by any other. The sordid
taint which this necessity imparted to the noblest and the highest sorts of
service was bitterly resented by generous souls, but there was no evading it.
There was no exemption, however transcendent the quality of one's service, from
the necessity of haggling for its price in the market-place. The physician must
sell his healing and the apostle his preaching like the rest. The prophet, who
had guessed the meaning of God, must dicker for the price of the revelation, and
the poet hawk his visions in printers' row. If I were asked the name the most
distinguishing felicity of this age, as compared to that in which I first saw
the light, I should say that to me it seems to consist in the dignity you have
given to labor by refusing to set a price upon it and abolishing the
market-place forever. By requiring of every man his best you have made God his
task-master, and by making honor the sole reward of achievement you have
imparted to all service the distinction peculiar in my day to the soldier's.
 

                                   Chapter XV

When, in the course of our tour of inspection, we came to the library, we
succumbed to the temptation of the luxurious leather chairs with which it was
furnished, and sat down in one of the book-lined alcoves to rest and chat
awhile.3
    »Edith tells me that you have been in the library all the morning,« said
Mrs. Leete. »Do you know, it seems to me, Mr. West, that you are the most
enviable: of mortals.«
    »I should like to know just why,« I replied.
    »Because the books of the last hundred years will be new to you,« she
answered. »You will have so much of the most absorbing literature to read as to
leave you scarcely time for meals these five years to come. Ah, what would I
give if I had not already read Berrian's novels.«
    »Or Nesmyth's, mamma,« added Edith.
    »Yes, or Oates' poems, or Past and Present, or, In the Beginning, or, - oh,
I could name a dozen books, each worth a year of one's life,« declared Mrs.
Leete, enthusiastically.
    »I judge, then, that there has been some notable literature produced in this
century.«
    »Yes,« said Dr. Leete. »It has been an era of unexampled intellectual
splendor. Probably humanity never before passed through a moral and material
evolution,