the exchange at the hour of 3 P. M., when they were pounced upon by a quarter score of stalwart policemen and landed inside a rough luggage conveyance. Baxter Street was a Garden of Eden compared to the slums to which they were driven, and they were finally sheltered in a dirty tenement that arose in a series of rickety stories to a dizzy height. Their fastidious taste would not permit them to indulge in sleep amid such commonplace surroundings, where the only furniture of their room consisted of two dirty beds and a filthy sink. So they sat up all night smoking the cigars they happened to have in their clothes when captured, and muttering deep curses against their eccentric ruler. The following morning the awakening of the laborers resembled that of Christopher Sly in "The Taming of the Shrew." They were bewildered with astonishment at the appointments of their surroundings and the service of their attendants. A champagne headache was a natural accompaniment to the previous night's drinking and gorging; so that fashionable “coffee and rolls," though served in the most delicate of faïence, seemed but meagre fare upon which to commence the arduous labors of the day. At precisely 5:30 A. M. the same carriage they had occupied the previous evening, with its crested panels, its liveried coachman, and its spanking span of bays, was at the door to convey them back to work. The same routine was substantially carried into effect each day, a natural consequence of which was that they became weary of their enforced luxury, and their hearts yearned for the humble living of their tenement, with its rough and hearty jollity, and its freedom from constraint and the supervision of lackeys, however well dressed or polite. In the case of the fastidious brokers kept under surveillance, tired nature at last, reluctant, yielded. There came a day, or rather a night, when even they were able to sleep—an uneasy, troubled sleep, it is true amid the mean surroundings of the tenement. The determined will of the monarch so ordered affairs that the conditions under his edict were kept in force for many days. He proposed to give a thorough test to his quixotic ideas. The portion of the workmen was hard manual labor by day in the upper regions of air and light, and by night the relaxation of enervating luxury; and the portion of the brokers was deep dejection, deep curses, and haggard sleeplessness. The culmination of this condition of unrest occurred at a great ball which another royal edict had blazoned forth to be given as a tribute to the laboring masses, and at which the nonproducers would be compelled to assist, not indeed as menials, but as experienced advisers. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars at least would be expended on the pomp and glory of the occasion. The sage counsellors of state, men deeply versed in the lore of the past, were called together to devise costumes for the crude working people and to frame rules of etiquette for their behavior. The most elaborate descriptions appeared in the daily press of what was proposed. For weeks the vast preparations went steadily forward. Everything of luxury and ornament that the commerce of the empire sucked up from the farthest confines of the earth was made to minister to the great event. At last the auspicious day arrived. One of the grandest palaces of the King himself was the scene of the festivity. The costumes worn represented many of the great names of history, from Julius Cæsar to Napoleon Bonaparte, and from Cleopatra to Marie Antoinette. The height of the great occasion was reached somewhat after midnight when the quadrille d'honneur was announced. The great King sat upon a raised dais, or throne, the better to view the gorgeous pageant. A mighty fanfare of trumpets, which seemed to whirl the feelings for a moment into the forces beyond mortality, invited to the initial movements of the quadrille. It was as though an army with banners was about to launch its squadrons upon the foe in some majestic Friedland or Gettysburg. As the sound died away, there was a pause. The great King looked up in amazement, and stamping that foot whose heel had rested upon the necks of mighty potentates, now his willing vassals, he arose with frown black as midnight. Suffer me, O reader, to recall the elements of this unparalleled occasion: On the one hand, almost omnipotent power, backed by transcendent though wayward genius, a will that hitherto had never been balked, an unsullied prestige, a front of Jove to threaten and command, upon which great thought registered every varying expression, one of the least of which would have endowed an ordinary prince with lasting renown. On the other hand, "fantastic compliment strutting up and down tricked in outlandish feather." A motion from the hand of majesty, now fully erect, sent another mighty wave of martial music flying on invisible wings, in thousand forms, throughout every corridor. As this second summons for the masterpiece to be set in motion died away in turn, two bands of men detached themselves from the distant throng massed in the farthest background, and came slowly forward with bowed heads and deferential tread. At the same instant a hundred brilliant officers of the household stepped out of the corridors behind the King with drawn swords, and other hundreds crowded behind them prepared to do their master's instant service. The Great Strategist comprehended the situation with a single sweeping glance of his eagle eye, and drawing himself up full height motioned his servitors with his left hand back into their concealment, while with his extended right hand he encouraged with benignant gesture the approach of the representatives of the people, who had shrunk back in dismay when the King's guard sprang forth so abruptly. It was now seen that the approaching bands were composed in equal parts of the gaudily caparisoned workmen and their plainly dressed advisers. Each party bore in its midst an enormous roll, whose weight impeded anything like rapid progress. On arriving at the front of the throne, they deposited their burdens and then prostrated themselves before the King. When bidden to arise and state their purpose, a stalwart son of toil stepped forward in front of his comrades. He was attired in a $10,000 costume, representing Henry of Navarre. This costume sat upon his rugged limbs as though they had been melted into it. The King gazed complacently upon his manufactured nobleman and bade him proceed. "August and Sovereign King!" thus began the blacksmith, for such he was when not intoxicated or attending a costume ball❝August and Sovereign King, I have been pushed forward by my fellows who have joined in this petition, with a vast multitude of their co-workers, similarly gorged with hateful luxury. They ask me to state plainly to your Majesty that they now know from actual experience how hollow and worth less are all the glories of the merely rich, whose time is devoted to vain shows and in devising new delicacies for the palate. They beseech your Majesty that you, in accordance with your gracious pleasure, should restore them to their simple and humble paths of life, wherein they will dwell in reasonable contentment hereafter." The workman ceased, and the spokesman for wealth and idleness stepped forward and pleaded his case very eloquently. He showed, in the petition which many thousands of his class had signed, that through their recent experience they all had been made to feel the weight of life as it rests upon those under them, He averred that he and his fellows were heartily sick of their lives thus ordered, and that they petitioned the King to send them beyond his confines, or place them in his army, or, better still, allow them to seek honorable employment in vocations more in accord with their taste and inclination. The King, esteeming that he had sufficiently disciplined the wealthy and had measurably cast out the "daimon of unrest" from the mind of labor, while at the same time he had given a notable illustration to all his people of the folly of outrunning too far the sentiments of your age, and the arrant rot of placing edicts upon the statute books that at once become a dead letter unless backed by despotic force, and feeling the security of his position, stood before his petitioners, lightly leaning on his left foot, with his right hand in the breast of his coat, and thus addressed them: 66 My people, the results flowing from my edict are not otherwise than I fully believed would result; I am satisfied at the real good that has been accomplished. Many there are who would like to see human nature changed by an equally absurd upheaval of the social fabric, which would instantly place the limbs of labor between cambric sheets and line their stomachs with sweetmeats. The truly wise base their expectations for the race upon no such sudden revolution, but rather see salvation for their fellows in a gradual and natural betterment of conditions, a growth upwards that can be maintained through all the spasms of reform, a lifting of the whole fabric of society by the great forces of education, faith, and persistency, which are and have ever been the architects of the race." PLAZA OF THE POETS. REPLY TO "LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER." BY BARTON LOMAX PITTMAN. Nay, my grandsire, though you leave me latest lord of Locksley Hall, Point me to the shield of Locksley, hanging in this mansion lone, stone. While you prate of pride ancestral and the dead dreams of your youth, I, despite my birth and lineage, am a battler for the truth. To the work-worn, half-starved peasants of this realm my heart goes out Those who, plundered and forgotten, find this life a ruthless rout. In the rustling robes of Amy bloomed the roses that had fled Nay, 'tis wrong that we should range with science glorying in the time, While we force our brother mortals into, squalor, need, and crime; Wicked we should pose as Christians singing songs to God on high, Heedless of his tortured creatures who in pauper prisons lie. Christless is the crime of turning creed-stopped ears to teardrops shed By the women whom oppression robs of virtue for their bread. Satan's blush would mantle crimson could he see the stunted child Slaving in our marts and markets, helpless, hopeless, and reviled See its pallid face uplifted from the whirling factory wheels, |