[It is desirable that an organization which is assuming such proportions and promising such results should be examined from every point of view, and the foregoing article, written from that of an enthusiastic member of the order, will, we may hope, assist in throwing light upon the subject. If there is some degree of vagueness in its statement of the aims and purposes with which the movement has been set on foot, it is probable that this exactly represents the state of mind of the great majority of those who are engaged in it. The one tangible thing which it would seem to be accomplishing, a combination of the farmers for the purchase of pianos and agricultural implements at wholesale prices, is not of a very startling character; and if this can be attained at no greater cost or trouble to the individual "Patrons" than that of "decorating the granges" and taking part in the singing and the symbolical rites, a considerable advantage will no doubt have been gained. How the cost of transportation is to be reduced, or why the railroads, by facilitating the exchange of productions, should have become the bête noire of the producers, are points on which more definite information would seem to be required. But "the people" being now "aroused," and the revolution in progress, we have only to await events in that hopeful state of mind which such announcements are calculated to inspire.—ED.]
ON THE CHURCH STEPS.
CHAPTER VI.
I had a busy week of it in New York—copying out instructions, taking notes of marriages and intermarriages in 1690, and writing each day a long, pleading letter to Bessie. There was a double strain upon me: all the arrangements for my client's claims, and in an undercurrent the arguments to overcome Bessie's decision, went on in my brain side by side.
I could not, I wrote to her, make the voyage without her. It would be the shipwreck of all my new hopes. It was cruel in her to have raised such hopes unless she was willing to fulfill them: it made the separation all the harder. I could not and would not give up the plan. "I have engaged our passage in the Wednesday's steamer: say yes, dear child, and I will write to Dr. Wilder from here."
I could not leave for Lenox before Saturday morning, and I hoped to be married on the evening of that day. But to all my pleading came "No," simply written across a sheet of note-paper in my darling's graceful hand.
Well, I would go up on the Saturday, nevertheless. She would surely yield when she saw me faithful to my word.
"I shall be a sorry-looking bride-groom," I thought as I surveyed myself in the little mirror at the office. It was Friday night, and we were shutting up. We had worked late by gaslight, all the clerks had gone home long ago, and only the porter remained, half asleep on a chair in the hall.