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Yes; they are all here now, at last; all, from father down to the curates; some sitting resolutely down, some standing uncertainly up. Barbara's protégé, with frightened stealth, is edging round the furniture to where she sits on a little chair alone. Barbara is locketless, braceletless, chainless, head-dressless! such was our unparalleled haste to abscond.
And in this change, though Hal had no idea of it, he was repeating an experience common among reformers; many of whom begin as mild and benevolent advocates of some obvious bit of justice, and under the operation of the jail-psychology are made into blazing and determined revolutionists. "Eternal spirit of the chainless mind," says Byron. "Greatest in dungeons Liberty thou art!"
Perchance from his windows in the Lion Mansion he had looked in the evening over the broad expanse of frontierless waters, and risen to the exaltation of the chainless unrest, the tireless and eternal youth, the illimitable breadth of the sea. At all events, he stood before the House visibly younger, brighter, serener than for many a day.
It does seem odd and frumpish not to be in Scotland, but motoring covers a multitude of social sins. Not a word has been said about birds. Our sporting talk is of mufflers, pinions, water-cooled brakes, and chainless drives. The Tyndals have turned up at this hotel, more gorgeous and more bored than ever, but they have taken a fancy to Ellaline Lethbridge, and I am playing it for all it's worth.
He told her that he rode "one of those chainless bikes." He said it rather mumblingly. Exactly in that tone she used to say things like, "I do like you in that brown suit, Marko." He resumed his ride. A mile farther on he overtook, on a slight rise, an immense tree trunk slung between three pairs of wheels and dragged by two tremendous horses, harnessed tandemwise.
So we sheered off together, arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging, thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me. A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking stile?
So wonderful in equalizing all states and all times in the varying tide of life, are these two rulers yet levellers of mankind, Hope and Custom, that the very idea of an eternal punishment includes that of an utter alteration of the whole mechanism of the soul in its human state, and no effort of an imagination, assisted by past experience, can conceive a state of torture which custom can never blunt, and from which the chainless and immaterial spirit can never be beguiled into even a momentary escape.
He then robed me and himself in a costume which suggested by its shape both Greece and Egypt, but by its crimson colour a more passionate life than theirs; and having put into my hands a little chainless censer of bronze, wrought into the likeness of a rose, by some modern craftsman, he told me to open a small door opposite to the door by which I had entered.
Nothing but education scientific education can benefit mankind. We must find out the laws of nature and conform to them. We need free bodies and free minds, free labor and free thought, chainless hands and fetterless brains. Free labor will give us wealth. Free thought will give us truth.
I am going to cure you, and then you will throw the crutches away yourself." For the vagaries of the clouds, the infidels propose to substitute the realities of the earth; for superstition, the splendid demonstrations and achievements of science; and for the theological tyranny, the chainless liberty of thought. We do not say we have discovered all; that our doctrines are the all in all in truth.
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