He told me all about his grips and passes and benefits; he told me how
much it would cost me to get in and how much more to stay in and how
much for a uniform (which was not compulsory). He told me about the fine
funeral the Masons would give me; he said that the Elks would care for
my widow and children.

"You're just the sort of a man," he said, "that we'd like to have in our
lodge. I'd enjoy giving you the grip of fellowship."

He was a rotund, good-humoured man with a shining red nose and a husky
voice. He grew so much interested in telling me about his lodges that I
think (I _think_) he forgot momentarily that he was selling
corn-planters, which was certainly to his credit.

As I drove homeward this afternoon I could not help thinking of the
Masons, the Oddfellows and the Elks--and curiously not without a sense
of depression. I wondered if my friend of the corn-planters had found
the pearl of great price that I have been looking for so long. For is
not friendliness the thing of all things that is most pleasant in this
world? Sometimes it has seemed to me that the faculty of reaching out
and touching one's neighbour where he really lives is the greatest of
human achievements. And it was with an indescribable depression that I
wondered if these Masons and Oddfellows and Elks had in reality caught
the Elusive Secret and confined it within the insurmountable and
impenetrable walls of their mysteries, secrets, grips, passes, benefits.

"It must, indeed," I said to myself, "be a precious sort of fraternity
that they choose to protect so sedulously."