The World of Chance by William Dean Howells

The streets had that Sunday sense which is as unmistakable as their / week-day effect. Their noises were subdued almost to a country quiet; as / he crossed with his friend to the elevated station, Ray noted with a / lifting heart the sparrows that chirped from the knots and streamers of / red Virginia-creeper hanging here and there from a porch roof or over a / bit of garden wall; overhead the blue air was full of the jargoning of / the blended church bells.

He tried to fit these facts with phrases in the intervals of his / desultory talk with Kane, and he had got two or three very good epithets / by the time they found seats together in an up-town train. It was not / easy to find them, for the cars were thronged with work-people going to / the Park for one of the last Sundays that could be fine there.

Kane said: "The man we are going to see belongs to an order of thinking / and feeling that one would have said a few years ago had passed away / forever, but of late its turn seems to be coming again; it's curious how / these things recur. Do you happen to hate altruism in any of its protean / forms?"

Ray smiled with the relish for the question which Kane probably meant / him to feel. "I can't say that I have any violent feeling against it."

"It is usually repulsive to young people," Kane went on, "and I could / very well conceive your loathing it. My friend has been an altruist of / one kind or another all his life. He's a man whom it would be perfectly / useless to tell that the world is quite good enough for the sort of / people there are in it; he would want to set about making the people / worthy of a better world, and he would probably begin on _you_. You have / heard of Brook Farm, I suppose?"

"Of course," Ray answered, with a show of resentment for such a / question. "_Blithedale Romance_ -- I think it's the best of Hawthorne's / books."

"Blithedale," said Mr. Kane, ignoring the literary interest, "is no more / Brook Farm than -- But we needn't enter upon that! My friend's career as / an altruist began there; and since then there's hardly been a / communistic experiment in behalf of Man with a capital and without / capital that he hasn't been into and out of."

"I should like immensely to see him," said Ray. "Any man who was at / Brook Farm -- Did he know Hollingsworth and Zenobia, and Priscilla and / Coverdale? Was it at Brook Farm that you met?"

Kane shook his head. "I think no one knew them but Hawthorne. I don't / speak positively; Brook Farm was a little before my day, or else I / should have been there too, I dare say. But I've been told those / characters never were."

Then it was doubly impossible that Hawthorne should have studied Miles / Coverdale from Kane; Ray had to relinquish a theory he had instantly / formed upon no ground except Kane's sort of authority in speaking of / Brook Farm; what was worse he had to abandon an instant purpose of / carrying forward the romance and doing _The Last Days of Miles / Coverdale_; it would have been an attractive title.

"I met David Hughes," Kane continued, "after the final break-up of the / community, when I was beginning to transcendentalize around Boston, and / he wanted me to go into another with him, out West. He came out of his / last community within the year; he founded it himself, upon a perfectly / infallible principle. It was so impregnable to the logic either of / metaphysics or events, that Hughes had to break it up himself, I / understand. At sixty-nine he has discovered that his efforts to oblige / his fellow-beings ever since he was twenty have been misdirected. It / isn't long for an error of that kind in the life of the race, but it / hasn't exactly left my old friend in the vigor of youth. However, his / hope and good-will are as athletic as ever."

"It's rather pathetic," Ray suggested.

"Why, I don't know -- I don't know! Is it so? He hasn't found out the / wrong way without finding the right way at the same time, and he's / buoyantly hopeful in it, though he's not only an old man; he's a sick / man, too. Of course, he's poor. He never was a fellow to do things by / halves, and when he dispersed his little following he divided nearly / all his substance among his disciples. He sees now that the right way to / universal prosperity and peace is the political way; and if he could / live long enough, we should see him in Congress -- if _we_ lived long / enough. Naturally, he is paving the way with a book he's writing. " Kane / went on to speak of his friend at length; he suddenly glanced out of the / car window, and said: "Ah, we're just there. This is our station."