* * * * *

Once more Baxter wrote me, urging me to come to Eden.  He told me his wife would welcome me ... and jested clumsily that his secretary would be just the girl to marry me and take care of me....

Jested?  I did not know the man yet ... he meant it.

* * * * *

Though I was possessed of a curious premonitory warning that I must not accept his invitation and was, besides, settled in a hut by the lake shore, yet I was tempted to go to Eden....

For one thing, Perfection City was no longer the place of ideals it had been ... it was now a locality where the poorer bourgeoisie sent their wives and children, for an inexpensive summer outing....

Wavering this way and that, I sent a telegram which clinched the matter.

“Will leave for Eden to-morrow morning.  John Gregory.”

* * * * *

Not far from the little suburban station to which I had changed, lay the Single Tax Colony of Eden.  When I dropped off the train and found no one to greet me, I was slightly piqued.  Of a labourer in a nearby field I inquired the way to Eden.  He straightened his back, paused in his work.

He gave me the direction—­“and there by the roadside you’ll find a sort of wooden archway with a sign over it ... you step in and follow the path, and that will take you right into the centre of the community.  But what do want to go to Eden for? they’re all a bunch of nuts there!”

“Maybe I might be a nut, too!”

The old man laughed.

“Well, good-bye and good luck, sonny.”

Soon I reached the gateway, trailing my heavy suitcase ... heavy mostly with manuscripts....

A woodland path led me into what seemed, and was, a veritable forest; boughs interlaced above, with glimpses of blue sky between.  In interspaces of trees wild flowers grew.  Luxuriant summer was abroad.

I stepped out of the forest straightway into the community.  It was in a beautiful open space like a natural meadow.

There stood the houses of the colonists—­Single Taxers, Anarchists, Socialists, Communists,—­folk of every shade of radical opinion ... who here strove to escape the galling mockeries of civilisation and win back again to pastoral simplicity.

It was a community such as William Morris or some Guild Socialist of a medieval turn of mind might have conceived.  It was the Dream of John Ball visualised.

  “When Adam dolve and Eve span
  Who was then the gentleman?”

Toy houses picturesquely set under trees that fringed the Common ... houses with different, quaint colours ... the “green” in the centre carefully cropped as if nibbled by sheep ... well-kept paths of parti-coloured stone, as if each pebble had been placed there by hand....

Everything here was born obviously of the Arts and Crafts movement, a movement which seeks to teach that each shall make and build for himself ... if clumsily, yet uniquely ... the product to be something at least individual and warm from the maker’s personality.