hovels in which poor people had to live, and drink-shops, and gambling-houses, and prisons.  He was always asking himself, how are evils like these to be put away?  Whatever good any Age of the past had had, these things had never been cast out.  He did not think poorly of the Age when Christ was on the earth.  He was as pious as his brother.  He loved the Lord as much as his brother.  But his love went more into the future than into the past.  It was the Lord who was coming, rather than the Lord who had come, in whom he had joy.  “The Golden Age would come when Christ returned to the earth,” he said.  The verses in the Bible where this coming was foretold shone like light for Goldmorrow.  And often, as he read them aloud to his brothers and his sister, his eyes would kindle and he would burst out with speeches like this:  “I see that happy time approaching.  I hear its footsteps.  My ears catch its songs.  It is coming.  It is on the way.  My Lord will burst those heavens and come in clouds of glory, with thousands and tens of thousands in His train.  And things evil shall be cast out of the kingdom.  And things that are wrong shall be put right.  There shall be neither squalor, nor wretched poverty, nor crime, nor intemperance, nor ignorance, nor hatred, nor war.  All men shall be brothers.  Each shall be not for himself but for the kingdom.  And Christ shall be Lord of all.”

In these discussions Goldenday was always the last to speak.  And always he had least to say.  I have been told that he was no great speaker.  But my impression is that he got so little attention from his brothers when he spoke, that he got into the way of keeping his thoughts to himself.  But everybody knew that he did not agree with either of his brothers.  His belief was that the present Age, with all its faults, was the Golden Age for the people living in it.  And there is no doubt that that was the view of his sister Faith.  For when at any time he happened to let out even the tiniest word with that view in it, she would come closer to him, lean up against his side, and give him a hidden pressure of the hand.

III.

Search for the golden age.

When these views of the young Princes came to be known, the people took sides, some with one Prince, some with another.  The greatest number sided with Yestergold, a number not so great with Goldmorrow, and a few, and these for the most part of humble rank, with Goldenday.  In a short time nothing else was talked about, from one end of the kingdom to the other, but the time of the Golden Age.  And this became a trouble to the King.

Now there happened to be living at that time in the palace a wise man, a high Councillor of State, whom the King greatly esteemed, and whose counsel he had often sought.  To him in his trouble the King turned for advice.