Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. WITHIN THE CIRCLE. A strange scene now rises before us, and though the reader, at first sight, may be disposed to shrink back, we bid him follow, in all good courage: for this is no assembly of Southern Ku-Klux, meditating a descent on some defenseless negro cabin, but a company of peaceful citizens, who lay aside their masks and disguises when the business which calls them together is over, and separate without the deliberate planning of a single deed of darkness. But our business just now is in an ante-room, where two men stand fronting each other, the older of the two with a blank book before him, in which he is writing down to the following questions the answers given him by the younger, who proves to be no other than our friend, Stephen Howland: "What is your name?" "Where do you live?" "What is your occupation?" "How-old are you? "Do you hold membership in, or are you suspended or expelled from any lodge of this order?" "Are you, so far as you know, in sound health?" Stephen Howland had a good deal of what we may call the "pride of life." He had never wrongedhis pure and temperate ancestry by a single .youthful excess, and his happy New England heritage of mingled plenty and toil had developed in him a vigor and hardihood which hardly knew a day's sickness. So he may be pardoned for answering in the affirmative, with a pleasant consciousness, meanwhile, that his well-knit, manly figure and fine proportions made him goodly to look at, both in the eyes of men and women. "Do you believe in the existence of a Supreme, Intelligent Being, the creator and preserver of the TJniverse?" And again Stephen answered in the affirmative, forgetting that he called himself a Christian, and was now giving his assent to a creed that left out the ...