As flat as the untroubled sea, the open prairie lay about us, browned and seared by frosts and gleaming faintly under the winter stars. Long parallels of street-lamps, cutting one another at right angles, marked the outlines of city “blocks,” and threw into stronger relief the deep black of clustered trees and the forms of lonely cottages with lights glancing dimly from their windows.
When my friend opened the door of his house, there was nothing in the domestic scene which met us to suggest the home of a revolutionary. It was the typical home, rather, of the prosperous American workman. The living-room, which we entered, was aglow with light, and redolent of dry, unwholesome, excessive heat from a closed iron stove, and it seemed at first to be already crowded by occupants. The wife was standing over a cradle, in which she softly rocked her baby, whose sleep was undisturbed by the conversation between two young men of the family. An old couple, seated in easy chairs, were reading to themselves, and formed a feature of the picture that fitted well with the books which stood ranged in swinging brackets on the wall. There was the usual floral paper, with a border sad enough to move one to tears, and the worsted tidies, and the prints wherein sentimentality has so long and so often posed as sentiment. But the plain, rough furniture was redeemed by the marks of long usefulness, and the room, as a whole, had all the cosey homeliness of fitness to those whom it served.
[Illustration: THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE DOMESTIC SCENE WHICH MET US TO SUGGEST THE HOME OF A REVOLUTIONARY.]
Soon we were seated at supper, and the family, accustomed, apparently, to the presence of a stranger brought home from the meeting, left my friend and me to our own discussion of Socialistic themes. I found this deeply interesting, for my host was finely representative of the views of the majority of the Socialists whom I saw at Waverley Hall. In the main he was a Social Democrat. His economic views were drawn, I found, entirely from Karl Marx. “_Das Kapital_” was his Bible, and he seemed to know it by heart. To question Marx’s theory of value or his treatment of labor in relation to production was blasphemy akin to casting doubt before a devout believer upon the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures.