I BECOME A SOCIALIST

I soon joined the party and gave myself body, soul and spirit to the Socialists’ propaganda.  The quest for a living took me to a little farm on the outskirts of the city.  There were eighteen acres—­sixteen of them stones.

Gradually I began to feel that my rejection was not a mere matter of being let alone, of ignoring me; it was a positive attitude.  There was a design to drive me out of the city.  On the farm I was without the gates in person but my influence was within, among the workers.  We spent every penny we had on the farm.  I hired a neighbouring farmer to plow my ground and plant my seed, for I had neither horse nor machinery.  I told him I had a little cottage in the woods in Massachusetts that I was offering for sale and I would pay him out of the proceeds.  At first he believed me and did the work.

It took me two months to get that cottage sold and get the money for it.  The farmer’s son camped on my doorstep daily.  Every day I met him, in the fields or on the road.  I spoke in such soft tones and promised so volubly every time he approached me that he got the impression that I had no cottage—­that I was a fraud and cheating his father.  He spread that impression.  He began after a while to insult me, to make fun of me.  I debated with myself one afternoon whether when he again repeated his insults I should thrash him or treat him as a joke.  I decided on the former.  Meantime the check for the cottage came and relieved the situation.  Despite my inability to become a Yogi, I believed in the New Thought.  My wife and I used to “hold the thought,” “make the mental picture,” and “go into the silence.”  We did this regularly.

I had an old counterfeit ten-dollar bill for a decoy.  I shut my eyes and imagined myself stuffing big bundles of them into the pigeon-holes of my desk.

I got an incubator, filled it with Buff Orpington eggs and kept the thermometer at 103 deg.  F. My knees grew as hard as a goat’s from watching it.  In the course of events, two chickens came.  We had pictured the yard literally covered with them.  These poor things broke their legs over the eggs.  My wife was more optimistic than I was.

“Wait,” she said, “these things are often several days late.”  So we waited; waited ten days and then refilled the thing and began all over again.

We lost an old hen that was so worthless that we never looked for her.  In the fullness of her time she returned with a brood of fourteen!  She had been in “the silence” to some purpose!

“Well, let’s let the hens alone,” my wife said with a sigh; “they know this business better than we do.”  But we kept on monkeying with mental images—­it was great fun.

During our stay on that farm I did four times more pastoral work than I had ever done in my life.  I was the minister of the nondescript and the destitute.  I presided over funerals, weddings, baptisms, strikes, protests, mass meetings.  Nobody thought of paying anything.  To those I served I had a sort of halo, a wall of mystery; to me it was often the halo of hunger—­of the wolf and the wall—­yes, a wall, truly, and very high that separated me from my own.