"Tough—wasn't it?" said Hendricks. "What did you do? Why didn't you go to Carnine or Barclay?"

"That's just what I'm a-comin' to,—the Priest or the Levite?" said Jake. "Well, Mart said, 'Where're the men they caught—won't they help?' and I says, 'They paid their tine and skipped.' 'Fine?' asks Mart, 'fine? I thought you said it was jail sentence.' 'Well,' says I, 'it amounts to the same thing; she can't pay her fine, and that damn reform judge, wanting to make a record as a Spartan, has committed her to jail till it is paid!' 'So they go free, and she goes to jail, because she is poor,' says Mart.' That's what your reform means,' says I, 'or I let her and the boy loose and lose my job. And oh, Mart,' says I, 'the screams of that little boy at the disgrace of it and the terror of the jail—man—I can't stand it!' 'How much is it?' sighs Mart. 'An even hundred fine and seventeen dollars and fifty cents costs,' says I. Mart's eyes was leaking, and he gets up and goes to the vault, and comes back with the cash and says, blubbering like a calf: 'Here, Jake Dolan, you old scoundrel, take this. I'll pass a paper and get it to-morrow—now get out of here.' And he handed me the money all cried over where he'd been slow counting it out, and said when he'd got hold of his wobbly jaw: 'Don't you tell her where you got it—I don't want her around here. I'll see her to-morrow when I'm down that way and talk to her for old Cap Lee—' And then he laughs as he stands in the door and says: 'Well, Jim,' and he points up, 'your bread cast upon the waters was a long time a-coming—but here she is;' and he says, 'Do you suppose the old villain knows?' And I turned and hunted up the justice and went around to the office, and told Trixie to 'go sin no more,' and she laughs and says, 'Well, hardly ever!' and I kissed the kid, and he fought my whiskers, and we all live happy ever after."

But the colonel, after Dolan left the office, went into the darkening room, and spread out the harsh letter from the Vermont banker demanding money long past due, and read and reread it and took up his burden, and got into the weary treadmill of his life. It rained the next day, and he did not go out with his subscription paper; he had learned that people subscribe better on bright days; and as Hendricks and Barclay were both out of town, he wrote a dilatory letter to the Vermont people—the fifth he had written about that particular transaction—and waited another rainy day and still another before starting out with his paper. But the event was past; the cry of the child was not in the people's ears; they knew that the colonel had put up the money; so it was not until Hendricks came back and heard the story from Dolan that the colonel was repaid. Then because he actually had the money—at least half of it due on that particular debt, which was one of scores of its kind—the colonel delayed another day and another, and while he was musing the fire burned. And events started in Vermont which greatly changed the course of this story.

"I wonder," he has written in that portion of the McHurdie Biography devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are bedraggled. And out of the inexplicable tangle of the mesh of life come dark threads from God knows where and colour the woof of it gray and dreary. Ah for the days of the large white plumes—for the days when life's woof was bright!"



CHAPTER XX

If the reader of this tale should feel drawn to visit Sycamore Ridge, he will find a number of interesting things there, and the trip may be made by the transcontinental traveller with the loss of but half a dozen hours from his journey. The Golden Belt Railroad, fifteen years ago, used to print a guide-book called "California and Back," in which were set down the places of interest to the traveller. In that book Sycamore Ridge was described thus:—

"Sycamore Ridge, pop. 22,345, census 1890; large water-power, main industry milling; also manufacturing; five wholesale houses. Seat Ward University, 1300 students; also Garrison County High School, also Business College. Thirty-five churches, two newspapers, the Daily Banner and the Index; fifty miles of paved streets; largest stone arch bridge in the West, marking site of Battle of Sycamore Ridge, a border ruffian skirmish; home of Watts McHurdie, famous as writer of war-songs, best known of which is—" etc., etc.

But excepting Watts, who may be gone before you get there,—for he is an old man now, and is alone and probably does not always have the best of care,—the things above annotated will not interest the traveller. At the Thayer House they will tell you that three things in the town give it distinction: the Barclay home, a rambling gray brick structure which the natives call Barclay Castle, with a great sycamore tree held together by iron bands on the terraced lawn before the house—that is number one; the second thing they will advise the traveller to see is Mary Barclay Park, ten acres of transplanted elm trees, most tastefully laid out, between Main Street and the Barclay home; and the third thing that will be pointed out to the traveller is the Schnitzler fountain, in the cemetery gateway, done by St. Gaudens; it represents a soldier pouring water from his canteen into his hand, as he bathes the brow of a dying comrade.

These things, of course,—the house, the park, and the fountain,—represent John Barclay and his money. The town is proud of them, but the reader is advised not to expect too much of them. One of the two things really worth seeing at the Ridge is the view over the wheat fields of the Sycamore Valley from the veranda of the Culpepper home on the hill. There one may see the great fields lying in three townships whereon John Barclay founded his fortune. The second thing worth seeing may be found in the hallway of the public library building, just at the turn of the marble stairway, where the morning light strikes it. Take the night train out of Chicago and get to the Ridge in the morning, to get the light on that picture.

It is a portrait of John Barclay, done when he was forty years old and painted by a Russian during the summer when the Barclays were called home from Europe before their journey was half completed, to straighten out an obstreperous congressman, one Tom Wharton by name, who was threatening to put wheat and flour on the free list in a tariff bill, unless—but that is immaterial, except that Wharton was on Barclay's mind more or less while the painter was at work, and the portrait reflects what Barclay thought of a number of things. It shows a small gray-clad man, with a pearl pin in a black tie, sitting rather on the edge of his chair, leaning forward, so that the head is thrown into the light. The eyes are well opened, and the jaw comes out, a hard mean jaw; but the work of the artist, the real work that reveals the soul of the sitter, is shown in three features, if we except the pugnacious shoulders. In the face are two of these features: the mouth, a hard, coarse, furtive mouth,—the mouth of the liar who is not polished,—the peasant liar who has been caught and has brazened it out; the mouth and the forehead, full almost to bulging, so clean and white and naked that it seems shameful to expose it, a poet's forehead, noble and full of dreams, broad over the eyes, and as delicately modelled at the temples as a woman's where the curly brown hair is brushed away from it. But the wonderful feature about the portrait is the right hand. The artist obviously asked Barclay to assume a natural attitude, and then seeing him lean forward with his hand stretched out in some gesture of impatience, persuaded him to take that pose. It is the sort of vital human thing that would please Barclay—no sham about it; but he did not realize what the Russian was putting into that hand—a long, hard, hairy, hollow, grasping, relentless hand, full in the foreground and squarely in the light—a horrible thing with artistic fingers, and a thin, greedy palm indicated by the deep hump in the back. It reaches out from the picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the furtive mouth, the bold, shrewd eyes, and then sees that forehead full of visions, one sees in it more than John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge, more than America, more than Europe. It is the menace of civilization—the danger to the race from the domination of sheer intellect without moral restraint.

General Ward, who was on the committee that received the picture fifteen years after it was painted, stood looking at it the morning it was hung there on the turn of the stairs. As the light fell mercilessly upon it, the general, white-haired, white-necktied, clean-shaven, and lean-faced, gazed at the portrait for a long time, and then said to his son Neal who stood beside him, "And Samson wist not that the Lord had departed from him."

It will pay one to stop a day in Sycamore Ridge to see that picture—though he does not know John Barclay, and only understands the era that made him, and gave him that refined, savage, cunning, grasping hand.

Barclay stopped a week in Washington on his return from Europe the year that picture was painted, made a draft for fifty thousand dollars on the National Provisions Company to cover "legal expenses," and came straight home to Sycamore Ridge. He was tired of cities, he told Colonel Culpepper, who met Barclay at the post-office the morning he returned, with his arms full of newspapers. "I want to hear the old mill, Colonel," said Barclay, "to smell the grease down in the guts of her, and to get my hair full of flour again." When he had gorged himself for two days, he wired Bemis to come to the Ridge, and Barclay and Bemis sat on the dam one evening until late bedtime, considering many things. As they talked, Barclay found that a plan for the reorganization of the Provisions Company was growing in his mind, and he talked it out as it grew.

"Lige," he said, as he leaned with his elbows on a rock behind him, "the trouble with the company as it now stands is that it's too palpable. There's too much to levy on—too much in sight; too much physical property. How would it do to sell all these mills and elevators, and use the company as a kind of a cream skimmer—a profit shop—to market the products of the mills?" He paused a moment, and Bemis, who knew he was not expected to reply, flipped pebbles into the stream. Barclay changed his position slightly and began to pick stones out of the crevices, and throw the stones into the water. "That's the thing to do—go ahead and sell every dollar's worth of assets the company's got—I'll take the mill here. I couldn't get along without that. Then we'll buy the products of the mills at cost of the millers, and let them get their profits back as individual holders of our stock. Our company will handle the Door Strip—buy it and sell it—and if any long-nosed reformer gets to snooping around the mills, he'll find they are making only a living profit; and as for us—any state grain commissioner or board of commissioners who wanted to examine us could do so, and what'd he find? Simply that we're buying our products at cost of the millers and selling at the market price—sometimes at a loss, sometimes at a profit; and what if we do handle all the grain and grain products in the United States? They can't show that we are hurting anything. I tell you there's getting to be too much snooping now in the state and federal governments. Have you got any fellow in your office who can fix up a charter that will let us buy and sell grain, and also sell the Barclay Economy Strip?"

Bemis nodded.

"Then, damn 'em, let 'em go on with their commissioners and boards and legislative committees; they can't catch us. There's no law against the railroads that ship our stuff buying the Economy Door Strip, is there? You bet there isn't. And we're entitled to a good round inventor's profit, ain't we? You bet we are. You go ahead and get up that reorganization, and I'll put it through. Say, Lige—" Barclay chuckled as a recollection flashed across his mind—"you know I've made some of our Northwest senators promise to make you a federal judge. That's one of the things I did last week; I thought maybe sometime we'd need a federal judge as one of the—what do you call it—the hereditaments thereunto appertaining of the company." Bemis opened his eyes in astonishment, and Barclay grunted in disgust as he went on: "Of course we can't get you appointed from this state—that's clear—but they think we can work it through in the City—as soon as there is a vacancy—or make a new district. How would you like that? Judge Bemis—say, that sounds all right, doesn't it?"

Barclay rose and stretched his legs and arms. "Well, I must be going—Mrs. Barclay and my mother want to hear the new organ over in the Congregational Church. It's a daisy—Colonel Culpepper, amongst hands, skirmished up three thousand. They let me pick it out, and I had to put up another thousand myself to get the kind I wanted. Are you well taken care of at the hotel?" When Bemis explained that he had the bridal chamber, the two men clambered up the bank of the stream, crossed the bridge, and at his gate Barclay said: "Now, I'll sleep on this to-night,—this reorganization,—and then I'll write you a letter to-morrow, covering all that I've said, and you can fix up a tentative charter and fire it down—and say, Lige, figure out what a modest profit on all the grain and grain produce business of the country would be—say about two and a half per cent, and make the capitalization of the reorganization fit that. We'll get the real profits out of the Door Strip, and can fix that up in the books. We'll show the reformers a trick or two." It was a warm night, and when the organ recital was over, John and Jane Barclay, after the custom of the town, sat on a terrace in front of the house talking of the day's events. Music always made John babble.

"Jane," he asked suddenly, "Jane—when does a man begin to grow old? Here I am past forty. I used to think when a man was forty he was middle-aged; every five years I have advanced my idea of what an old man was; when I was fifteen, I thought a man was getting along when he was thirty. When I was twenty-five, I regarded forty as the beginning of the end; when I was thirty, I put the limit of activity at forty-five; five years ago I moved it up to fifty; and to-day I have jumped it to sixty. It seems to me, Jane, that I'm as much of a boy as ever; all this talk about my being a man puzzles me. What's this Provisions Company but a game? And I'm going to play another game; I'm going to get grain and grain produce organized, and then I'm going to tackle meat. In ten years I'll have the packing-houses where I have the mills; but it's just play—and it's a lot of fun."

He was silent a moment. Jane did not disturb his reveries. She understood, without exactly putting her feeling into language, that she was being talked at, not talked to.

"Say, Jane," he exclaimed, "wasn't that 'Marche Triomphante to-night great?" He hummed a bar from the motif, "That's it—my—" he cried, hitting his chair arm with his fist, "but that's a big thing—almost good enough for Wagner to have done; big and insistent and strong. I'm getting to like music with go to it—with bang and brass. Wagner does it; honest, Jane, when I hear his trombones coming into a theme, I get ideas enough to give the whole force in the office nervous prostration for a month. To-night when that thing was swelling up like a great tidal wave of music rolling in, I worked out a big idea; I'm going to sell all the mills and factories back to the millers for our stock, and when I own every dollar of our stock, I'm going to double the price of it to them and sell it back to them; and if they haggle about it, I'll build a new mill across the track from every man-jack who tries to give me any funny business—I'll show 'em. That reorganization ought to clean up millions for us in the next year. What a lot of fun it all is! I used to think old Jay Gould was some pumpkins; but if we get this reorganization through, I'll go down there and buy the Gould outfit and sell 'em for old iron."

The current of his thoughts struck under language, as a prairie stream sometimes hides from its surface bed. After a time Jane said: "Grandma Barclay thought the 'Marche Funebre' was the best thing the man did. I heard the Wards speaking of it in the vestibule; and Molly, who held my hand through it, nearly squeezed it off—poor girl; but she looks real well these days." Jane paused a moment and added: "Did you notice the colonel? How worn and haggard he looks—he seems broken so. They say he is in trouble. Couldn't we help him?"

Her husband did not reply at once. Finally he recalled his wandering wits and answered: "Oh, I don't know, Jane. He'll pull through, I guess." Then he reverted to the music, which was still in his head. "He played the Largo well—didn't he? That was made for the organ. But some way I like the big things. The Largo is like running a little twenty-horse-power steam mill, and selling to the home grocers. But 'The Ride of the Valkyries,' with those screaming discords of brass, and those magnificent crashes of harmony—Jane, I've got an idea—Wagner's work is the National Provisions Company set to music, and I'm the first trombone." He laughed and reached for his wife's hand and kissed it; then he rose and stood before her, admiring her in the starlight, as he exclaimed: "And you are those clarinets, sweet and clear and delicious, that make a man want to cry for sheer joy. Come on, my dear—isn't it very late?" And the little man limped across the grass up the steps and into the house. The two stopped a moment while he listened to the roar of the water and the rumble of the mill, that glowed in the night like a phosphorescent spectre. He squeezed her hand and cried out in exultation, "It's great, isn't it—the finest mill on this planet, my dear—do you realize that?" And then they turned into the house.

The next morning he kept two stenographers busy; he was spinning the web of his reorganization, bringing about a condition under which men were compelled to exchange their stock in the National Provisions Company for their former property. He was a crafty little man, and his ways were sometimes devious, even though to outward view his advertised and proclaimed methods were those of a pirate. So when he had dictated a day's work to two girls, he went nosing through the mill, loafing in the engine rooms, looking at the water wheel, or running about rafters in the fifth floor like a great gray rat. As he went he hummed little tunes under his breath or whistled between his teeth, with his lips apart. After luncheon he unlocked a row-boat, and took a cane pole and rowed himself a mile up the mill-pond, and brought home three good-sized bass. Thus did he spend his idle moments around the Ridge. That night he thumped his piano and longed for a pipe organ. The things he tried to play were noisy, and his mother, sitting in the gloaming near him, sighed and said: "John, play some of the old pieces—the quieter ones; play 'The Long and Weary Day' and some of the old songs. Have you forgotten the 'Bohemian Girl' and those Schubert songs?"

His fingers felt their way back to his boyhood, and when he ceased playing, he stood by his mother a moment, and patted her cheeks as he hummed in German the first two lines of the "Lorelei," and then said, "We have come a long way since then—eh, mother?" She held his hand to her cheek and then to her lips, but she did not reply. He repeated it, "A long, long way from the little home of one room here!" After a pause he added, "Would you like to go back?"

A tear fell on the hand against her cheek. He felt her jaw quiver, and then she said, "Oh, yes, John—yes, I believe I would."

He knew she did not care for his wealth, and there were many things about his achievements that he felt she might misunderstand; her attitude often puzzled him. So he sat a moment on her chair arm, and said, "Well, mother, I have done my best." It was a question more than a protest.

"Yes, dear," she replied, "I know you have—you have done your best—your very best. But I think it is in your blood."

"What?" he asked.

"Oh, all this," she answered; "all this money-getting. I am foolish, John, but some way, I want my little boy back—the one who used to sit with me so long ago, and play on the guitar and sing 'Sleeping, I Dream, Love.' I don't like your new music, John; it's so like clanging cars, and crashing hammers, and the groans of men at toil."

"But this is a new world, mother—a new world that is different," protested the son, impatiently.

And the mother answered sadly as she looked up at him: "I know, dear—it is a new world; but the same old God moves it; and the same faith in God and love of man move men that always have moved them, and always will move them; there are as many things to live and die for now, as when your father gave up his life, John—just as many." They rocked together in silence—the boy of forty and the mother of sixty. Finally she said, "Johnnie, play me 'Ever of Thee I'm fondly Thinking,' won't you, before you go?"

He sat with his foot on the soft pedal and played the old love song, and as he played his mother wandered over hills he had never seen, through fields he had never known, and heard a voice in the song he might never hear, even in his dreams. When he finished, she stood beside him and cried with all the passion her years could summon: "Oh, John—John—it will come out some way—some day. It's in your soul, and God in His own way will bring it out." He did not understand her then, and it was many years before he prayed her prayer.

The next day he went to the City and plunged into his work, and the Ridge and its people and the prayers of his mother became to him only as a dream that comes in the night and fades in the day. Even the shabby figure of Colonel Martin Culpepper, with his market basket on his arm, waving a good-by as the Barclay private car pulled out of the Sycamore Ridge depot, disappeared from his mind, though that pathetic image haunted him for nearly a hundred miles as he rode, and he could not shake it off until he immersed himself in the roar of the great City. He could not know that he had any remote relation with the worry in the old man's eyes. Nor did Martin Culpepper try to shift his load to John. He knew where the blame was, and he tried to take it like a man. But in reckoning the colonel's account, may not something be charged off to the account of John Barclay, who to save himself and accomplish the Larger Good—which meant the establishment of his own fortunes—sent Adrian Brownwell in those days in the seventies with the money to the colonel, not so much to help the colonel as to save John Barclay? The Larger Good is a slow, vicious, accumulative poison, and heaven only knows when it will come out and kill.

It was a week after the pipe-organ recital at the church, when Mary Barclay, doing her day's marketing, ran into Colonel Culpepper standing rather forlornly in front of McHurdie's shop. He bowed to her with elaborate graciousness, and she stopped to speak with him. In a moment he was saying, "So you have not heard, are unaware, entirely ignorant, in point of fact, of my misfortunes?" She assented, and the colonel went on: "Well, madam, the end has come; I have played out my hand; I have strutted my hour upon the stage, and now I go off. Old Mart Culpepper, my dear, is no longer the leading citizen, nor our distinguished capitalist, not even the hustling real estate agent of former days—just plain old Mart Culpepper, I may say. He who was, is now a has-been,—just an old man without a business." He saw that she did not appreciate what had happened, and he smiled gently and said: "Closed up, my dear madam. A receiver was appointed a few minutes ago for the Culpepper Mortgage Company, and I gave him the key. Failure—failure—" he repeated the word bitterly—"failure is written over the door of this life."

Mary Barclay grasped his big fat hand and pressed it, and shook her head. Something in her throat choked her, and she could not speak at first. The two stood a moment in silence before the woman said emphatically, "No—no! Martin Culpepper, God is keeping your books!"

The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes. "Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so," he said. The smile fell into his countenance as he added, "That is why I have gone so long without a settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too." Then he turned to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk, broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart.

And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his life here, and as for the others,—the colonel and Jake and the general and Watts, and even Molly,—what do these people mean to you, these common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair, sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the basement of the court-house, with the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat. Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through, patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the basement of a court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of a little table beside the cot,—a table with Bob Hendricks' picture, framed in plush, sitting on the top,—now Mr. Dolan takes from the drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it at the top is the picture of the new one-hundred-thousand-dollar court-house, and beside the court-house picture are these words: "Office of Jacob Dolan, Custodian of Public Buildings and Grounds of Garrison County." Mr. Dolan will be writing a letter, and so long as it begins with "Dear Sir," and nothing more endearing, surely we may look over his shoulder while he writes,—even though it is bad form. And as Mr. Dolan will be writing to "Robert Hendricks, care of Cook's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt,"—which he spells with an "i," but let that pass, and let some of his literary style and construction pass with it,—and as he will be writing to Mr. Hendricks, perhaps Miss Nancy may do well to go sit in the corridor and put her fingers in her ears while we read. For Mr. Dolan is an emotional man, and he is breathing hard, and by the way he grabs his pen and jabs it into the ink one can see that he is angry.

"DEAR SIR (begins Mr. Dolan): I take my pen in hand to answer yours of this date from New York and would have written you anyhow, as there is much on my mind and I would cable you, but I can't, being for the moment short of funds. I write to say, Robert, that we have Mart Culpepper in jail—right across the hall. He came in at nine o'clock to-night, and the damn Pop judge put his bail at $15,999 to cover his alleged shortage, and the stinker won't accept us old boys on the bond—Phil and Watts and Os and the Company 'C' boys I could get before the judge went to bed, and Gabe Carnine, the gut, would not sign—would not sign old Mart's bond, sir, and I hope to be in hell with a fishpole some day poking him down every time his slimy fingers get on the rim of the kettle. But we'll have him out in the morning, if every man in Garrison County has to go on the bond. They say Mart received money to pay four or five mortgages due to a Vermont Bank, and they sent a detective here about a month ago and worked up the case, and closed his business to-day and waited until to-night to arrest him. I've just come from Mart. It's hell. Hoping this will find you enjoying the same I beg my dear sir to sign myself

"Your ob't s'r'v't J. DOLAN."

When Jacob Dolan finished his letter, he addressed the envelope and hurried away to mail it. And so long as we are here in the court-house, and the custodian is gone, would you like to step in and see Martin Culpepper across the hall? It is still in the basement now, and if you are quiet, so quiet that the slipping patter of a rat's foot on the floor comes to you, a sound as of a faint whining will come to you also. There—now it comes again. No, it is not a dog; it is a man—a man in his agony. Shall we open the great iron door, and go into the cell room? Why, not even you, Miss Nancy—not even you, who love tears so? You would not see much—only a man, with his coat and vest off, an old man with a rather shaggy, ill-kept chin whisker and not the cleanest shirt in the world—though it is plaited, and once was a considerable garment. And the man wearing it, who lies prostrate upon his face, once was a considerable man. But he is old now, old and broken, and if he should look up, as you stepped in the corridor before him, you would see a great face ripped and scarred by fear and guilt, and eyes that look so piteously at you—eyes of a man who cannot understand why the blow has fallen, surprised eyes with a horror in them; and if he should speak, you will find a voice rough and mushy with asthma. The heart that has throbbed so many nights in fear and the breath that has been held for so many footsteps, at last have turned their straining into disease. No—let's not go in. He bade his daughter go, and would not see his wife, and they have sent to the City for his son,—so let us not bother him, for to-morrow he will be out on bail. But did you hear that fine, trembling, animal whine—that cry that wrenched itself out of set teeth like a living thing? Come on—let us go and find Jake, and if he is taking a drink, don't blame him too much, Miss Nancy—how would you like to sleep in that room across the corridor?

At nine o'clock the next morning two hundred men had signed the bond the judge required, and Martin Culpepper shambled home with averted eyes. They tried to carry him on their shoulders, thinking it would cheer him up; and from the river wards of the town scores came to give him their hands. But he shook himself away from them, like a great whipped dog, and walked slowly up the hill, and turned into Lincoln Avenue alone.

John Barclay heard the news of the colonel's trouble as he stepped from his private car in the Sycamore Ridge yards that morning, and Jane went to the Culpepper home without stopping at her own. That afternoon, Molly Brownwell knocked at Barclay's office door in the mill, and went in without waiting for him to open it. She was pale and haggard, and she sat down before he could speak to her.

"John," she said in a dead voice that smote his heart, "I have come for my reward now. I never thought I'd ask it, John, but last night I thought it all out, and I don't believe it's begging."

"No," he replied quietly, "it's not. I am sure—"

But she did not let him finish. She broke in with: "Oh, I don't want any of your money; I want my own money—money that you got when you sold me into bondage, John Barclay—do you remember when?" She cried the last words in a tremulous little voice, and then caught herself, and went on before he could put into words the daze in his face. "Let me tell you; do you remember the day you called me up into your office and asked me to hold Adrian in town to save the wheat company? Yes, you do—you know you do! And you remember that you played on my love for Bob, and my duty to father. Well, I saved you, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did, Molly," Barclay replied.

She stared a moment at the framed pictures of mill designs on the wall, and at the wheat samples on the long table near her, and did not speak; nor did he. She finally broke the silence: "Well, I saved you, but what about father—" her voice broke into a sob—"and Bob—Jane has told you what Bob and I have been—and what about me—what have you taken from me in these twenty years? Oh, John, John, what a fearful wreck we have made of life—you with your blind selfishness, and I with my weakness! Did you know, John, that the money that father borrowed that day, twenty years ago, of Adrian, to lend to you, is the very money that sent him to jail last night? I guess he—he took what wasn't his to pay it back." Her face twitched, and she was losing control of her voice. Barclay stepped to the door and latched it. She watched him and shook her head sadly. "You needn't be afraid, John—I'm not going to make a scene."

"It's all right, Molly," said Barclay. "I want to help you—you know that. I'm sorry, Molly—infinitely sorry."

She looked at him for a moment in silence, and then said: "Yes, John, I'll give you credit for that; I think you're as sorry as a selfish man like you can be. But are you sorry enough to go to jail a pauper, like father, or wander over the earth alone, like Bob, or come and beg for money, like me?" Then she caught herself quickly and cried: "Only it's not begging, John—it's my own; it's the price you got when you sold me into bondage; it's the price of my soul, and I need it now. Those people only want their money—that is all."

"Yes," he replied, "I suppose that is all they want." He drummed on his desk a moment and then asked, "Does your father know how much it is?"

"Yes," she answered, "I found in his desk at the house last night a paper on which he had been figuring—poor father—all the night before. All the night before—" she repeated, and then sobbed, "Poor father—all the night before. He knew it was coming. He knew the detective was here. He told me to-day that the sum he had there was correct. It is sixteen thousand five hundred and forty-three dollars. But he doesn't know I'm here, John. I told him I had some money of my own—some I'd had for years—and I have—oh, I have, John Barclay—I have." She looked up at him with the pallid face stained with fresh tears and asked, "I have—I have—haven't I, John, haven't I?"

He put his elbows on the desk and sank his head in his hands and sighed, "Yes, Molly—yes, you have."

They sat in silence until the roar of the waters and the murmur of the wheels about them came into the room. Then the woman rose to go. "Well, John," she said, "I suppose one shouldn't thank a person for giving her her own—but I do, John. Oh, it's like blood money to me—but father—I can't let father suffer."

She walked to the door, he stepped to unlatch it, and she passed out without saying good-by. When she was gone, he slipped the latch, and sat down with his hands gripping the table before him. As he sat there, he looked across the years and saw some of the havoc he had made. There was no shirking anything that he saw. A footfall passing the door made him start as if he feared to be caught in some guilty act. Yet he knew the door was locked. He choked a little groan behind his teeth, and then reached for the top of his desk, pulled down the rolling cover, and limped quickly out of the room—as though he were leaving a corpse. What he saw was the ghost of the Larger Good, mocking him through the veil of the past, and asking him such questions as only a man's soul may hear and not resent.

He walked over the mill for a time, and then calling his stenographers from their room, dictated them blind and himself dumb with details of a deal he was putting through to get control of the cracker companies of the country. When he finished, the sunset was glaring across the water through the window in front of him, and he had laid his ghost. But Molly Brownwell had her check, and her father was saved.

That evening the colonel sat with Watts McHurdie, on the broad veranda of the Culpepper home, and as the moon came out, General Ward wandered up the walk and Jake Dolan came singing down the street about "the relic of old dacincy—the hat me father wore." Perhaps he had one drink in him, and perhaps two, or maybe three, but he clicked the gate behind him, and seeing the three men on the veranda, he called out:—

"Hi, you pig-stealing Kansas soldiers, haven't ye heard the war is over?" And then he carolled: "Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up, Oh, can't get 'em up in the mornin'—Get up, you"—but the rest of the song, being devoted to the technical affairs of war, and ending with a general exhortation to the soldier to "get into your breeches," would give offence to persons of sensitive natures, and so may as well be omitted from this story.

There was an awkward pause when Dolan came on the veranda. The general had just tried to break the ice, but Dolan was going at too high a speed to be checked.

"Do you know," he asked, "what I always remember when I hear that call? You do not. I'll tell you. 'Twas the morning of the battle of Wilson's Creek, and Mart and me was sleeping under a tree, when the bugler of the Johnnies off somewhere on the hill he begins to crow that, and it wakes Mart up, and he rolls over on me and he says: 'Jake,' he says, or maybe 'twas me says, 'Mart,' says I—anyway, one of us says, 'Shut up your gib, you flannel-mouthed mick,' he says, 'and let me pull my dream through to the place where I find the money,' he says. And I says, 'D'ye know what I'm goin' to do when I get home?' says I. 'No,' says he, still keen for that money; 'no,' says he, 'unless it is you're going to be hanged by way of diversion,' he says. 'I'm going to hire a bugler,' says I. 'What fer—in the name of all the saints?' says he. 'Well,' says I, 'I'm going to ask him to blow his damn horn under my window every morning at five o'clock,' I says, 'and then I'm going to get up and poke my head out of the window and say: "Mister, you can get me up in the army, but on this occasion would you be obliging enough to go to hell"!' And Mart, seeing that the money was gone from his dream, he turns over and wallops me with the blanket till I was merely a palpitating mass. That was a great battle, though, boys—a great battle."

And then they shouldered arms and showed how fields were won. Boom! went Sigel's guns out of the past, and crash! came the Texas cavalry, and the whoop of the Louisiana Pelicans rang in their ears. They marched south after Hindman, and then came back with Grant to Vicksburg, where they fought and bled and died. The general left them and went east, where he "deployed on our right" and executed flank movements, and watched Pickett's column come fling itself to death at Gettysburg. And Watts McHurdie rode with the artillery through the rear of the rebel lines at Pittsburg Landing, and when the rebel officer saw the little man's bravery, and watched him making for the Union lines bringing three guns, he waved his hat and told his soldiers not to shoot at that boy. The colonel took a stick and marked out on the floor our position at Antietam, and showed where the reserves were supposed to be and how the enemy masked his guns behind that hill, and we planted our artillery on the opposite ridge; and he marched with the infantry and lay in ambush while the enemy came marching in force through the wood. In time Watts McHurdie was talking to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung it. But who cares now what Lincoln said? It was something kind, you may be sure, with a tear and a laugh in it, and the veterans laughed, while their eyes grew moist as they always did when Watts told it. Then they fell to carnage again—a fierce fight against time, against the moment when they must leave their old companion alone. Up hills they charged and down dales, and the moon rose high, and cast its shadow to the eastward before they parted. First Dolan edged away, and then the general went, waving his hand military fashion; and the colonel returned the salute. When the gate had clanged, Watts rose to go. He did not speak, nor did the colonel. Arm in arm, they walked down the steps together, and halfway down the garden path the colonel rested his hand on the little man's shoulder as they walked in silence. At the gate they saw each other's tears, and the little man's voice failed him when the colonel said, "Well, good-by, comrade—good night." So Watts turned and ran, while the colonel, for the first time in his manhood, loosed the cords of his sorrow and stood alone in the moonlight with upturned face, swaying like an old tree in a storm.



CHAPTER XXI

And now those who have avoided the gray unpainted shame of these unimportant people of the Ridge may here take up again for a moment the trailing clouds of glory that shimmer over John Barclay's office in the big City. For here there is the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light room at the corner of a tower high over the City in the Corn Exchange Building, the brain from which a million nerves radiate that run all over the world and move thousands of men. Forty years before, when John was playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now, sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. But a dry day in India or a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are all taken into account in the little man's plans. And if princes quarrel and kings grow weary of peace, and money bags refuse them war, John Barclay knows it and puts the episode into figures on the clean white pad of paper before him.

It is a privilege to be in this office; one passes three doors to get here, and even at the third door our statesmen often cool their toes. Mr. Barclay is about to admit one now. And when Senator Myton comes in, deferentially of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the long fight in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the senate of Lige Bemis as a federal judge, the little gray man waves the senator to a chair, and runs his pencil up a column of figures, presses a button, writes a word on a sheet of paper, and when the messenger appears, hands the paper to him and says, "For Judge Bemis."

"I have just dismissed a Persian satrap," expands Barclay, "who won't let his people use our binders; that country eventually will be a great field for our Mediterranean branch."

Myton is properly impressed. For a man who can make a senator out of Red River clay and a federal judge out of Lige Bemis is a superhuman creature, and Myton does not doubt Barclay's power over satraps.

When the business of the moment between the two men is done, Barclay, rampant with power, says: "Myton" (it is always "Myton," never "Senator," with Barclay; he finds it just as well to let his inferiors know their relation to the universe), "Myton, I ran across a queer thing last week when I took over that little jerkwater New England coast line. The Yankees are a methodical lot of old maids. I find they had been made agents of a lot of the big fellows—insurance people, packing-houses, and transcontinental railroads—two of my lines were paying them, though I'd forgotten about it until I looked it up—and the good old sewing society had card-indexed the politics of the United States—the whole blessed country, by state and congressional districts. I took over the chap who runs it, and I've got the whole kit in the offices here now. It's great. If a man bobs up for something in Florida or Nebraska, we just run him down on the card index, and there he stands—everything he ever did, every interview he ever gave, every lawsuit he ever had, every stand he ever took in politics—right there in the index, in an envelope ready for use, and all the mean things ever written about him. I simply can't make a mistake now in getting the wrong kind of fellows in. Commend me to a Yankee or a Jap for pains. I can tell you in five minutes just what influences are behind every governor, congressman, senator, judge, most of the legislators in every state, the federal courts clear up to the Supreme Court. There was a man appointed on that court less than a dozen years ago who swapped railroad receiverships like a tin peddler with his senator for his job, when he was on the circuit bench. And he was considerable of a judge in the bean country for a time. Just to verify my index, I asked Bemis about this judge. 'Lige,' I said, 'was Judge So-and-So a pretty honest judge?' 'Oh, hell,' says Lige, and that was all I could get out of him. So I guess they had him indexed right." And Barclay rattles on; he has become vociferous and loquacious, and seems to like to hear the roar of his voice in his head. The habit has been growing on him.

But do not laugh at the blindness of John Barclay, sitting there in his power, admiring himself, boasting in the strength of his card-index to Senator Myton. For the tide of his power was running in, and soon it would be high tide with John Barclay—high tide of his power, high tide of his fame, high tide of his pride. So let us watch the complacent smile crack his features as he sits listening to Senator Myton: "Mr. Barclay, do you know, I sometimes think that Providence manifests itself in minds like yours, even as in the days of old it was manifest in the hearts of the prophets. In those days it was piety that fitted the heart for higher things; to-day it is business. You and a score of men like you in America are intrusted with the destiny of this republic, as surely as the fate of the children of Israel was in the hands of Moses and Aaron!"

Barclay closed his eyes a moment, in contemplation of the figure, and then broke out in a roaring laugh, "Hanno is a god! Hanno is a god!—get out of here, Henry Myton,—get out of here, I say—this is my busy day," and he laughed the young senator out of the room. But he sat alone in his office grinning, as over and over in his mind his own words rang, "Hanno is a god!" And the foolish parrot of his other self cackled the phrase in his soul for days and days!

It is our high privilege thus to stand close by and watch the wheels of the world go around. In those days of the late nineties Barclay travelled up and down the earth so much in his private car that Jane used to tell Molly Brownwell that living with John was like being a travelling man's wife. But Jane did not seem to appreciate her privilege. She managed to stay at home as much as possible, and sometimes he took the Masons along for company. Mrs. Mason gloried in it, and lived at the great hotels and shopped at the highest-priced antique stores to her heart's delight. Lycurgus' joy was in being interviewed, and the Barclay secretaries got so that they could edit the Mason interviews and keep out the poison, and let the old man swell and swell until the people at home thought he must surely burst with importance at the next town.

One day in the nineties Barclay appropriated a half-million dollars to advertise "Barclay's Best" and a cracker that he was pushing. When the man who placed the business in the newspaper had gone, Barclay sat looking out of the window and said to his advertising manager: "I've got an idea. Why should I pay a million dollars to irresponsible newspapers? I won't do it."

"But we must advertise, Mr. Barclay—you've proved it pays."

"Yes," he returned, "you bet it pays, and I might just as well get something out of it besides advertising. Take this; make five copies of it; I'll give you the addresses later." Barclay squared himself to a stenographer to dictate:—

"Dear Sir: I spend a million dollars a year advertising grain products; you and the packers doubtless spend that much advertising your products and by-products; the railroads spend as much more, and the Oil people probably half as much more. Add the steel products and the lumber products, and we have ten million dollars going into the press of this country. In a crisis we cannot tell how these newspapers will treat us. I think we should organize so that we will know exactly where we stand. Therefore it is necessary absolutely to control the trade advertising of this country. A company to take over the five leading advertising agencies could be formed, for half as much as we spend every year, and we could control nine-tenths of the American trade advertising. We could then put an end to any indiscriminate mobbing of corporations by editors. I will be pleased to hear from you further upon this subject."

A day or two later, when the idea had grown and ramified itself in his mind, he talked it all out to Jane and exclaimed, "How will old Phil Ward's God manage to work it out, as he says, against that proposition? Brains," continued Barclay, "brains—that's what counts in this world. You can't expect the men who dominate this country—who make its wealth, and are responsible for its prosperity, to be at the mercy of a lot of long-nosed reformers who don't know how to cash their own checks."

How little this rich man knew of the world about him! How circumscribed was his vision! With all his goings up and down the earth, with all of his great transactions, with all of his apparent power, how little and sordid was his outlook on life. For he thought he was somebody in this universe, some one of importance, and in his scheme of things he figured out a kind of partnership between himself and Providence—a partnership to run the world in the interests of John Barclay, and of course, wherever possible, with reasonable dividends to Providence.

But a miracle was coming into the world. In the under-consciousnesses of men, sown God only knows how and when and where, sown in the weakness of a thousand blind prophets, the seeds of righteous wrath at greed like John Barclay's were growing during all the years of his triumph. Men scarcely knew it themselves. Growth is so simple and natural a process that its work is done before its presence is known. And so this arrogant man, this miserable, little, limping, brass-eyed, leather-skinned man, looked out at the world around him, and did not see the change that was quickening the hearts of his neighbours.

And yet change was in everything about him. A thousand years are as but a watch in the night, and tick, tock, tick, tock, went the great clock, and the dresses of little Jeanette Barclay slipped down, down, down to her shoe-tops, and as the skirts slipped down she went up. And before her father knew it her shoe-tops sank out of sight, and she was a miss at the last of her teens. But he still gave her his finger when they walked out together, though she was head and shoulders above him.

One day when she led him to the Banner office to buy some fancy programmes for a party she was giving, he saw her watching young Neal Ward,—youngest son of the general,—who was sitting at a reporter's desk in the office, and the father's quick eyes saw that she regarded the youth as a young man. For she talked so obviously for the Ward boy's benefit that her father, when they went out of the printing-office, took a furtive look at his daughter and sighed and knew what her mother had known for a year.

"Jeanette," he said that night at dinner, "where's my shot-gun?" When she told him, he said: "After dinner you get it, load it with salt, and put it in the corner by the front door." Then he added to the assembled family: "For boys—dirty-faced, good-for-nothing, long-legged boys! I'm going to have a law passed making an open season for boys in this place from January first until Christmas."

Jeanette dimpled and blushed, the family smiled, and her mother said: "Well, John, there'll be a flock of them at Jeanette's party next week for you to practise on. All the boys and girls in town are coming."

And after dessert was served the father sat chuckling and grinning and grunting, "Boys—boys," and at intervals, "Measly little milk-eyed kids," and again "Boys—boys," while the family nibbled at its cheese.

Those years when the nineteenth century was nearing its close and when the tide of his fortunes was running in, bringing him power and making him mad with it, were years of change in Sycamore Ridge—in the old as well as in the young. In those years the lilacs bloomed on in the Culpepper yard; and John Barclay did not know it, though forty years before Ellen Culpepper had guarded the first blossoms from those bushes for him. Miss Lucy, his first ideal, went to rest in those years while the booming tide was running in, and he scarcely knew it. Mrs. Culpepper was laid beside Ellen out on the Hill; and he hardly realized it, though no one in all the town had watched him growing into worldly success with so kindly an eye as she. But the tide was roaring in, and John Barclay's whole consciousness was turned toward it; the real things of life about him, he did not see and could not feel. And so as the century is old the booming tide is full, and John Barclay in his power—a bubble in the Divine consciousness, a mere vision in the real world—stands stark mad before his phantasm, dreaming that it is all real, and chattering to his soul, "Hanno is a god."

And now we must leave John Barclay for the moment, to explain why Neal Dow Ward, son of General Philemon Ward, made his first formal call at the Barclays'. It cannot be gainsaid that young Mr. Ward, aged twenty-one, a senior at Ward University, felt a tingle in his blood that day when he met Miss Jeanette Barclay, aged eighteen, and home for the spring vacation from the state university; and seeing her for the first time with her eyes and her hair and her pretty, strong, wide forehead poking through the cocoon of gawky girlhood, created a distinct impression on young Mr. Ward.

But in all good faith it should be stated that he did not make his first formal call at the Barclays' of his own accord; for his sister, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward, took him. She came home from the Culpeppers' just before supper, laughing until she was red in the face. And what she heard at the Culpeppers', let her tell in her own way to the man of her heart. For Lizzie was her father's child; the four other Ward girls, Mary Livermore, Frances Willard, Belva Lockwood, and Helen Gougar, had climbed to the College Heights and had gone to Ward University, and from that seat of learning had gone forth in the world to teach school. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward had remained in the home, after her mother's death filling her mother's vacant place as well as a daughter may.

"Well, father," said the daughter, as she was putting the evening meal on the table, addressing the general, who sat reading by the window in the dining room, "you should have been at the Culpeppers' when the colonel came home and told us his troubles. It seems that Nellie McHurdie is going to make Watts run for sheriff—for sheriff, father. Imagine Watts heading a posse, or locking any one up! And Watts has passed the word to the colonel, and he has passed it to Molly and me, and I am to see Mrs. Barclay, and she is to see Mrs. Carnine to-morrow morning, and they are all to set to work on Nellie and get her to see that it won't do. Poor Watts—the colonel says he is terribly wrought up at the prospect."

The general folded his paper and smiled as he said: "Well, I don't know; Watts was a brave soldier. He would make a good enough sheriff; but I suppose he doesn't really care for it."

"Why, no, of course not, father—why should he?" asked the daughter. "Anyhow, I want you to make Neal go down to Barclays' with me to-night to talk it over with Jane. Neal," she called to the young man who was sitting on the porch with his book on his knee, "Neal, I want you to go to Barclays' with me to-night. Come in now, supper's ready."

And so it happened that Neal Dow Ward made his first call on Jeanette Barclay with his sister, and they all sat on the porch together that fine spring evening, with the perfume of the lilacs in the air; and it happened naturally enough that the curious human law of attraction which unites youth should draw the chairs of the two young people together as they talked of the things that interest youth—the parties and the ball-games and the fraternities and sororities, and the freshman picnic and the senior grind; while the chairs of the two others drew together as they talked of the things which interest women in middle life—the affairs of the town, the troubles of Watts McHurdie, the bereavement of the Culpeppers, the scarcity of good help in the kitchen, the popularity of Max Nordau's "Social Evolution," and the fun in "David Harum." Nor is it strange that after the girl had shown the boy her Pi Phi pin, and he had shown her his Phi Delta shield, they should fall to talking of the new songs, and that they should slip into the big living room of the Barclay home, lighted by the electric lamps in the hall, and that she should sit down to the piano to show him how the new song went. And if the moonlight fell across the piano, and upon her face as she sang the little Irish folk-song, all in minors, with her high, trembling, half-formed notes in the upper register, and if she flushed and looked up abashed and had to be teased to go on,—not teased a great deal, but a little,—will you blame the young man if he forgot for a moment that her father was worth such a lot of money, and thought only that she was a beautiful girl, and said so with his eyes and face and hands in the pretty little pause that followed when she ceased singing? And if to hide her confusion when her heart knew what he thought, she put one foot on the loud pedal of the piano and began singing "O Margery, O Margery," and he sang with her, and if they thrilled just a little as their voices blended in the rollicking song—what of it? What of it? Was it not natural that lilacs should grow in April? Was it not natural that Watts McHurdie should dread the white light that beats upon the throne of the sheriff's office? Was it not natural that he should turn to women for protection against one of their sex, and that the women plotting for him should have a boy around and having a boy around where there is a girl around, and spring around and lilacs around and a moon and music and joy around,—what is more natural in all this world than that in the fire struck by the simple joy of youth there should be the flutter of unseen wings around, and when the two had finished singing, with something passing between their hearts not in the words, what is more natural than that the girl, half frightened at the thrill in her soul, should say timidly:—

"I think they will miss us out there—don't you?" as she rose from the piano.

And if you were a boy again, only twenty-one, to whom millions of money meant nothing, would you not catch the blue eyes of the girl as she looked up at you, in the twilight of the big room, and answer, "All right, Jeanette"? Certainly if you had known a girl all your life, you would call her by her first name, if her father were worth a billion, and would you not continue, emboldened some way by not being frowned upon for calling her Jeanette, though she would have been astonished if you had said Miss Barclay—astonished and maybe a little fearful of your sincerity—would you not continue, after a little pause, repeating your words, "All right, Jeanette—I suppose so—but I don't care—do you?" as you followed her through the door back to the moon-lit porch?

And as you walked home, listening to your elder sister, would you not have time and inclination to wonder from what remote part of this beautiful universe, from what star or what fairy realm, that creature came, whose hair you pulled yesterday, whose legs seem to have been covered with long skirts in the twinkling of an eye, and whose unrelated features by some magic had sloughed off, leaving a beautiful face? Would you not think these things, good kind sir, when you were twenty-one—even though to-day they seem highly improbable thoughts for any one to have who was not stark mad? But if we were not all stark mad sometimes, how would the world go round? If we were not all mad sometimes, who would make our dreams come true? How would visions in thin air congeal into facts, how would the aspirations of the race make history? And if we were all sane all the time, how would the angels ever get babies into the world at all, at all?



CHAPTER XXII

"Speaking of lunatics," said Mr. Dolan to Mr. Hendricks one June night, a few weeks after the women had persuaded Mrs. McHurdie not to drag the poet into politics,—"speaking of lunatics, you may remember that I was born in Boston, and 'twas my duty as a lad to drive the Cambridge car, and many a time I have heard Mr. Holmes the poet and Mr. Emerson the philosopher discussing how the world was made; whether it was objective or subjective,—which I take it to mean whether the world is in the universe or only in your eye. One fine winter night we were waiting on a switch for the Boston car, when Mr. Holmes said to Mr. Emerson: 'What,' says he, 'would you think if Jake Dolan driving this car should come in and say, "Excuse me, gentlemen, but the moon I see this moment is not some millions of miles away, but entirely in my own noddle?"' 'I'd think,' says the great philosopher, never blinking, 'that Mr. Dolan was drunk,' says he. And there the discussion ended, but it has been going on in my head ever since. Here I am a man climbing up my sixties, and when have I seen the moon? Once walking by this very creek here trying to get me courage up to put me arm around her that is now Mary Carnine; once with me head poked up close to the heads of Watts McHurdie, Gabe Carnine, and Philemon Ward, serenading the girls under the Thayer House window the night before we left for the army. And again to-night, sitting here on the dam, listening to the music coming down the mill-pond. Did you notice them, Robert—the young people—Phil Ward's boy, and John Barclay's girl, and Mary Carnine's oldest, and Oscar Fernald's youngest, with their guitars and mandolins, piling into the boats and rowing up stream? And now they're singing the songs we sang—to their mothers, God bless 'em—the other day before these children were born or thought of, and now I sit here an old man looking at the moon."

"But is it the moon?" he went on after a long silence, puffing at his pipe. "If the moon is off there, three or thirty or three hundred million miles away in the sky, where has it been these forty years? I've not seen it. And yet here she pops out of my memory into my eye, and if I say the moon has always been in my eye, and is still in my eye, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson says I'm drunk. But does that settle the question of who's got the moon—me or the cosmos—as the poets call it?" After that the two men smoked in silence, and as Hendricks threw away the butt of his cigar, Dolan said, "'Tis a queer, queer world, Robert—a queer, queer world."

Now do not smile at Mr. Dolan, gentle reader, for Adam must have thought the same thing, and philosophy has been able to say nothing more to the point.

It is indeed a queer, queer world, and our blindness is the queerest thing in it. Here a few weeks, later sit John and Jane Barclay on the terrace before their house one June night, listening to singing on the water. Suddenly they realize that there is youth in the world—yet there has been singing on the mill-pond ever since it was built. It has been the habitat of lovers for a quarter of a century, this mill-pond, yet Jane and John Barclay have not known it, and not until their own child's voice came up to them, singing "Juanita," did they realize that the song had not begun anew after its twenty years' silence in their own hearts, but always had been on the summer breeze. And this is strange, too, considering how rich and powerful John Barclay is and how by the scratch of his pen, he might set men working by the thousands for some righteous cause. Yet so it is; for with all the consciousness of great power, with all the feeling of unrestraint that such power gives a man, driving him to think he is a kind of god, John Barclay was only a two-legged man, with a limp in one foot, and a little mad place in his brain, wherein he kept the sense of his relation to the rest of this universe. And as he sat, blind to the moon, dreaming of a time when he would control Presidents and dominate courts if they crossed his path, out on the mill-pond under an elm tree that spread like a canopy upon the water, a boy, letting the oars hang loosely, was playing the mandolin to a girl—a pretty girl withal, blue as to eyes, fair as to hair, strong as to mouth and chin, and glorious as to forehead—who leaned back in the boat, played with the overhanging branches, and listened and looked at the moon, and let God's miracle work unhindered in her heart. And all up and down those two miles of mill-pond were other boats and other boys and other maidens, and as they chatted and sang and sat in the moonlight, there grew in their hearts, as quietly as the growing of the wheat in the fields, that strange marvel of life, that keeps the tide of humanity ceaselessly flowing onward. And it is all so simply done before our eyes, and in our ears, that we forget it is so baffling a mystery.

Now let us project our astral bodies into the living room of the Barclay home, while Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay are away in Boston, and only John Barclay's mother and his daughter are in Sycamore Ridge; and let us watch a young man of twenty-one and a young woman of eighteen dispose of a dish of fudge together. Fudge, it may be explained to the unsophisticated, is a preparation of chocolate, sugar, and cream, cooked, cooled, and cut into squares. As our fathers and mothers pulled taffy, as our grandfathers and grandmothers conjured with maple sugar, and as their parents worked the mysterious spell with some witchery of cookery to this generation unknown, so is fudge in these piping times the worker of a strange witchery. Observe: Through a large room, perhaps forty feet one way and twenty-five feet the other way, flits a young woman in the summer twilight. She goes about humming, putting a vase in place here, straightening a picture there, kicking down a flapping rug, or rearranging a chair; then she sits down and turns on an electric light and pretends to read. But she does not read; the light shows her something else in the room that needs attention, and she turns to that. Then she sits down again, and again goes humming about the room. Suddenly the young woman rises and hurries out of the room, and a footstep is heard on the porch, outside. A bell tinkles, and a maid appears, and—

"Yes," she says. "I'll see if Miss Jeanette is at home!"

And then a rustle of skirts is heard on the stairway and Miss Jeanette enters with: "Why, Neal, you are an early bird this evening—were you afraid the worm would escape? Well, it won't; it's right here on the piano."

The young man's eyes,—good, clear, well-set, dark eyes that match his brown hair; eyes that speak from the heart,—note how they dwell upon every detail of the opposing figure, caressing with their shy surreptitious glances the girl's hair, her broad forehead, her lips; observe how they flit back betimes to those ripe red lips, like bees that hover over a flower trembling in the wind; how the eyes of the young man play about the strong chin, and the bewitching curves of the neck and shoulders, and rise again to the hair, and again steal over the face, to the strong shoulders, and again hurry back to the face lest some feature fade. This is not staring—it is done so quickly, so furtively, so deftly withal as the minutes fly by, while the lips and the teeth chatter on, that the stolen honey of these glances is stored away in the heart's memory, all unknown to him who has gathered it.

An hour has passed now, while we have watched the restless eyes at their work, and what has passed with the hour? Nothing, ladies and gentlemen—nothing; gibber, chatter, giggles, and squeals—that is all. Grandma Barclay above stairs has her opinion of it, and wonders how girls can be so addle-pated. In her day—but who ever lived long enough or travelled far enough or inquired widely enough to find one single girl who was as wise, or as sedate, or as industrious, or as meek, or as gentle, or as kind as girls were in her grandmother's day? No wonder indeed that grandmothers are all married—for one could hardly imagine the young men of that day overlooking such paragons of virtue and propriety as lived in their grandmothers' days. Fancy an old maid grandmother with all those qualities of mind and heart that girls had in their grandmothers' days!

So the elder Mrs. Barclay in her room at the top of the stairs hears what "he said," "he said he said," and what "she said she said," and what "we girls did," and what "you boys ought to do," and what "would be perfectly lovely," and what "would be a lot of fun!" and so grandmother, good soul, grows drowsy, closes her door, and goes to bed. She does not know that they are about to sit down together on a sofa—not a long, straight, cold, formal affair, but a small, rather snuggly sofa, with the dish between them. No, girls never did that in their grandmothers' days, so of course who would imagine they would do so now? Who, indeed? But there they are, and there is the dish between them, and two hands reaching into the same dish, must of course collide. Collision is inevitable, and by carefully noting the repetitions of the collisions, one may logically infer that the collisions are upon the whole rather pleasurable than otherwise; and when it comes to the last piece of fudge in the dish,—the very last piece,—the astral observer will see that there is just the slightest, the very slightest, quickest, most fleeting little tussle of hands for it, and much laughter; and then the young woman rises quickly—also note the slight pink flush in her cheeks, and she goes to her chair and folds her pretty hands in her lap, and asks:—

"Well, do you like my fudge, Neal Ward? Is it as good as Belva Lockwood's? She puts nuts in hers—I've eaten it; do you like it with nuts in it?"

"Not so well as this," says the boy.

The girl slips into the dining room, for a glass of water. See the eyes of the youth following her. It is dusky in the dining room, and the youth longs for dusky places, but has not developed courage enough to follow her. But he has courage enough to steady his eyes as she comes back with the water, so that he can look into her blue eyes while you would count as much as one—two—three—slowly—four—slowly—five. A long, long time, so long indeed that she wishes he would look just a second longer.

So at the end of the evening here stand Neal, and Jeanette, even as Adam and Eve stood in the garden, talking of nothing in particular as they slowly move toward the door. "Yes, I suppose so," she says, as Eve said and as Eve's daughters have said through all the centuries, looking intently at the floor. And then Neal, suddenly finding the language of his line back to Adam, looks up to say, "Oh, yes, I forgot—but have you read 'Monsieur Beaucaire'?" Now Adam said, "Have you heard the new song that the morning stars are singing together?" and Priam asked Helen if she would like to hear that new thing of Solomon's just out, and so as the ages have rolled by, young gentlemen standing beside their adored but not declared ones have mixed literature with love, and have tied wisdom up in a package of candy or wild honey, and have taken it to the trysting place since the beginning of time. It is thus the poets thrive. And when she was asked about the new song of the morning stars, Eve, though she knew it as she knew her litany, answered no; and so did Eve's daughter, standing in the dimly lighted hallway of the Barclay home in Sycamore Ridge; and so then and there being, these two made their next meeting sure.

In those last years of the last century John Barclay became a powerful man in this world—one of the few hundred men who divided the material kingdoms of this earth among them. He was a rich man who was turning his money into great political power. Senates listened to him, many courts were his in fee simple, because he had bought and paid for the men who named the judges; Presidents were glad to know what he thought, and when he came to the White House, reporters speculated about the talk that went on behind the doors of the President's room, and the stock market fluttered. If he desired a law, he paid for it and got it—not in a coarse illegal way, to be sure, but through the regular conventional channels of politics, and if he desired to step on a law, he stepped on it, and a court came running up behind him, and legalized his transaction. He sneered at reformers, and mocked God, did John Barclay in those days. He grew arrogant and boastful, and strutted in his power like a man in liquor with the vain knowledge that he could increase the population of a state or a group of states, or he could shrivel the prosperity of a section of the country by his whim. For by changing a freight rate he could make wheat grow, where grass had nourished. By changing the rate again, he could beckon back the wilderness. And yet, how small was his power; here beside him, cherished as the apple of his eye, was his daughter, a slip of a girl, with blue eyes and fair hair, whose heart was growing toward the light, as the hearts of young things grow, and he, with all of his power, could only watch the mystery, and wonder at it. He was not displeased at what he saw. But it was one of the few things in his consciousness over which he could find no way to assume control. He stood in the presence of something that came from outside of his realm and ignored him as the sun and the rain and the simple processes of nature ignored him.

"Jane," he said one night, when he was in the Ridge for the first time in many weeks,—a night near the end of the summer when Jeanette and Neal Ward were vaguely feeling their way together, "Jane, mother says that while we've been away Neal Ward has been here pretty often. You don't suppose that—"

"Well, I've rather wondered about it myself a little," responded Jane. "Neal is such a fine handsome young fellow."

"But, Jane," exclaimed Barclay, impatiently, as he rose to walk the rug, "Jennie is only a child. Why, she's only—"

"Nineteen, John—she's a big girl now."

"I know, dear," he protested, "but that's absurdly young. Why—"

"Yes," she answered, "I was nearly twenty when I was engaged to you, and Jennie's not engaged yet, nor probably even thinking seriously of it."

"Don't you think," cried Barclay, as he limped down the diagonal of the rug, "that you should do something? Isn't it a little unusual? Why—"

"Well, John," smiled the wife, "I might do what mother did: turn the young man over to father!" Barclay laughed, and she went on patiently: "It's not at all unusual, John, even if they do—that is, if they are—you know; but they aren't, and Jennie is too much in love with her work at school to quit that. But after all it's the American way; it was the way we did, dear, and the way our mothers and fathers did, and unless you wish to change it—to Europeanize it, and pick—"

"Ah, nonsense, Jane—of course I don't want that! Only I thought some way, if it's serious she ought to—Oh, don't you know she ought to—"

Mrs. Barclay broke her smile with, "Of course she ought to, dear, and so ought I and so ought mother when she married father and so ought my grandmother when she married grandpa—but did we? Dear, don't you see the child doesn't realize it? If it is anything, it is growing in her heart, and I wouldn't smudge it for the world, by speaking to her now—unless you don't like Neal; unless you think he's too—unless you want a different boy. I mean some one of consequence?"

"Oh, no, it isn't that, Jane—it isn't that. Neal's all right; he's clean and he is honest—I asked Bob Hendricks about him to-day, when we passed the boy chasing news for the Banner, and Bob gives him a fine name." Barclay threw himself into a chair and sighed. "I suppose it's just that I feel Jeanette's kind of leaving us out of it—that is all."

Jane went to him and patted his head gently, as she spoke: "That is nature, dear—the fawn hiding in the woods; we must trust to Jennie's good sense, and the good blood in Neal. My, but his sisters are proud of him! Last week Lizzie was telling me Neal's wages had been increased to ten dollars a week—and I don't suppose their father in all of his life ever had that much of a steady income. The things the family is planning to do with that ten dollars a week brought tears of joy to my eyes. Neal's going to have his mother-in-law on his side, anyway—just as you had yours. I know now how mother felt."

But John Barclay did not know how mother felt, and he did not care. He knew how father felt—how Lycurgus Mason felt, and how the father of Mrs. Lycurgus Mason felt; he felt hurt and slighted, and he could not repress a feeling of bitterness toward the youth. All the world loves a daughter-in-law, but a father's love for a son-in-law is an acquired taste; some men never get it. And John Barclay was called away the next morning to throttle a mill in the San Joaquin Valley, and from there he went to North Dakota to stop the building of a competitive railroad that tapped his territory; so September came, and with it Jeanette Barclay went back to school. The mother wondered what the girl would do with her last night at home. She was clearly nervous and unsettled all the afternoon before, and made an errand into town and came back with a perturbed face. But after dinner the mother heard Jeanette at the telephone, and this is the one-sided dialogue the mother caught: "Yes—this is Miss Barclay." "Oh, yes, I didn't recognize your voice at first." "What meeting?" "Yes—yes." "And they are not going to have it?" "Oh, I see." "You were—oh, I don't know. Of course I should have felt—well, I—oh, it would have been all right with me. Of course." Then the voice cheered up and she said: "Why, of course—come right out. I understand." A pause and then, "Yes, I know a man has to go where he is called." "Oh, she'll understand—you know father is always on the wing." "No—why, no, of course not—mother wouldn't think that of you. I'll tell her how it was." "All right, good-by—yes, right away." And Jeanette Barclay skipped away from the telephone and ran to her mother to say, "Mother, that was Neal Ward—he wants to come out, and he was afraid you'd think it rude for him to ask that way, but you know he had a meeting to report and thought he couldn't come, and now they've postponed the meeting, and I told him to come right out—wasn't that all right?"

And so out came Neal Ward, a likely-looking young man of twenty-one or maybe twenty-two—a good six feet in height, with a straight leg, a square shoulder, and firm jaw, set like his father's, and clean brown eyes that did not blink. And as Jeanette Barclay, with her mother's height, and her father's quick keen features, and her Grandmother Barclay's eyes and dominant figure, stood beside him in the doorway, Mrs. Jane Barclay thought a good way ahead, and Jeanette would have blushed her face to a cinder if the mother had spoken her thoughts. The three, mother and daughter and handsome young man, sat for a while together in the living room, and then Jane, who knew the heart of youth, and did not fear it, said, "You children should go out on the porch—it's a beautiful night; I'm going upstairs."

And now let us once more in our astral bodies watch them there in the light of the veiled moon—for it is the last time that even we should see them alone. She is sitting on a balustrade, and he is standing beside her, and their hands are close together on the stones. "Yes," he is saying, "I shall be busy at the train to-morrow trying to catch the governor for an interview on the railroad question, and may not see you."

"I wish you would throw the governor into the deep blue sea," she says, and he responds:—

"I wish I could." There is a silence, and then he risks it—and the thing he has been trying to say comes out, "I wonder if you will do something for me, Jeanette?"

"Oh, I don't know—don't ask me anything hard—not very hard, Neal!"

The last word was all he cared for, and by what sleight of hand he slipped his fraternity pin from his vest into her hand, neither ever knew.

"Will you?" he asks. "For me?"

She pins it at her throat, and smiles. Then she says, "Is this long enough—do you want it back now?"

He shakes his head, and finally she asks, "When?" and then it comes out:—

"Never."

And her face reddens, and she does not speak. Their hands, on the wall, have met—they just touch, that is all, but they do not hasten apart. A long, long time they are silent—an eternity of a minute; and then she says, "We shall see in the morning."

And then another eternal minute rolls by, and the youth slips the rose from her hair—quickly, and without disarranging a strand.

"Oh," she cries, "Neal!" and then adds, "Let me get you a pretty one—that is faded."

But no, he will have that one, and she stands beside him and pins it on his coat—stands close beside him, and where her elbows and her arms touch him he is thrilled with delight. In the shadow of the great porch they stand a moment, and her hand goes out to his.

"Well, Jeanette," he says, and still her hand does not shrink away, "well, Jeanette—it will be lonesome when you go."

"Will it?" she asks.

"Yes—but I—I have been so happy to-night."

He presses her hand a little closer, and as she says, "I'm so glad," he says, "Good-by," and moves down the broad stone steps. She stands watching him, and at the bottom he stops and again says:—

"Well—good-by—Jeanette—I must go—I suppose." And she does not move, so again he says, "Good-by."

* * * * *

"Youth," said Colonel Martin Culpepper to the assembled company in the ballroom of the Barclay home as the clock struck twelve and brought in the twentieth century; "Youth," he repeated, as he tugged at the bottom of Buchanan Culpepper's white silk vest, to be sure that it met his own black trousers, and waved his free hand grandly aloft; "Youth," he reiterated, as he looked over the gay young company at the foot of the hall, while the fiddlers paused with their bows in the air, and the din of the New Year's clang was rising in the town; "Youth,—of all the things in God's good green earth,—Youth is the most beautiful." Then he signalled with some dignity to the leader of the orchestra, and the music began.

It was a memorable New Year's party that Jeanette Barclay gave at the dawn of this century. The Barclay private car had brought a dozen girls down from the state university for the Christmas holidays, and then had made a recruiting trip as far east as Cleveland and had brought back a score more of girls in their teens and early twenties—for an invitation from the Barclays, if not of much social consequence, had a power behind it that every father recognized. And what with threescore girls from the Ridge, and young men from half a dozen neighbouring states,—and young men are merely background in any social picture,—the ballroom was as pretty as a garden. It was her own idea,—with perhaps a shade of suggestion from her father,—that the old century should be danced out and the new one danced in with the pioneers of Garrison County set in quadrilles in the centre of the floor, while the young people whirled around them in the two-step then in vogue. So the Barclays asked a score or so of the old people in for dinner New Year's Eve; and they kept below stairs until midnight. Then they filed into the ballroom, with its fair fresh faces, its shrill treble note of merriment,—these old men and women, gray and faded, looking back on the old century while the others looked into the new one. There came Mr. and Mrs. Watts McHurdie in the lead, Watts in his best brown suit, and Mrs. Watts in lavender to sustain her gray hair; General Ward, in his straight black frock coat and white tie, followed with Mrs. Dorman, relict of the late William Dorman, merchant, on his arm; behind him came the Brownwells, in evening clothes, and Robert Hendricks and his sister,—all gray-haired, but straight of figure and firm of foot; Colonel Culpepper followed with Mrs. Mary Barclay; the Lycurgus Masons were next in the file, and in their evening clothes they looked withered and old, and Lycurgus was not sure upon his feet; Jacob Dolan in his faded blue uniform marched in like a drum-major with the eldest Miss Ward; and the Carnines followed, and the Fernalds followed them; and then came Judge and Mrs. Bemis—he a gaunt, sinister, parchment-skinned man, with white hair and a gray mustache, and she a crumbling ruin in shiny satin bedecked in diamonds. Down the length of the long room they walked, and executed an old-fashioned grand march, such as Watts could lead, while the orchestra played the tune that brought cheers from the company, and the little old man looked at the floor, while Mrs. McHurdie beamed and bowed and smiled. And then they took their partners to step off the quadrille—when behold, it transpired that in all the city orchestra, that had cost the Barclays a thousand dollars according to town tradition, not one man could be found who could call off a quadrille. Then up spake John Barclay, and stood him on a chair, and there, when the colonel had signalled for the music to start, the voice of John Barclay rang out above the din, as it had not sounded before in nearly thirty years. Old memories came rushing back to him of the nights when he used to ride five and ten and twenty miles and play the cabinet organ to a fiddle's lead, and call off until daybreak for two dollars. And such a quadrille as he gave them—four figures of it before he sent them to their seats. There were "cheat or swing," the "crow's nest," "skip to my Loo,"—and they all broke out singing, while the young people clapped their hands, and finally by a series of promptings he quickly called the men into one line and the women into another, and then the music suddenly changed to the Virginia reel. And so the dance closed for the old people, and they vanished from the room, looking back at the youth and the happiness and warmth of the place with wistful but not eager eyes; and as Jacob Dolan, in his faded blues and grizzled hair and beard, disappeared into the dusk of the hallway, Jeanette Barclay, looking at her new ring, patted it and said to Neal Ward: "Well, dear, the nineteenth century is gone! Now let us dance and be happy in this one."

And so she danced the new year and the new century and the new life in, as happy as a girl of twenty can be. For was she not a Junior at the state university, if you please? Was she not the heir of all the ages, and a scandalous lot of millions besides, and what is infinitely more important to a girl's happiness, was she not engaged, good and tight, and proud of it, to a youth making twelve dollars every week whether it rained or not? What more could an honest girl ask? And it was all settled, and so happily settled too, that when she had graduated with her class at the university, and had spent a year in Europe—but that was a long way ahead, and Neal had to go to the City with father and learn the business first. But business and graduation and Europe were mere details—the important thing had happened. So when it was all over that night, and the girls had giggled themselves to bed, and the house was dark, Jeanette Barclay and her mother walked up the stairs to her room together. There they sat down, and Jeanette began—

"Neal said he told you about the ring?"

"Yes," answered her mother.

"But he did not show it to you—because he wanted me to be the first to see it."

"Neal's a dear," replied her mother. "So that was why? I thought perhaps he was bashful."

"No, mother," answered the girl, "no—we're both so proud of it." She kept her hand over the ring finger, as she spoke, "You know those 'Short and Simple Annals' he's been doing for the Star—well, he got his first check the day before Christmas, and he gave half of it to his father, and took the other twenty-five dollars and bought this ring. I think it is so pretty, and we are both real proud of it." And then she took her hand from the ring, and held her finger out for her mother's eyes, and her mother kissed it. They were silent a moment; then the girl rose and stood with her hand on the doorknob and cried: "I think it is the prettiest ring in all the world, and I never want any other." Then she thought of mother, and flushed and ran away.

And we should not follow her. Rather let us climb Main Street and turn into Lincoln Avenue and enter the room where Martin Culpepper sits writing the Biography of Watts McHurdie. He is at work on his famous chapter, "Hymen's Altar," and we may look over his great shoulder and see what he has written: "The soul caged in its prison house of the flesh looks forth," he writes, "and sees other chained souls, and hails them in passing like distant ships. But soul only meets soul in some great passion of giving, whether it be man to his fellow-man, to his God, or in the love of men and women; it matters not how the ecstasy comes, its root is in sacrifice, in giving, in forgetting self and merging through abnegation into the source of life in this universe for one sublime moment. For we may not come out of our prison houses save to inhale the air of heaven once or twice, and then go scourged back to our dungeons. Great souls are they who love the most, who breathe the deepest of heaven's air, and give of themselves most freely."