir; yes, sir, I will. Fur God's sake, don' do dat, Marse Hen. Jes' git me out o' here an' I will tell you everything; but I'll swear I didn't fight him; he jes' got into a fight so, and then jist as he hed licked de stuffin out of dat Barkeep Gallagin's dog, them d-d policemen come in an' hammered me over the head because I didn't want them to rake in de skads and tek Dix 'way from me."

I could not help laughing at his contradictions.

"Well, where is he now ?"

"I'll swear, Marse Hen, I don' know. You ax the police. I jes' know he ain't in here, but dey knows where he is. I prays night and day no harm won't happen to him, because dat dog can beat ary dog in this sinful town. I jes' wish you had seen him."

As the turnkey was now showing signs of impatience, I cut Jeams short, thereby

saving him the sin of more lies, and with a promise that I would get him bailed out if I could, I came away.

The turnkey had assured me on the way that he would find and return me my dog and was so sincere in his declaration that nothing would give him more pleasure than to do this for any friend of Mr. McSheen's that I made the concession of allowing him to use his efforts in this direction. But I heard nothing more of him.

With the aid of my friend, the detective, I soon learned the names of the police officers who had arrested Jeams, and was enabled to get from them the particulars of the trouble which caused his arrest.

It seemed that, by one of the strange and fortuitous circumstances which so often occur in life, Jeams had come across Dix just outside of the building in which was my law office, and being then in his glory, he had taken the dog into the bar-room of Mick Raffity, where he had on arrival in town secured a place, to see what chance there might be of making a match with Dix. The match was duly arranged and came off the following night in a resort not far from Raffity's saloon, and Dix won the fight. Just at this moment, however, the police made a raid, pulled the place and arrested as many of the crowd as could not escape, and held on to as many of those as were without requisite influence to secure their prompt discharge. In the course of the operation, Jeams got soundly hammered, though I could not tell whether it was for being drunk or for engaging in a scrimmage with the police. Jeams declared privately that it was to prevent his taking down the money.

When the trial came off, I had prepared myself fully, but I feel confident that nothing would have availed to secure Jeams's acquittal except for two circumstances: One was that I succeeded in enlisting the interest of Mr. McSheen, who for some reason of his own showed a disposition to be particularly civil and complacent toward me at that time-so civil indeed that I quite reproached myself for having conceived a dislike of him. Through his intervention, as I learned later, the most damaging witness against my client, suddenly became exceedingly friendly to him and on the witness-stand failed to remember any circumstance of importance which could

injure him, and finally declared his inability to identify him.

The result was that Jeams was acquitted, and when he was so informed, he arose and made a speech to the Court and the Jury which would certainly fix him in

their memory forever. In the course of it, he declared that I was the greatest lawyer that had ever lived in the world and I had to stop him for fear, in his ebullient enthusiasm he might add also that Dix was the greatest dog that ever lived.

I

T is impossible not to sympathize with many of the purposes of socialism. Looked at sympathetically, its objective propositions are the result of a state of mind rather than of a logical system of thought; and one cannot be indifferent to this state of mind. To be sure, it is a matter of temperament rather than of reason; but one has an honoring sense of respect for those who, having listened to the songs of the sirens, have no desire ever to return to the land of humdrum. By this one means to express the idea that socialists are primarily idealists, and that they have arrived at their land of dreams by the highway of idealism; and that it is precisely because they are idealists that they are ever wishing to escape the sordid requirements of a world largely built upon bourgeois virtues. Thus it results that, as an idealistic expression of what life might be, it appeals strongly to the latent idealism in all of us-especially to those who for one reason or another find ourselves little endowed with material wealth, and who wish the opportunity for leisure, and for enjoyment according to our tastes. Whatever our level of education or intelligence, we are all of us striving to get the means of enjoying that which seems to each of us the most attractive way of spending our time. To the most of the workingmen it is a desire for freedom from constant grinding manual labor; and to mental laborers, it is a desire to escape from nervous strain and anxiety, and to have leisure for enjoyment.

Thus, while socialism appeals to an almost universal longing in human nature, it has, on the other hand, the obvious and inevitable inconsistencies of a theory detached from the tyrannical rule of fact. While idealizing the possibilities of human nature to suit an a priori conception of life, until this poor human nature is fairly unrecognizable, socialism proposes, as one means to its end, to obliterate the effects of existing conditions by the removal of competition in the struggle for material existence. That is, it suggests material means to bring about ideal conditions. It does not primarily put its emphasis on the improvement of human nature, but upon a change in the distribution of material wealth. The socialists are seemingly not concerned in building up an Altruria where the only end is goodness and where satisfactions are only spiritual. It is what seems to them the unequal distribution of material possessions which causes them to criticise existing society. Throughout socialistic literature there is the well-known insistence upon the materialistic interpretation of history—a conception based upon a hunger for things of material enjoyment, and for more and more of them. Fundamentally, they have as much centred their aim on an increase in material possessions as the veriest Napoleon of finance in Wall Street. An existence in which the acquisition of more material wealth is of very large

if not of chief-importance is in the thoughts of both. The ends sought for by the socialists are not, in effect, different from those of the mass of non-socialists who are striving to acquire wealth in order to have ease and leisure for enjoyment.