square, drew anew their huge bull-ring, resumed their game, and everybody was happy and unreformed except, of course, the reformers; though perhaps they were happy, too, in their restored misery of having something to complain about and to wag their heads over.
In relating this veracious little tale of the lid of Loami, perhaps I have not sufficiently revealed that attitude of moral sympathy toward the good characters in the story which Tolstoy insists a writer should always assume and maintain. But this has not been due to any want of that sympathy. In the shadows of the scene the figure of the mayor, for instance, has ever been present—the keenest sufferer, the most unhappy man of them all. He was the one of all of them who was burdened with official responsibility; the marble-playing faction was happy in that it had no responsibility save of that light, artificial sort imposed by the rules of its game; its conscience, indeed, was untroubled. The other faction—the goo-goos, or whatever they were called in Loami—felt responsible primarily for the short-comings of others; their consciences were troubled only by the sins of other people, the easiest and most comfortable, because it is the most normal, position that the human conscience can assume. But the mayor was held responsible for everything and everybody, and in seeking to do his duty he found that difficulty which must everywhere increase in a society and a civilization which, in casting off some of its old moorings, recognizes less the responsibility of parent and teacher, not to mention personal respon-
