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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Man and a Woman, by Stanley Waterloo
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: A Man and a Woman
+
+Author: Stanley Waterloo
+
+Release Date: June 28, 2005 [EBook #16143]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A MAN AND A WOMAN ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Al Haines
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+A MAN AND A WOMAN
+
+
+By STANLEY WATERLOO
+
+
+
+
+
+[A NEW EDITION]
+
+
+
+
+
+Published by
+
+Way & Williams
+
+Chicago
+
+
+
+
+MDCCCXCVII
+
+
+
+
+Copyright, 1892, by Stanley Waterloo
+
+All rights reserved
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAPTER
+
+      I  PROLOGUE
+     II  CLOSE TO NATURE
+    III  BOY, BIRD, AND SNAKE
+     IV  GROWING UP WITH THE COUNTRY
+      V  GRIM-VISAGED WAR
+     VI  THE SPEARING OF ALFRED
+    VII  HOW FICTION MADE FACT
+   VIII  NEW FORCES AT WORK
+     IX  MRS. POTIPHAR
+      X  THE BUILDING OF THE FENCE
+     XI  SETTLING WITH WOODELL
+    XII  INCLINATION AGAINST CONSCIENCE
+   XIII  FAREWELL TO THE FENCE
+    XIV  A RUGGED LOST SHEEP
+     XV  A STRANGE WORLD
+    XVI  THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING
+   XVII  "EH, BUT SHE'S WINSOME"
+  XVIII  THE WOMAN
+    XIX  PURGATORY
+     XX  TWO FOOLS
+    XXI  "MY LITTLE RHINOCEROS-BIRD"
+   XXII  TWO FOOLS STILL
+  XXIII  JUST A PANG
+   XXIV  "AS TO THOSE OTHERS"
+    XXV  NATURE AGAIN
+   XXVI  ADVENTURES MANIFOLD
+  XXVII  THE HOUSE WONDERFUL
+ XXVIII  THE APE
+   XXIX  THE FIRST DISTRICT
+    XXX  THE NINTH WARD
+   XXXI  THEIR FOOLISH WAYS
+  XXXII  THE LAW OF NATURE
+ XXXIII  WHITEST ASHES
+
+
+
+
+A MAN AND A WOMAN.
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+PROLOGUE.
+
+But for a recent occurrence I should certainly not be telling the story
+of a friend, or, rather, I should say, of two friends of mine.  What
+that occurrence was I will not here indicate--it is unnecessary; but it
+has not been without its effect upon my life and plans.  If it be asked
+by those who may read these pages under what circumstances it became
+possible for me to acquire such familiarity with certain scenes and
+incidents in the lives of one man and one woman,--scenes and incidents
+which, from their very nature, were such that no third person could
+figure in them,--I have only to explain that Grant Harlson and I were
+friends from boyhood, practically from babyhood, and that never, during
+all our lives together, did a change occur in our relationship.  He has
+told me many things of a nature imparted by one man to another very
+rarely, and only when each of the two feels that they are very close
+together in that which sometimes makes two men as one.  He was proud
+and glad when he told me these things--they were but episodes, and
+often trivial ones--and I was interested deeply.  They added the
+details of a history much of which I knew and part of which I had
+guessed at.
+
+He was not quite the ordinary man, this Grant Harlson, close friend of
+mine.  He had an individuality, and his name is familiar to many people
+in the world.  He has been looked upon by the tactful as but one of a
+type in a new nationality--a type with traits not yet clearly defined,
+a type not large, nor yet, thank God, uncommon--one of the best of the
+type; to me, the best.  A close friend perhaps is blind.  No; he is not
+that: he but sees so clearly that the world, with poorer view, may not
+always agree with him.
+
+I hardly know how to describe this same Grant Harlson.  At this stage
+of my story it is scarcely requisite that I should, but the account is
+loose and vagrant and with no chronology.  Physically, he was more than
+most men, six feet in height, deep of chest, broad-shouldered,
+strong-legged and strong-featured, and ever in good health, so far as
+all goes, save the temporary tax on recklessness nature so often
+levies, and the other irregular tax she levies by some swoop of the
+bacilli of which the doctors talk so much and know so little.  I mean
+only that he might catch a fever with a chill addition if he lay
+carelessly in some miasmatic swamp on some hunting expedition, or that,
+in time of cholera, he might have, like other men, to struggle with the
+enemy.  But he tossed off most things lightly, and had that vitality
+which is of heredity, not built up with a single generation, though
+sometimes lost in one.  Forest and farm-bred, college-bred,
+city-fostered and broadened and hardened.  A man of the world, with
+experiences, and in his quality, no doubt, the logical, inevitable
+result of such experiences--one with a conscience flexile and seeking,
+but hard as rock when once satisfied.  One who never, intentionally,
+injured a human being, save for equity's sake.  One who, of course,
+wandered in looking for what was, to him, the right, but who, having
+once determined, was ever steadfast.  A man who had seen and known and
+fed and felt and risked, but who seemed to me always as if his religion
+were: "What shall I do?  Nature says so-and-so, and the Power beyond
+rules nature."  Laws of organization for political purposes, begun
+before Romulus and Remus, and varied by the dale-grouped Angles or the
+Northmen's Thing, did not seem to much impress him.  He recognized
+their utility, wanted to improve them, made that his work, and
+eventually observed most of them.  This, it seemed to me, was his
+honest make-up--a Berseker, a bare-sark descendant of the Vikings, in a
+dress-coat.  He had passions, and gratified them sometimes.  He had
+ambitions, and worked for them.  He had a conscience, and was guided by
+it.
+
+It was always interesting to me to look at him in youthful fray, more
+so, years afterward, in club or in convention, or anywhere, and try to
+imagine him the country small boy.  Keen, hard, alert in all the ways
+of a great city, it was difficult to conceive him in his early youth,
+well as I knew it; difficult to reflect that his dreams at night were
+not of the varying results of some late scheme, nor of white shoulders
+at the opera, nor the mood of the Ninth Ward, nor of the drift of
+business, but of some farm-house's front yard in mid-summer with a boy
+aiming a long shot-gun at a red-winged poacher in a cherry tree, or
+that he saw, in sleep, the worn jambs beside the old-fashioned
+fireplace where, winter mornings, he kicked on his frozen boots, and
+the living-room where, later in the morning, he ate so largely of
+buckwheat cakes.  He was a figure, wicked some said, a schemer many
+said, a rock of refuge for his friends said more.  This was the man, no
+uncommon type in the great cities of the great republic.
+
+As for the woman, I write with greater hesitation.  I can tell of her
+in this place but in vague outline.  She was slender, not tall,
+brown-haired and with eyes like those of the deer or Jersey heifer,
+save that they had the accompanying expression of thought or mood or
+fancy which mobile human features with them give.  She was a woman of
+the city, with all that gentle craft which is a woman's heritage.  She
+was good.  She was unlike all others in the world to one man--no, to
+two.
+
+I have but tried to tell what these two people appeared to me.  I can
+see them as they were, but cannot tell it as I should.  I have not
+succeeded well in expressing myself in words.  Even were I cleverer, I
+should fail.  We can picture characters but approximately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+CLOSE TO NATURE.
+
+The great forest belt, oak, ash, beech and maple, sweeps southwestward
+from New England through New York and trends westward and even to the
+north again till one sees the same landscape very nearly reproduced in
+Wisconsin wilds.  Not far from where its continuity is broken by the
+southern reach of Lake Huron was a clearing cut in the wood.  The land
+was rolling, and through the clearing ran a vigorous creek, already
+alder-fringed--for the alder follows the chopper swiftly--and
+glittering with countless minnows.  In the spring great pickerel came
+up, too, from the deep waters, miles away, to spawn and, sometimes, to
+be speared.  From either side of the creek the ground ascended
+somewhat, and on one bank stood a little house.  It was a house
+pretentious for the time, since it was framed and boarded instead of
+being made of logs, but it contained only three rooms: one, the general
+living-room with the brick fireplace on one side, and the others,
+smaller, for sleeping apartments.  So close to the edge of the forest
+was the house that the sweep of the wind through the tree-tops made
+constant music, and the odd, squalling bark of the black squirrel, the
+chatter of the red one, the drumming of the ruffed grouse, the pipe of
+the quail and the morning gobble of the wild turkey were familiar
+sounds.  There were deer and bear in the depths of the green ocean, and
+an occasional wolverine.  Sometimes at night a red fox would circle
+about the clearing and bark querulously, the cry contrasting oddly with
+the notes of whippoorwills and the calls of loons.  The trees were
+largely oak and beech and ash and birch, and in the spring there were
+great splashes of white where the Juneberry trees had burst into bloom.
+In summer there was a dense greenness everywhere, and in autumn a great
+blaze of scarlet and yellow leaves.
+
+There was an outlined flower garden in front of the house, made in
+virgin soil, and with the stumps of trees, close-hewn, still showing
+above the surface.  Beside the door were what they called "bouncing
+Betties" and "old hen and chickens," and on each side of a short
+pathway, that led to what was as yet little more than a trail through
+the wood, were bunches of larkspur and phlox and old-fashioned pinks
+and asters, and there were a few tall hollyhocks and sunflowers
+standing about as sentinels.  The wild flowers all about were so close
+to these that all their perfumes blended, and the phlox and pinks could
+see their own cousins but a few feet away.  The short path ran through
+a clump of bushes but a few yards from the creek.  In these bushes
+song-sparrows and "chippy-birds" built their nests.
+
+In the doorway of the little house by the forests edge stood, one
+afternoon in summer, a young man.  He was what might perhaps be termed
+an exceedingly young man, as his sixth birthday was but lately
+attained, and his stature and general appearance did not contradict his
+age.  His apparel was not, strictly speaking, in keeping with the glory
+of the general scene.  His hat had been originally of the quality known
+as "chip," but the rim was gone, and what remained had an air of
+abandon about it.  His clothing consisted of two garments, a striped,
+hickory shirt and trousers of blue drilling.  The trousers were
+supported by suspenders, home-made, of the same material.  Sometimes he
+wore but one.  It saved trouble.  He was barefooted.  He stood with a
+hand in each pocket, his short legs rather wide apart, and looked out
+upon the landscape.  His air was that of a large landed proprietor,
+one, for instance, who owned the earth.
+
+This young man under consideration had not been in society to any great
+extent, and of one world had seen very little.  Of another he knew a
+great deal, for his age.  With people of the sort who live in towns he
+was unacquainted, but with nature's people he was on closer terms.  He
+had a great friend and crony in a person who had been a teacher, and
+who had come to this frontier life from a broader field.  This person
+was his mother.  With his father he was also on a relationship of
+familiarity, but the father was, necessarily, out with his axe most of
+the time, and so it came that the young man and his mother were more
+literally growing up together with the country.  To her he went with
+such problems as his great mind failed to solve, and he had come to
+have a very good opinion of her indeed.  Not that she was as wise as he
+in many things; certainly not.  She did not know how the new woodchuck
+hole was progressing, nor where the coon tracks were thickest along the
+creek, nor where the woodpecker was nesting; but she was excessively
+learned, nevertheless, and could be relied upon in an emergency.  He
+approved of her, decidedly.  Besides, he remembered her course on one
+occasion when he was in a great strait.  He was but three years old
+then, but he remembered all about it.  It was, in fact, this occurrence
+which had given him his hobby.
+
+The young man had a specialty.  He had several specialties, but to one
+yielded all the rest.  He had an eye to chipmunks, and had made most
+inefficient traps for them and hoped some day to catch one, but they
+were nothing to speak of.  As for the minnows in the creek, had he not
+caught one with a dipper once, and had he not almost hit a big pickerel
+with a stone?  He knew where the liverwort and anemones grew most
+thickly in the spring and had gathered fragrant bunches of them daily,
+and he knew, too, of a hollow where there had been a snowy sheet of
+winter-green blossoms earlier, and where there would soon be an
+abundance of red berries such as his mother liked.  At beech-nut
+gathering, in the season, he admitted no superior.  As for the habits
+of the yellow-birds, particularly at the season when they were feeding
+upon thistle-seed and made a golden cloud amid the white one as they
+drifted with the down, well, he was the only one who really knew
+anything about it!  Who but he could take the odd-shaped pod of the
+wild fleur-de-lis, the common flag, and, winding it up in the flag's
+own long, narrow leaf, holding one end, and throwing the pod
+sling-wise, produce a sound through the air like that of the swoop of
+the night-hawk?  And who better than he could pluck lobelia, and
+smartweed, and dig wild turnips and bring all for his mother to dry for
+possible use, should, he or his father or she catch cold or be ill in
+any way?  Hopes for the future had he, too.  Sometimes a deer had come
+in great leaps across the clearing, and once a bear had invaded the
+hog-pen.  The young man had an idea that as soon as he became a little
+taller and could take down the heavy gun, an old "United States yager"
+with a big bore, bloodshed would follow in great quantities.  He had
+persuaded his father to let him aim the piece once or twice, and had
+confidence that if he could get a fair shot at any animal, that animal
+would die.  Were it a deer, he had concluded he would aim from a great
+stump a few feet distant from the house.  If a bear came, he would shut
+the door and raise the window, not too far, and blaze away from there.
+But in none of all these things, either present exploits or imaginings
+for the future, was his interest most entangled.  His specialty was
+Snakes.
+
+Not intended by nature for a naturalist was this youthful individual
+whose specialty was snakes.  Very much enamored was he of most of
+nature's products, but not at all of the family _ophidia_.  Snakes were
+his specialty simply because he did not approve of them.  All dated
+back to the affair of three years before.  Snakes were abundant in the
+wood, but were not of many kinds.  There were garter-snakes, dreaded of
+the little frogs, but timid of most things; there was a small snake of
+wonderful swiftness and as green as the grass into which it darted;
+there were the water pilots, sunning themselves in coils upon the
+driftwood in the water, swart of color, thick of form and offensive of
+aspect; there were the milk-snakes, yellowish gray, with wonderful
+banded sides and with checker-board designs in black upon their yellow
+bellies.  Sometimes a pan of milk from the solitary cow, set for its
+cream in the dug-out cellar beneath the house, would be found with its
+yellow surface marred and with a white puddling about the floor, and
+then the milk remaining would be thrown away and there would be a
+washing and scalding of the pan, because the thief was known.  There
+were, in the lowlands, the massasaugas; short, sluggish rattle-snakes,
+venomous but cowardly, and, finally, there were the black-snakes
+ranging everywhere, for no respecter of locality is _bascanion
+constrictor_ when in pursuit of prey.  Largest of all the snakes of the
+region, the only constrictor among them, at home in the lowlands, on
+the hill-sides or in the tree-tops, the black-snake was the dread of
+all small creatures of the wood.  There was a story of how one of them
+had dropped upon a hunter, coiled himself about his neck and strangled
+him.
+
+This young man of six remembered how, one day, three years back, before
+he had assumed trousers or become familiar with all the affairs of the
+world, he was alone in the house, his mother having gone into the
+little garden.  He remembered how, looking up, he saw, lifted above the
+doorsill, a head with beady, glittering eyes, and how, after a moment's
+survey, the head was lifted higher and there came gliding over the
+floor toward him a black monster, with darting tongue and long, curved
+body and evident fierce intent.  He remembered how he leaped for a high
+stool which served him at the table, how he clambered to its top and
+there set up a mighty yell for succor--for he had great lungs.  He
+could, by shutting his eyes, even now, see his mother as she came
+running from the garden, see her look of terror as she caught sight of
+the circling thing upon the floor, and then the look of desperation as
+the mother instinct rose superior and she dashed into the room, seized
+the great iron shovel that stood before the fireplace, and began
+dealing reckless blows at the hissing serpent.  A big black-snake is
+not a pleasant customer, but neither--for a black-snake--is a frenzied
+mother with an iron fire shovel in her hand, and this particular snake
+turned tail, a great deal of it, by the way, since it extended to its
+head, and disappeared over the doorsill in a cataract of black and into
+the wood again.
+
+From that hour the individual so beleaguered on a stool had been no
+friend of snakes.  Talk about vendettas!  No Sicilian feud was ever
+bitterer or more relentlessly pursued, as the boy increased in size and
+confidence.  Scores of garter-snakes had been his victims; once even a
+milk-snake had yielded up the ghost, and once--a great day that--he had
+seen a black-snake in the open and had assailed it valorously with
+stones hurled from a distance.  When it came toward him he retreated,
+but did not abandon the bombardment, and finally drove it into a cover
+of deep bushes.  Come to close quarters with a black-snake he had never
+done, for a double reason: firstly, because stones did almost as well
+as a club, and, secondly, because his father, fearing for him, had
+threatened him with punishment if he essayed such combat, and the firm
+old rule of "spare the rod and spoil the child" was adhered to
+literally by the father and indorsed by the mother with hesitation.
+And, growing close to the house, were slender sprouts of birch and
+willow, each of which leaned forward as if to say, "I am just the thing
+to lick a boy with," and such a sprout as one of these, especially the
+willow, does, under proper conditions, so embrace one's shoulders and
+curl about one's legs and make itself familiar.  But the feud was on,
+and as a permanency, though, on this particular afternoon, the young
+man, as he stood there in the doorway, had no thought of snakes.
+Something else this summer was attracting much of his attention.  He
+had a family on his hands.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+BOY, BIRD AND SNAKE.
+
+The young man's family was not large, but a part of it was young, and
+he felt the responsibility.  The song-sparrow is the very light and
+gladness of the woods and fields.  There are rarer singers, and birds
+of more brilliant plumage, but he is the constant quantity.  His notes
+may not rival those mellow, brief ones of the blue-birds in early
+spring, so sweet in their quaint inflection, which suggest all hope,
+and are so striking because heard while snow may be yet upon the
+ground; he may not have the wild abandon of the bobolink with that
+tinkle and gurgle and thrill; he is no pretentious songster, like a
+score of other birds, but he is a great part of the soul of early
+summer, for he is telling, morning, noon and night, how good the world
+is, how he approves of the sunshine, and how everything is all right!
+And so the young man approved much of the song-sparrow, and was
+interested in the movements of all his kind.
+
+One day in May, the boy had noted something in the clump of bushes,
+between the house and creek, which very much resembled a small
+bird's-nest, and had at once investigated.  He found it, the nest of
+the song-sparrow, and, when the little gray guardian had fluttered
+away, he noted the four tiny eggs, and their mottled beauty.  He did
+not touch them, for he had been well trained as to what should be the
+relations between human beings and all singing birds, but his interest
+in the progress of that essay in summer housekeeping became at once
+absorbing.  He announced in the house that he intended to watch over
+the nest all summer, and keep off the hawks, and that when the little
+eggs were hatched, and the little birds were grown, maybe he would try
+to tame one.  He was encouraged in the idea.  It is good to teach a boy
+to be protective.  And when the birds were hatched, his interest
+deepened.
+
+He was half inclined, as he stood in the doorway on this particular
+day, to visit the dense bushes and note the condition of affairs in
+that vicinity, but, buoyant as he was, there was something in the
+outlook which detained him.  There was such a yellow glory to the
+afternoon, and so many things were happening.
+
+Balanced above the phlox, a humming-bird, green-backed and glittering,
+hung and tasted for a moment, then flashed to where the larkspurs were.
+A red-headed woodpecker swung downward on the wing to the white-brown
+side of a dead elm, sounded a brief tattoo upon the surface, then dived
+at a passing insect.  A phoebe bird was singing somewhere.  A red
+squirrel sat perched squarely on the drooping limb of a hickory tree
+and chewed into a plucked nut, so green that the kernel was not formed,
+then dropped it to the ground, and announced in a chatter that he was a
+person of importance.  Great yellow butterflies, with black markings
+upon their wings, floated lazily here and there, and at last settled in
+a magnificent cluster upon a moist spot in a mucky place where
+something pleased their fancy, and where they fed and fluttered
+tremulously.  There were myriads of wild bees, and a pleasant droning
+filled the air, while from all about came the general soft clamor of
+the forest, made up of many sounds.
+
+The boy was satisfied with the prospect.  Suddenly he started.  There
+was a call which was not of peacefulness.  He knew the cry.  He had
+heard it when some bird of prey had seized a smaller one.  It was the
+call of the sparrow now, and it came from his clump of bushes.  His
+family was in danger.  A hawk, perhaps, but he would have seen such a
+foe in its descent.  It might be a cat-bird or a weasel?
+
+With a rush, the boy was across the garden, and as he ran he snatched
+up what was for a person of such inches an ideal club, a cut of
+hickory, perhaps two feet in length, not over an inch in thickness, but
+tough and heavy enough for a knight errant of his years.  He broke
+through the slight herbage about the place where the bushes grew
+thickest, and, getting into an open space, had a fair view of the
+particular shrub wherein were the bird's-nest and his birdlings.  He
+stopped short and looked, then ran back a little, then looked again,
+and straightway there rose from his throat a scream which, though
+greater in volume, was almost in its character like that other wild cry
+of the two sparrows who were fluttering pitifully and desperately about
+their nest, tempting their own death each instant in defense of their
+half-fledged young.  He stood with his youthful limbs half paralyzed,
+and screamed, for he saw what was most horrible, and what it seemed he
+could not check nor hinder, though a cruel tragedy was going on before
+his eyes!
+
+Curled easily about the main stem of the bush, close to which, upon a
+forked limb, rested the sparrow's nest, its dark coils reaching
+downward and its free neck and head waving regularly to and fro, was a
+monstrous black-snake, and in its jaws fluttered feebly one of the
+youthful sparrows.  Evidently the seizure had just been made when the
+boy burst in upon the scene.  The snake's eyes glittered wickedly, and
+it showed no disposition to drop its prey because of the intruder.  It
+only reared its head and swung slowly from side to side.  Lying almost
+at full length upon a branching limb of the same bush, and on a level
+with the nest, was a second serpent, its head raised slightly, but
+motionless, awaiting, it seemed, its opportunity to seize another of
+the tender brood.  The parent birds flew about in converging circles in
+their strait, clamoring piteously and approaching dangerously near to
+the jaws of their repulsive enemies.  The boy but stood and screamed.
+They were the greatest black-snakes he had ever seen.  Then, all at
+once, he became another creature.  His childish voice changed in its
+key, and, club in hand, screaming still louder, he ran right at the
+bush.  At the same moment his frightened mother came running down the
+pathway, screaming also.
+
+As the boy leaped downward, both snakes, with wonderful swiftness,
+dropped to the ground and darted across the open space of a few yards,
+toward the creek.  Side by side, with crests erect, they glided, and
+one of them still held between his jaws the unfortunate young sparrow.
+The boy did not hesitate a moment.  Still making a great noise, but
+hoarsely for a creature of his age, he ran to head them off and barely
+passed them as they touched the water.  He leaped in ahead of them and
+they were beside him in an instant.  The water was up to his waist.  He
+plunged deeper recklessly.  With a cry of rage he struck at the serpent
+with the bird, and struck and struck again, blindly, still giving
+utterance to that odd sound, and with the fury of a young demon.  The
+woman had reached the bank and stood, unknowing what to do, shrieking
+in maternal terror, while across the clearing a man was running.  And
+then a fierce chance blow, delivered with all the strength of the
+maddened boy, alighted fairly, just below the head of the snake
+carrying away the bird, and in a second it was done for, floating,
+writhing down the stream with a broken neck, and its tiny prey loosened
+and drifting away beside it.
+
+The mother gasped in relief, but only for a moment.  The boy cast one
+glance at the floating reptile and the bird, and only one, then turned
+to the other serpent.  It had almost reached the shore, and between
+that and the covert it might attain was a stretch of shrubless ground.
+Already its black length was defined on the short grass when the boy
+rushed from the water with uplifted club, just as his father came in
+full view of the scene from the other side.  With cries like those of
+some young wild beast, the child ran at the snake, raining blows with
+the stout club, and with rage in every feature.  The black-snake,
+checked in its course, turned with the constrictor's instinct and
+sprang at the boy, whipping its strong coils about one of its
+assailant's legs and rearing its head aloft to a level with his face.
+The boy but struck and gasped and stumbled over some obstruction, and,
+somehow, the snake was wrenched away, and then there was another rush
+at it, another rain of blows, and it was hit as had been its mate, and
+lay twisting with a broken back.  The man dashed through the creek and
+came upon the scene with a great stick in his hand, but its use was not
+required.  The only labor which devolved upon him was to tear away from
+his quarry the boy who was possessed of a spirit of rage and vengeance
+beyond all reasoning.  Upon the heaving, tossing thing, so that he
+would have been fairly in its coils had it possessed longer any power,
+he leaped, striking fiercely and screaming out all the fearful terms he
+knew--what would have been the wildest of all abandonment of profanity
+had he but acquired the words for such performance.  His father caught
+him by the arm, and he struggled with him.  It was simply a young
+madman.  Carried across the creek and held in bonds for a brief period,
+he suddenly burst out sobbing, and then went to inspect the ravished
+nest where the two old birds hovered mourningly about, and where the
+remaining nestlings seemed dead at first, though they subsequently
+recovered, so gruesomely had the fascination of their natural enemy
+affected them!
+
+What happened then?  What happens when any father and mother have
+occasion to consider the matter of a son, a child, bone of their bone
+and flesh of their flesh, who has transgressed some rule they have set
+up for him wisely, thoughtfully, but with no provision for emotional or
+extraordinary contingencies, because it would be useless, since he
+could not comprehend exceptions.  They took him to the house.  The
+father looked at him queerly, but with an expression that was far
+removed from anger on his face, and his mother took the young man aside
+and washed him, and put on another hickory shirt, and told him that his
+sparrows would raise a pretty good family after all, and that it
+wouldn't be so hard for the old birds to feed three as four.
+
+Early that same evening a six-foot father strolled over to the place of
+the nearest settler, a mile or so away, and the two men walked back,
+talking together as neighbors will in a new country, though they do not
+so well in cities, and when they reached the creek one of them, the
+father, cut a forked twig and lifted the black-snake to its full
+length.  Its head, raised even with his, allowed its tail to barely
+touch the ground.  Evidently the men were interested, and evidently one
+of them was rather proud of something.  But he said nothing to his son
+about it.  That would, in its full consideration, have involved a
+licking of somebody for disobedience of orders.  It was a good thing
+for the bereaved song-sparrows, though.  Older heads than that of the
+boy were now considerate of their welfare.  Lucky sparrows were they!
+
+As for the youth, he had, that night, queer dreams, which he remembered
+all his life.  He was battling with the snakes again, and the fortunes
+of war shifted, and there was much trouble until daylight.  Then, with
+the sun breaking in a blaze upon the clearing, with the ground and
+trees flashing forth illuminated dew-drops, with a clangor of thousands
+of melodious bird-voices--even the bereaved father song-sparrow was
+singing--he was his own large self again, and went forth conquering and
+to conquer.  He found the murdered nestling stranded down the creek,
+and buried it with ceremony.  He found both dead invaders, and punched
+their foul bodies with a long stick.  And he wished a bear would come
+and try to take a pig!
+
+This was the boy.  This was the field he grew in, the nature of his
+emergence into active entity, and this may illustrate somewhat his
+unconscious bent as influenced by early surroundings, while showing
+some of the fixed features of heredity, for he came of a battling race.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+GROWING UP WITH THE COUNTRY.
+
+Have you ever seen a buckwheat field in bloom?  Have you stood at its
+margin and gazed over those acres of soft eider-down?  Have your
+nostrils inhaled the perfume of it all, the heavy sweetness toned
+keenly with the whiff of pine from the adjacent wood?  Have you noted
+the wild bees in countless myriads working upon its surface and
+gathering from each tiny flower's heart that which makes the clearest
+and purest and most wine-like of all honey?  Have you stood at the
+forest's edge, perched high upon a fence, maybe of trees felled into a
+huge windrow when first the field was cleared, or else of rails of oak
+or ash, both black and white--the black ash lasts the longer, for worms
+invade the white--and looked upon a field of growing Indian corn, the
+green spread of it deep and heaving, and noted the traces of the
+forest's tax-collectors left about its margins: the squirrel's dainty
+work and the broken stalks and stripped ears upon the ground, leavings
+of the old raccoon, the small bear of the forest, knowing enough to
+become a friend of man when caught and tamed, and almost human in his
+ways, as curious as a scandal-monger and selfish as a money-lender?
+
+Have you gone into the hard maple wood, the sugar bush, in early
+spring, the time of frosty nights and sunny days, and driven home the
+gouge and spile, and gathered the flowing sap and boiled it in such
+pots and kettles as later pioneers have owned, and gained such
+wildwood-scented product as no confectioner of the town may ever hope
+to equal?  Have you lain beside some pond, a broadening of the creek
+above an ancient beaver-dam, at night, in mellowest midsummer, and
+watched the muskrats at their frays and feeding?  Have you hunted the
+common wildcat, short-bodied demon, whose tracks upon the snow are
+discernible each winter morning, but who is so crafty, so gifted with
+some great art of slyness, that you may grow to manhood with him all
+about you, yet never see him in the sinewy flesh unless with dog and
+gun, and food and determination, you seek his trail, and follow it
+unreasoningly until you terminate the stolid quest with a discovery of
+the quarry lying close along the body of some eloping, stunted tree,
+and with a lively episode in immediate prospect?  Did you ever chase a
+wolverine, last of his kind in a clearing-overflowed region, strange
+combination in character and form of bear and lynx, gluttonous and
+voracious, and strong and fearless, a beast descended almost unchanged
+from the time of the earliest cave-men, the horror of the bravest dog,
+and end his too uncivilized career with a rifle-shot at thoughtful
+distance?
+
+Have you seen the wild pigeons, before pot-hunters invaded their
+southern roosts and breeding-grounds and slaughtered them by millions,
+exterminating one of the most wonderful of American game birds, sweep
+over in such dense clouds that the sun would be obscured, and at times
+so close to earth that a long pole thrust aloft from tree or hillock
+would stun such numbers as would make a gallant pot-pie?  Have you
+followed the deer in the dense forest, clinging doggedly to his track
+upon the fresh snow from the dusk of early morning, startling him again
+and again from covert, and shooting whenever you caught even so much as
+a glimpse of his gray body through distant interstices of tree and
+brush, until, late in the afternoon, human endurance, which always
+surpasses that of the wild beast, overcame him, and he leaped less
+strongly with each new alarm and grew more reckless before twilight,
+and came within easy range and fed his enemies on the morrow?  Have you
+watched for him beside the brackish waters of the lick, where, perched
+upon a rude, high scaffold built beside a tree, mosquito-bitten and
+uneasy, you waited and suffered, preserving an absolute silence and
+immobility until came ghost-like flitting figures from the forest to
+the shallow's edge, when the great gun, carrying the superstitious
+number of buckshot, just thirteen, roared out, awakening a thousand
+echoes of the night, and, clambering down, found a great antlered thing
+in its death agony?
+
+Have you wandered through new clearings neglected for a season and
+waded ankle-deep in strawberry blooms, and, later, fed there upon such
+scarlet fruit, so fragrant and with such a flavor of its own that the
+scientific horticulturist owns to-day his weakness?  Have you looked
+out upon the flats some bright spring morning and found them
+transformed into a shallow lake by the creek's first flood, and seen
+one great expanse of shining gold as the sun smote the thin ice made in
+the night but to disappear long before mid-day and leave a surface all
+ripples and shifting lights and shadows, upon which would come an
+occasional splash and great out-extending circles, as some huge mating
+pickerel leaped in his glee?  Have you stood sometime, in sheer delight
+of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air clarified by hundreds of
+miles of sweep over an inland sea, the nearest shore not a score of
+miles away, and filtered through aromatic forests to your senses, an
+invisible elixir, exhilarating, without a headache as the price?  Have
+you seen the tiger-lilies and crimson Indian-tobacco blossoms flashing
+in the lowlands?  Have you trapped the mink and, visiting his haunts,
+noticed there the old blue crane flitting ever ahead of you through
+dusky corridors, uncanny, but a friend?  Have you--but there are a
+thousand things!
+
+If you have not seen or known or felt all these fair things--so jumbled
+together in the allusion here, without a natural sequence or thought or
+reason or any art--if you have not owned them all and so many others
+that may not here be mentioned, then you have missed something of the
+gifts and glories of growth in a new land.  Such experience comes but
+to one generation.  But one generation grows with the conquest, and it
+is a great thing.  It is man-making.
+
+And from the east came more hewers of wood, not drawers of water, and
+the axe swung all around, and new clearings were made and earlier ones
+broadened, and where fireweed first followed, the burning of the logs
+there were timothy and clover, though rough the mowing yet, and the
+State was "settled."  Roads through the woods showed wagon-ruts, now
+well defined; houses were not so far apart, and about them were young
+orchards.  The wild was being subjugated.  The tame was growing.  The
+boy was growing with it.
+
+There was nothing particularly novel in the manner of this youth's
+development, save that, as he advanced in years, he became almost a
+young Indian in all woodcraft, and that the cheap, long,
+single-barreled shotgun, which was his first great personal possession,
+became, in his skilled hands, a deadly thing.  Wild turkey and ruffed
+grouse, and sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder,
+and he had it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older,
+and become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux.
+The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at.  Those
+remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live
+to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin admirably,
+and he approved of them.  With the Sioux it was quite different.  He
+had read of them in the weekly paper, which was now a part of progress,
+and he had learned something of them at the district school--for the
+district school had come, of course.  It springs up in the United
+States after forests have been cut away, just as springs the wheat or
+corn.  And the district school was, to the youth, a novelty and a vast
+attraction.  It took him into Society.
+
+Through forest paths and from long distances in each direction came the
+pupils to this first school of the region, and there were perhaps a
+score of them in all, boys and girls, and the teacher was a fair young
+woman from the distant town.  The school-house was a structure of a
+single room, built in the wood, and squirrels dropped nuts upon its
+roof from overhanging boughs and peeped in at the windows, and
+sometimes a hawk would chase a fleeing bird into the place, where it
+would find a sure asylum, but create confusion.  Once a flock of quail
+came marching in demurely at the open door, while teacher and pupils
+maintained a silence at the pretty sight.  And once the place was
+cleared by an invasion of hornets enraged at something.  That was a
+great day for the boys.
+
+The studies were not as varied as in the cross-roads schools to-day.
+There was the primer, and there were a few of the old Webster
+spelling-books, but, while the stories of the boy in the apple tree and
+the overweening milkmaid were familiar, the popular spelling-book was
+Town's, and the readers were First, Second, Third and Fourth, and their
+"pieces" included such classics as "Webster's Reply to Hayne" and
+"Thanatopsis," and numerous clever exploits of S. P. Willis in blank
+verse.  Davie's Arithmetic was dominant, and, as for grammar, whenever
+it was taught, Brown's was the favorite.  There was, even then, in the
+rural curriculum the outlining of that system of the common schools
+which has made them of this same region unexcelled elsewhere in all the
+world.  There were strong men, men who could read the future,
+controlling the legislation of some of the new States.
+
+The studies mentioned, and geography were the duties now in hand, and
+there was indifference or hopefulness or rivalry among those of the
+little group as there is now in every school, from some new place in
+Oklahoma to old Oxford, over seas.  In all scholarship, it chanced that
+this same boy, Grant Harlson, was easily in the lead.  His mother, an
+ex-teacher in another and older State, loving, regardful, tactful, had
+taught him how to read and comprehend, and he had something of a taste
+that way and a retentive memory.  So, inside the rugged schoolroom, he
+had a certain prestige.  Outside, he took his chances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+GRIM-VISAGED WAR.
+
+It has been said that there were some twenty children in the school.
+They were of various degrees and fortunes.  There were the sons and
+daughters of the land-owners, the pioneers, and there were the sons and
+daughters of the men who worked for them, mostly the drifting class,
+who occupied log houses on unclaimed ground and got flour or meal or
+potatoes for their services with the steadier or more masterful.  In
+the school, though, there were no distinctions on this account.  There
+were but two measurements of standing among girls and boys together,
+their relative importance in their classes, the teacher giving force to
+this, and among the boys alone the equation resulting from the issue of
+all personal encounter.  Boys will be boys, and our fighting
+Anglo-Saxon blood will tell.
+
+There were Harrison Woodell and George Appleton and Frank Hoadly and
+Mortimer Butler, among the older boys; and, among the second growth,
+though varying somewhat in their ages, were Alf Maitland and Maurice
+Shannon and Grant Harlson, and three or four others who ranked with
+them.  The girls differed more in age, for there were some who aspired
+to be teachers, who, if boys, would have been home at work in
+summer-time, and some who could come, while very young, since their
+older sisters came with them to exercise all needed care.  And among
+the smaller ones, though not so young as some, was Katie Welwood, a
+black-haired, black-eyed, evil-tempered little thing, who was the rage
+among the boys.  She had smiled upon Grant Harlson, and smiled upon
+young Maitland, so early in her years is the female a coquette, and
+they looked askance upon each other, though they were the best of
+friends.  Had they not together defied the big George Appleton, and
+vanquished him in running fight, and were they not sworn allies, come
+any weal or woe!  But woman, even at the age of ten, has ever been the
+cause of trouble between males, and those two had, on her account, a
+mortal feud.  It all came suddenly.  There had been certain jealousies
+and heartaches caused by the raven-locked young vixen with the winning
+eyes, but there had been no outspoken words of anger between these
+vassals in her train until there came excuse in other way, for your
+country lad is modest, and never admits that his ailing has aught to do
+with the grand passion.  But there had been a sharp debate over the
+proper ownership of a big gray squirrel at which they had shot their
+arrows from strong hickory bows together, and, with this excuse for
+fuel to the fire already smoldering, there soon came a great flame.
+Neither would yield to one he knew in his heart addicted to winning,
+villainously, the affections of the young woman, and so they fought.
+Unfortunately for Grant, Napoleon was at least in a measure right when
+he remarked that Providence always favored the heaviest battalions, and
+equally unfortunate for him that Alf, as resolute as he, was just a
+little heavier, was as tough of fiber at that stage of their young
+careers, and was, in a general way, what a patron of the prize ring
+would term the better man.  Grant went home licked as thoroughly as any
+country boy, not hyper-critical, could ask, and should have felt that
+all was lost save honor.  But he did not feel that way.  He did not
+consider honor at greater length than is generally done by any boy of
+ten, on the way to eleven, but he did want vengeance.  To lose his
+siren and a portion of his blood--"-'twas from the nose," as Byron
+says--together, was too much for his philosophy.  He must have
+vengeance!  He was no lambkin, and he knew things.  He had read the
+Swiss Family Robinson.  He resolved that on the morrow he would spear
+his hated rival and successful adversary!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+THE SPEARING OF ALFRED.
+
+"The spears they carried, though entirely of wood, were dangerous
+weapons," says the old writer in describing the armament of a tribe of
+the South Sea islanders.  "Their points are hardened by being subjected
+to fire, and, in the hands of those fierce men, they are as deadly as
+the assegai of the African."
+
+This passage, which he had stumbled upon somewhere, was of deepest
+interest to young Harlson.  His armament, he felt, was not yet what it
+should be.  He had arrived at the dignity of a gun, it was true, but
+that was quite another thing.  What he needed was something especially
+adapted for personal encounter and for any knight-errantry which
+chanced to offer itself.  He had imagined what might occur if he were
+with Katie Welwood and they should be assailed by anything or anybody.
+He had large ideas of what was a lover's duty, and was under the
+impression, from what he had read, that a proper knight should go
+always prepared for combat.  So he had fashioned him a spear, a
+formidable weapon contrived with great exactitude after the South Sea
+island recipe.  He had gone into the woods and selected a blue beech,
+straight as could be found, and nearly an inch in thickness.  From this
+he had cut a length of perhaps ten feet, which, with infinite labor and
+risk of jack-knife, he had whittled down to smoothness and to
+whiteness.  Upon one end he left as large a head as the sapling would
+allow, and this, after shaving it into the fashion of a spear-blade, he
+had plunged into the fire until it had begun to char.  He had scraped
+away the charring with a piece of broken glass, and, as a result of his
+endeavors, had really a spear with a point of undoubted sharpness and
+great hardness.  He took huge pride in his new weapon, and carried it
+to school with him for days and on his various woodland expeditions,
+but there had come no chance to rescue any distressful maiden anywhere,
+and the envy and admiration of the other boys had but resulted in
+emulation and in the appearance of similar warlike gear among them.
+
+He had tired of carrying the thing about, and had for some time left it
+peacefully at home, leaning beside the hog-pen.  Now all was different.
+The time had come!  He would have revenge, and have it in a gory way.
+As the South Sea islanders treated their foes, his should be treated.
+He would go upon the war-path, and as for Alf--well, he was sorry for
+him in a general way, but all mercy was dead within his breast
+specifically.  He remembered something in the reader:
+
+  "'Die! spawn of our kindred!  Die! traitor to Lara!'
+  As he spake, there was blood on the spear of Mudara!"
+
+There must be blood, and he laid his plans with what he considered the
+very height of savage craft and ingenuity.
+
+The father of Alf was a sturdy man and good one, but he had a weakness.
+He was the chief supporter in the neighborhood of the itinerant
+minister who exhorted throughout this portion of the country, and he
+had imbibed, perhaps, too much of a fancy for hearing himself talk at
+revival meetings, and for hearing himself in long prayers at home.  His
+petitions covered a great range of subjects, and he was regular in
+their presentation.  The family prayers before breakfast every morning
+were serious matters to the boys from one point of view, and not as
+serious as they should have been from another.  Present, and kneeling
+at chairs about the room, they always were on these occasions, for the
+order was imperative, and the father's arm was strong, and above the
+door hung a strap of no light weight, constituting as it had once done
+that portion of a horse's harness known technically as the bellyband.
+So the boys were always there, each at his particular chair, and Grant
+Harlson, who had been present at these orisons many a time, knew
+exactly where Alf's chair was, and the attitude he must occupy.  It was
+close beside an open window, and his back was always toward the
+opening, this particular attitude having been dictated by the father in
+the vain hope of making his buoyant offspring more attentive if their
+gaze were diverted from things outside.  And all these circumstances
+the dreadful savage from the South Sea islands was considering with
+care.  They are very regular in their habits in the country, and he
+knew just the moment when the morning devotions would begin--some
+fifteen minutes before the breakfast hour.  He knew about how long he
+would be in traversing the distance between his own house and the scene
+of the coming tragedy, and the morning after his resolve was made he
+bolted his own breakfast in a hurry, seized his spear, and scurried
+down the wood road until he approached the verge of the Maitland
+clearing.  Then began a series of extraordinary movements.
+
+Mr. Maitland's house stood close by the wood at one side of the
+clearing, and Grant could easily have walked unperceived until within a
+few yards of the place, had he but kept hidden by the trees; but such
+was not his course.  Right across the clearing, and passing near the
+house, had been dug a great ditch a yard in depth, a year or two
+before, with the intent of draining a piece of lowland lately
+subjugated.  This ditch had been overgrown with weeds until it was
+almost hidden from sight, and now in summer time its bottom was but a
+sandy surface.  It was with the aid of this natural shelter that the
+wily invader proposed to steal upon his enemy.  Already he was lurking
+near its entrance.
+
+Just why he had to "lurk" at this particular juncture Grant could not
+probably have told.  There was not the slightest necessity for lurking.
+There were no windows in the side of the house toward him, and no one
+was visible about the place, but he knew what he had read, and he knew
+that the savages of the South Sea islands were always addicted to
+lurking just previous to springing upon their unsuspecting victims, and
+he was bound to lurk and do it thoroughly.  His manner of lurking
+consisted, before he reached the clearing fence, in crouching very low
+and creeping along in a most constrained and uncomfortable manner,
+occasionally dropping to the ground slowly and with utter noiselessness
+and rising again with equal caution.  All this time the face of the
+young man wore what he conceived to be an expression of most bloody
+purpose craftily concealed.  Upon reaching the fence, he shot his head
+above it, and withdrew it with lightning-like rapidity, frightening
+almost into convulsions, in her nest, a robin whose home was between
+the rails in the immediate vicinity.  Of course he could have looked
+through the fence with greater ease, but that would have involved no
+such dramatic effect.  His sudden view of the landscape taken, the boy
+climbed the fence, ran to the dry ditch, parted the overhanging weeds
+and leaped down.  Once in the dry waterway, he was utterly concealed
+from view, even had any one been near; but that made no difference with
+his precautions.  He knew that after savages had lurked, they always
+glided, and that what the writers describe as "a snake-like motion" was
+something absolutely essential.
+
+Spear in hand and creeping on his hands and knees, the destroyer
+advanced along the drain, lying flat and wriggling with much patience
+wherever a particularly clear stretch of sand presented itself.  Half
+way across the field he raised his head with a movement so slow that a
+full minute was occupied in the performance, parted the weeds gently
+and peered out to get his bearings and ascertain if any foemen were in
+sight.  There were no foemen, and his progress had been satisfactory.
+The remainder of the desperate advance was made with no less adroitness
+and success.  At last there fell upon the ear of the avenger the sound
+of a human voice.  He was close to the house, and the morning exercises
+had begun!
+
+Here was the moment for the exhibition of all South Sea island craft,
+and the moment was about at hand, too, for exhibition of the full
+measure of a South Sea islander's ferocity!  The islander glided from
+the ditch, crept to the house and slowly put forth his head until he
+could see around the corner.  There, within three feet of him, back to
+the window, kneeling beside his chair, was Alf, ostensibly paying deep
+attention to his father's unctuous and sonorous sentences, though
+really, as Grant could see, engaged in flicking kernels of corn at his
+brother in another corner.  His jeans trousers were, as a result of his
+present attitude, drawn tightly across that portion of his body nearest
+to the window, and never fairer mark was offered savage spear!  Not a
+moment did the avenger hesitate.  He poised his weapon, took deadly
+aim, and lunged!
+
+Never was quiet of a summer morning broken more suddenly and
+startlingly.  A yell so loud, so wild, so blood-curdling, ascended from
+within the farm-house, that even nature seemed to shiver for a moment.
+Then came the rush of feet and the clamor of many voices.  Out of doors
+ran all the household, the father included, so appalling had been Alf's
+cry of apparently mortal agony, to learn the source of all the trouble.
+There was nothing to be seen.  Not a living being was in sight.  It
+dawned upon the elders gradually that nothing very serious had
+occurred, and the father and the females of the household went in to
+breakfast, the exercises of the morning not being now renewed, while
+Alf and his brother scoured the wood.  Upon one leg of Alf's jeans
+trousers appeared an artistic dab of red.  He had been wounded, and for
+days the sitting down and the uprising of him would be acts of care.
+
+And where was the South Sea islander?  Almost as he lunged he had
+leaped backward around the corner of the house and run for the covered
+ditch.  Once in that covert, he did not "lurk" to any great extent.  He
+crawled away as rapidly as his hands and knees would carry him,
+reasoning that the boys would, upon finding no one near the house, run
+naturally to the wood in search of the enemy.  They never thought of
+the old ditch, though, later in the day, the thing occurred to them,
+and an examination of the sandy bottom told the story.  The edge of the
+field was reached, the islander lying very low until he could climb the
+fence in safety.  Then he examined his fatal spear-point.  It appeared
+incarnadined.  There was certainly blood on the spear of Mudara!
+
+A week later Alf caught Grant, and, despite another valiant struggle,
+licked him mercilessly.  A year later the fortunes of war had turned
+the other way.  As they grew, these boys, like race-horses
+well-matched, passed each other, physically, time and again, one now
+surging to the front and then another, with no great difference at any
+time between them.
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+HOW FICTION MADE FACT.
+
+What may become a streak of proper modern chivalry in the man is but a
+fantastic imagining in the boy.  Some one has said that but for the
+reading of "Ivanhoe" in the South, there would have been no war of the
+rebellion, that the sentiment of knightliness and desire to uphold
+opinions in material encounter was so fostered by the presence of the
+book in thousands of households that, when the issue came, a majority
+was for war which might have been otherwise inclined under more
+practical teaching.  This may or may not have been the case.  There
+would be nothing strange in it were the theory correct; the influence
+of great novels is always underrated; but certain it is that the
+reading of the age influences much the youth, and that many a bent of
+mind is made by the books that lie about the house when some strong
+young intellect is forming.  So with this boy.  The same force which
+made of him a great savage marauder of the South Sea islands, though
+modified by a keener perception and a broader intelligence, affected
+him as he grew older.  There were a few books available to him; and
+what a reader he was, and what a listener!  His father would sometimes
+read aloud at night from current weeklies, and then the boy would
+sprawl along the floor, his feet toward the great fireplace, his head
+upon a rolled-up sheepskin, and drink in every word.  "East Lynne" was
+running as a serial then, and he would have given all his worldly
+possessions to have had Sir Francis Levison alone in the wood, and had
+his spear, and at his back some half-dozen of the boys whom he could
+name.  In some publication, too, at about that time, appeared the tale
+of the adventures of Captain Gardiner and Captain Daggett in antarctic
+wastes, seeking the sea-lions' skins, and the story of pluckiness and
+awful trial affected his imagination deeply.  Years afterward, when he
+himself was at death's portal once, because of a grievous injury, and
+when ice was bound upon his head to keep away the fever from his brain,
+he imagined in his delirium that he was Captain Gardiner, and called
+aloud the orders to the crew which he had heard read when a boy, and
+which had so long lain in his memory's storehouse among the
+unconsidered lumber.
+
+The boy's reading included all there was in his home, and the small
+collection was not a bad one.  "Chambers' Miscellany" was in the
+accidental lot, and good for him it was.  "Chambers' Miscellany" is
+better reading than much that is given to the world to-day, and the boy
+rioted in the adventure-flavored tales and sketches.  Scott's poetical
+works were there, and Shakespeare, but the latter was read only for the
+story of the play, and "Titus Andronicus" outranked even "Hamlet" among
+the tragedies.  As for Scott, the stirring rhymes had marked effect,
+and this had one curious sequence.  Tales of the lance and tilting have
+ever captivated boys, and Grant was no exception.  Alf did not read so
+much, was of a nature less imaginative, and his younger brother,
+Valentine, read not at all, but among them was enacted a great scene of
+chivalry which ended almost in a tragedy.  Grant, his mind absorbed in
+jousting and its laurels, explained the thing to Alf and induced him to
+read the tales of various encounters.  Alf was more or less affected by
+the literature and ready to do his share toward making each of them a
+proper warrior fit for any fray.  They considered the situation with
+much earnestness, and concluded that the only way to joust was to
+joust, and that Valentine should act as marshal of the occasion, for a
+marshal at a tourney, they discovered, was a prime necessity.  As for
+coursers, barbs, destriers, or whatever name their noble steeds might
+bear, they had no choice.  There were but a couple of clumsy farm mares
+available to them, and these the knights secured, their only equipments
+being headstalls abstracted from the harness in the barn, while the
+course fixed upon was a meadow well out of sight from the houses and
+the eyes of the elders.  Valentine was instructed in his duties,
+particularly in the manner of giving the word of command.  _Laissez
+aller_, as found in "Ivanhoe," Grant did not understand, but a passage
+from "The Lady of the Lake":
+
+  "Now, gallants! for your ladies' sake,
+  Upon them with the lance!"
+
+seemed to answer every purpose, and Valentine was instructed to commit
+it to memory, as the event proved, with but indifferent success.  He
+comprehended, in a vague way, that the warriors were to do battle for
+the honor of their true loves, but, at the critical moment, the lines
+escaped him and he had to improvise.  The lances were rake-handles,
+and, as this was not to be a fray _a l'outrance_, about the end of each
+formidable weapon was wadded and tied an empty flour bag.
+
+The unwilling, lumbering mares were brought upon the ground, and
+Valentine held the headstall reins while a preliminary ceremony was
+performed, for your perfect knight omits no courteous detail.  Gloves
+were unknown about the farm, but Grant drew from his pocket a buckskin
+mitten, and with it slapped Alf suddenly in the face.  It was to be
+regretted that the aggressor had somewhat exaggerated the mediaeval
+glove idea, and had not previously explained to Alf that to fling one's
+glove in a foeman's face was one proper form of deadly insult preceding
+mortal combat, for, ignoring lances, steeds and all about them, the
+assailed personage immediately "clinched," and the boys rolled over in
+a struggle, earnest, certainly, but altogether commonplace.  It was
+with the greatest difficulty, while defending himself, that Grant was
+enabled to explain that his act was one rendered necessary by the laws
+of chivalry and a part of the preliminaries of the occasion, instead of
+an attack in cold blood upon an unwarned adversary.  Alf accepted the
+apology gloweringly, and manifested great anxiety to secure his lance,
+and mount.  It was evident the encounter would be deadly.
+
+Some hundred yards apart, with the perplexed, astonished old mares
+facing each other, sat the warriors in their saddles, or, rather, in
+the place where their saddles would have been had they possessed them.
+Each grasped the headstall reins firmly in his left hand, and with his
+right aimed his top-heavy lance in a somewhat wobbling manner at his
+adversary.  It must soon be known to all the world of knighthood which
+was the grimmer champion!  At middle distance and well to one side,
+stood Grand Marshal Valentine, racking his brains for the lines which
+should give the signal for the shock, but all in vain.  Desperation
+gave him inspiration.  "Let 'er go for your girls!" he roared.
+
+Never, even in the gentle and joyous passage of arms at Ashby, or on
+the Field of the Cloth of Gold, was afforded a more thrilling spectacle
+than when these two paladins rushed to the onset and met in mid-career.
+Each gave a yell and dug his heels into his charger, and whacked her
+with the butt end of his lance, and forced her into a ponderous gallop
+for the meeting.  It matters not now what was the precise intent of
+either jouster, which of them aimed at gorget or head-piece, or at
+shield, for--either because the flour bags made the lances difficult to
+manage or of some unevenness in the ground--each missed his enemy in
+the encounter!  Not so the two old mares!  They came together with a
+mighty crash and rolled over in a great cloud of dust and grass and
+mane and tail and boy and spear and flour-bag!
+
+There is a providence that looks after reckless youth especially, else
+there would have been broken bones, or worse; but out of the confusion
+two warriors scrambled to their feet, dazed somewhat and dirty, but
+unharmed, and two old mares floundered into their normal attitude a
+little later, evidently much disgusted with the entire proceeding.  And
+Valentine, grand marshal, who had chanced to have a little difficulty
+with his elder brother the day before, promptly awarded the honors of
+the tournament to Grant on the ground that old Molly, the horse ridden
+by Alfred, seemed a little more shaken up than the other.
+
+Of course there were other books than those of chivalric doings which
+appealed to this young reader so addicted to putting theory into
+practice at all risks.  "Robinson Crusoe," and Byron, and D'Aubigne's
+"History of the Reformation," and "Midshipman Easy," and "Snarleyow,"
+and the "Woman in White," "John Brent," and Josephus, and certain old
+readers, such as the American First Class Book, made up the odd country
+library, and there was not a book in the lot which was not in time
+devoured.  There was another book, a romance entitled "Don Sebastian,"
+to which at length a local tragedy appertained.  The scene was laid in
+Spain or Portugal and the hero of the story was a very gallant
+character, indeed, one to be relied upon for the accomplishment of
+great slaughter in an emergency, but who was singularly unlucky in his
+love affair, in the outcome of which Grant became deeply interested,
+too deeply, as the event proved.  Upon the country boy of eleven or
+twelve devolve always, in a new country, certain responsibilities not
+unconnected with the great fuel question,--the keeping of the wood-box
+full,--and these duties, in the absorption of the novel, the youth
+neglected shamefully.  A casual allusion or two, followed by a direct
+announcement of what must come, had been entirely lost upon him, and,
+one day, as he was lying by the unreplenished fire, deep in the pages
+of the book, the volume was lifted gently from his hands, and, to his
+horror, dropped upon the blazing coals against the back-log.  Many
+things occurred to him in later life of the sort men would avoid, but
+never came much greater mental shock than on that black occasion.
+Stunned, dazed, he went outside and threw himself upon the grass and
+tried to reason out what could be done.  Was he never to know the fate
+of Don Sebastian?  It was beyond endurance!  A cheap quality of
+literature the book was, no doubt, but he was not critical at that age,
+and in later years he often sought the volume out of curiosity to learn
+what in his boyhood had entranced him, but he never found it.  It was a
+small, fat volume, very like a pocket Bible in shape, bound cheaply in
+green cloth, and printed in England, probably somewhere in the '30's,
+but it had disappeared.  The bereaved youth was, henceforth, in as sore
+a retrospective strait over "Don Sebastian" as Mr. Andrew Lang declares
+he is, to-day, with his "White Serpent" story.
+
+Byron--"Don Juan," in particular--had an effect upon the youth, and
+"The Prisoner of Chillon" gave him dreams.  "Snarleyow" was the book,
+though, which struck him as something great in literature.  The demon
+dog tickled his fancy amazingly.  He was somewhat older when he read
+"Jane Eyre" and "John Brent," and could recognize a little of their
+quality, but "Snarleyow" came to him at an age when there was nothing
+in the world to equal it.
+
+Meanwhile the whole face of nature was changing, and the boy was
+necessarily keeping up with the procession of new things.  Broad
+meadows were where even he, a mere boy still, had seen dense woodland;
+there were highways, and it was far from the farmhouse door to the
+forests edge.  The fauna had diminished.  The bear and wolverine had
+gone forever.  The fox rarely barked at night; the deer and wild turkey
+were far less plentiful, though the ruffed grouse still drummed in the
+copses, and the quail whistled from the fences.  Different, even, were
+the hunters in their methods.  The boy, whose single-barreled shot-gun
+had known no law, now carried a better piece, and scorned to slay a
+sitting bird.  Both he and Alf became great wing shots, and clever
+gentlemen sportsmen from the city who sometimes came to hunt with them
+could not hope to own so good a bag at the day's end.  Wise as to dogs
+and horses were they, too, and keen riders at country races.  And
+ridges of good muscles stiffened now their loins, and their chests were
+deepening, and at "raisings," when the men and boys of the region
+wrestled after their work was done, the two were not uncounted.  For
+them the country school had accomplished its mission.  The world's
+geography was theirs.  Grammar they had memorized, but hardly
+comprehended.  As for mathematics, they were on the verge of algebra.
+Then came the force of laws of politics and trade, a shifting of
+things, and Grant strode out of nature to learn the artificial.  His
+family was removed to town.
+
+Western, or rather Northwestern, town life, when the town has less than
+ten thousand people, varies little with the locality.  There is the
+same vigor everywhere, because conditions are so similar.  It is odd,
+too, the close resemblance all through the great lake region in the
+local geography of the towns.  Small streams run into larger ones, and
+these in turn enter the inland seas, or the straits, called rivers,
+which connect them.  Where the small rivers enter the larger ones, or
+where the larger enter the straits or lakes, men made the towns.  These
+were the water cross-roads, the intersections of nature's highways, and
+so it comes that to so many of these towns there is the great blue
+water front intersected at its middle by a river.  There is a bridge in
+the town's main street, and the smell of water is ever in the air.
+Boys learn to swim like otters and skate like Hollanders, and their
+sisters emulate them in the skating, though not so much in the swimming
+as they should.  There is a life full of great swing.  The touch
+between the town and country is exceedingly close, and the country
+family which comes to the community blends swiftly with the current.
+So with the family of Grant Harlson and so with him personally.  A year
+made him collared and cravatted, short-cropped of hair, mighty in
+high-school frays, and with a new ambition stirring him, of a quality
+to compare with that of one Lucifer of unbounded reputation and
+doubtful biography.  There was something beyond all shooting and riding
+and wrestling fame and the breath of growing things.  There was another
+world with reachable prizes and much to feed upon.  He must wear
+medals, metaphorically, and eat his fill, in time.
+
+The high-school is really the first telescope through which a boy so
+born and bred looks fairly out upon this planet.  The astronomer who
+instructs him is often of just the sort for the labor, a being also
+climbing, one not to be a high-school principal forever, but using this
+occupation merely as a stepping-stone upon his ascending journey.  If
+he be conscientious, he instils, together with his information that all
+Gaul is divided and that a parasang is not something to eat, also the
+belief that the game sought is worth the candle, and that hard study is
+not wasted time.  Such a teacher found young Harlson; such a teacher
+was Professor--they always call the high-school principal "Professor"
+in small towns--Morgan, and he took an interest in the youth, not the
+interest of the typical great educator, but rather that of an older and
+aspiring jockey aiding a younger one with his first mount, or of a
+railroad engineer who tells his fireman of a locomotive's moods and
+teaches him the tricks of management.  They might help each other some
+day.  Well equipped, too, was Morgan for the service.  No shallow
+graduate of some mere diploma-manufactory, but one who believed in the
+perfection of means for an end,--an advocate of thoroughness.
+
+So it came that for four years Grant Harlson studied
+feverishly,--selfishly might be almost the word,--such was the impulse
+that moved him under Morgan's teaching, and so purely objective all his
+reasoning.  In his vacations he hunted, fished, and developed the more
+thews and sinews, and acquired new fancies as to whether an Irish
+setter or a Gordon made the better dog with woodcock, and upon various
+other healthful topics, but his main purpose never varied.  In his
+classes there were fair girls, and in high-schools there is much callow
+gallantry; but at this period of his life he would have none of it.  He
+was not timid, but he was absorbed.  Morgan told him one day that he
+was ready for college.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+NEW FORCES AT WORK.
+
+"You will be kind enough, sir, to write upon the blackboard two
+couplets:
+
+  "'What do you _think_
+  I'll shave you for nothing and _give you a drink_.'
+
+"And
+
+  "'_What_ do you think
+  I'll shave you for _nothing_ and give you a drink.'
+
+"You will observe that, while the wording is the same, the inflection
+is different.  Please punctuate them properly, and express the idea I
+intend to convey."
+
+This from a professor, keen-eyed and unassuming in demeanor, to a big,
+long-limbed young fellow, facing, with misgivings despite himself, a
+portion of the test of whether or not he were qualified for admission
+as a freshman into one of our great modern universities.  He had not
+been under much apprehension until the moment for the beginning of the
+trial.  There was now to be met the first issue in the new field.  He
+plunged into his task.
+
+Then the professor:
+
+"Well, yes, you have caught my idea.  How write upon the board: 'This
+is the forest primeval,' and a dozen lines or so following, from this
+slip.  Scan that for me; parse it; show me the relations of words and
+clauses, and all that sort of thing."
+
+A pause; some only half-confident explanation, and enlargement upon the
+subject by the young man.
+
+The professor again:
+
+"H-u-u-m--well--now you may write--no, you needn't--just tell me the
+difference, in your opinion, between what are known as conjunctions and
+prepositions.  Say what you please.  We ask no odds of them.  Be
+utterly free in your comment."
+
+More explanations by the young man.  The professor: "We'll not pursue
+that subject.  You might tell us, incidentally, what a trochaic foot
+is?--Yes.--And who wrote that 'Forest primeval' you just
+scanned?--Certainly--That will do, I think.  Oh, by the way, who was
+Becky Sharp?--The most desirable woman in 'Vanity Fair,' eh?  I may be
+half inclined to agree with you, but I was asking who, not what.  Good
+afternoon.  You have passed your examination in English literature.  I
+trust you may be equally successful in other departments.  Good
+afternoon, sir."
+
+And this was all from a professor whose name was known on more than one
+continent and who was counted one of the greatest of educators.  Such
+was his test of what of English literature was required in a freshman.
+A lesser man than this great teacher would have taken an hour for the
+task and learned less, for, after all, did not the examination cover
+the whole ground?  The droll range of the inquiry was such that the
+questioner had gauged, far better than by some more ponderous and
+detailed system, the quality of the young man's knowledge in one field.
+One of the strong teachers this, one not afraid of a departure, and one
+of those who, within the last quarter of a century, have laid the
+foundations of new American universities deep and wide, and given to
+the youth facilities for a learning not creed-bound, nor school-bound,
+but both liberal and of all utility.
+
+It was well for the particular freshman whose examination is here
+described that his first experience with a professor was with such a
+man.  It gave confidence, and set him thinking.  With others of the
+examiners he did not, in each instance, fare so happily.  What
+thousands of men of the world there are to-day who remember with
+something like a shudder still the inquisition of Prof. ----, whose
+works on Greek are text-books in many a college; or the ferocity of
+Prof. ----, to whom calculus was grander than Homer!  But the woes of
+freshmen are passing things.
+
+What Grant Harlson did in college need not be told at any length.  He
+but plucked the fruit within his reach, not over-wisely in some
+instances, yet with some industry.  He had, at least, the intelligence
+to feel that it is better to know all of some things than a little of
+all things, and so surpassed, in such branches as were his by gift and
+inclination, and but barely passed in those which went against the
+mental grain.
+
+It may be the professor of English literature had something to do with
+this.  Between Grant and him there grew up a friendship somewhat
+unusual under all the circumstances.  One day the professor was
+overtaken by the student upon a by-way of the campus, and asked some
+questions regarding certain changed hours of certain recitations, and,
+having answered, detained the questioner carelessly in general
+conversation.  The elder became interested--perhaps because it was a
+relief to him to talk with such a healthy animal--and, at the
+termination of the interview, invited him to call.  There grew up
+rapidly, binding these two, between whose ages a difference of twenty
+years existed, a friendship which was never broken, and which doubtless
+affected to an extent the student's ways, for he at least accepted
+suggestions as to studies and specialties.  This relationship resulted
+naturally in transplanting to the mind of the youth some of the fancies
+and, possibly, the foibles of the man.  One incident will illustrate.
+
+The student, during a summer vacation, had devoted himself largely to
+the copying of Macaulay's essays, for, in his teens, one is much
+impressed by the rolling sentences of that great writer.  Upon his
+return Harlson told of his summer not entirely wasted, and expressed
+the hope that he might have absorbed some trifle of the writer's style.
+
+The professor of English literature laughed.
+
+"Better have taken Carlyle's 'French Revolution' or any one of half a
+dozen books which might be named.  Let me tell a little story.  Some
+time ago a fellow professor of mine was shown by a Swedish servant girl
+in his employ a letter she had just written, with the request that he
+would correct it.  He found nothing to correct.  It was a wonderfully
+clear bit of epistolary literature.  He was surprised, and questioned
+the girl.  He learned that, though well educated, she knew but little
+English, and had sought the dictionary, revising her own letter by
+selecting the shortest words to express the idea.  Hence the letter's
+strength and clearness.  Stick to the Saxon closely.  Macaulay will
+wear off in time."  And this was better teaching than one sometimes
+gets in class.
+
+This is no tale of the inner life of an American university.  It is but
+a brief summary of young Harlson's ways there.  But some day, I hope, a
+Thomas Hughes will come who will write the story, which can be made as
+healthful as "Tom Brown," though it will have a different flavor.  What
+a chance for character study!  What opportunity for an Iliad of many a
+gallant struggle!  Valuable only in a lesser degree than what is
+learned from books is what is learned from men in college, that is,
+from young men, and herein lies the greater merit of the greater place.
+In the little college, however high the grade of study, there is a lack
+of one thing broadening, a lack of acquaintance with the youth of many
+regions.  The living together of a thousand hailing from Maine or
+California, or Oregon or Florida, or Canada or England, young men of
+the same general grade and having the same general object, is a great
+thing for them all.  It obliterates the prejudice of locality, and
+gives to each the key-note of the region of another.  It builds up an
+acquaintance among those who will be regulating a land's affairs from
+different vantage-grounds in years to come, and has its most practical
+utility in this.  When men meet to nominate a President this fact comes
+out most strongly.  The man from Texas makes a combination with the man
+from Michigan, and two delegations swing together, for have not these
+two men well known each other since the day their classes met in a rush
+upon the campus twenty years ago?
+
+No studious recluse was Harlson.  His backwoods training would not
+allow of that.  In every class encounter, in every fray with townsmen,
+it is to be feared in almost every hazing, after his own gruesome
+experience--for they hazed then vigorously--he was a factor, and
+beefsteak had been bound upon his cheek on more than one occasion.  A
+rollicking class was his, though not below the average in its
+scholarship, and the sometimes reckless mood of it just suited him.
+"There were three men of Babylon, of Babylon, of Babylon."
+
+There is what some claim is an aristocracy in American colleges.  It is
+asserted that the leading Greek fraternities are this, and that the
+existence of Alpha Delta Phi, Psi Upsilon or Delta Kappa Epsilon, or
+others of the secret groups, is not a good thing for the students as a
+whole.  Yet in the existence of these societies is forged another of
+the links of life to come outside, and all the good things to be gained
+in college are not the ratings won in classes.  Harlson was one of
+those with badges and deep in college politics.  He never had occasion
+to repent it.
+
+And so, with study, some rough encounter and much scheming and much
+dreaming, time passed until the world outside loomed up again at close
+quarters.  The present view was a new struggle.  The great money
+question intervened.  There had come a blight upon his father's dollar
+crop, and when Grant Harlson left the university he was so nearly
+penniless that the books he owned were sold to pay his railroad fare.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+MRS. POTIPHAR.
+
+It must have been some person aged, say, twenty, who expressed to Noah
+the opinion that there wasn't going to be much of a shower.  At twenty
+tomorrow is ever a clear day, and notes are easy things to meet, and
+friends and women are faithful, and Welsh rarebit is digestible, and
+sleep is rest, and air is ever good to breathe.  Grant Harlson was not
+particularly troubled by the condition of his finances.  That the money
+available had lasted till his schooling ended, was, at least, a good
+thing, and, as for the future, was it not his business to attend to
+that presently?  Meanwhile he would dawdle for a week or two.
+
+So the young man stretched his big limbs and lounged in hammocks and
+advised or domineered over his sisters, as the case might be, and read
+in a desultory way, and fished and shot, and ate with an appetite which
+threatened to bring famine to the family.  Your lakeside small town is
+a fair place in July.  He would loaf, he said, for a week or two.  The
+loafing was destined to have character, perhaps to change a character.
+
+There had come to Harlson in college, as to most young men, occasional
+packages from home, and in one of these he had found a pretty thing, a
+man's silk tie, worked wonderfully in green and gold, and evidently the
+product of great needlecraft.  It was to his fancy, and he had thought
+to thank whichever of his sisters had wasted such time upon him, but
+had forgotten it when next he wrote, and so the incident had passed.
+
+One day, wearing this same tie, he bethought him of his negligence
+lying supine on the grass, while his sister Bess was meanwhile reading
+in the immediate vicinity.  He would be grateful, as a brother should.
+
+"I say, Bess," he called, "I forgot to write about this tie and thank
+you.  Which of you did it?"
+
+Bess looked up, interested.
+
+"I thought I wrote you when I sent the other things.  None of us did
+it.  It was Mrs. Rolfston."
+
+"Mrs. Rolfston?"
+
+"Certainly.  She was here one day, when we were making up a lot of
+things for you, and said that she'd make something herself to go with
+the next lot.  A week or two later she brought me that tie, and I
+inclosed it.  Pretty, isn't it?"
+
+"Very pretty."
+
+The young man on the grass was thinking.
+
+He knew Mrs. Rolfston slightly; knew her as the wife of a well-to-do
+man who saw but little of her husband.
+
+Daughter of a poor man of none too good character in the little town,
+she had grown up shrewd, self-possessed, and with much animal beauty.
+At twenty she had married a man of fifty, a builder of steamboats, a
+red-faced, riotous brute, who had bought her as he would buy a horse,
+and to whom she went easily because she wanted the position money
+gives.  Within a week he had disgusted her to such an extent that she
+almost repented of the bargain.  Within a year, he had tired of her and
+was openly unfaithful in every port upon the lakes, a vigorous, lawless
+debauchee.  His ship-building was done in a distant port, and he rarely
+visited his wife.  He rather feared her, mastiff as he was, for here
+was the keener intelligence, and her moods, at times, were desperate as
+his.  So he furnished her abundant income and was content to let it go
+at that.  It pleased her, also, to have it that way.
+
+Harlson thought of the woman, and wondered somewhat.  Black-haired,
+black-eyed, white-skinned, deep of bust and with a graceful and
+powerful swing of movement, she was a woman, physically considered, not
+of the common herd.  She was a lioness, yet not quite the grand lioness
+of the desert.  She lacked somewhat of dignity and grandeur of
+countenance, and had more of alertness and of craft.  She was, though
+dark, more like the tawny beast of the Rocky Mountains, the California
+lion, as that great cougar is called, supple, full of moods and
+passion, and largely cat-like.  She had filled his eye casually.  Why
+had she sent him the tie, the silken thing in green and gold?
+
+He thought and pulled his long limbs together and rose till he was
+sitting, and decided that it was but courteous, but his duty as a
+gentleman, to wander over to her house and thank her for her
+remembrance of him.  It was but an expression of good will toward the
+family generally, this little act of hers; he knew that, but it was a
+personal matter, after all, and he should thank her.  It was well to be
+thoughtful, to attend to the small amenities, and it took him more than
+the usual time to dress.  His apparently careless summer garb required
+the adjustment of an expert here and there.  He was an hour in the
+doing of it.  When he emerged he was not, taken in a comprehensive way,
+bad-looking.  He was clear-faced, strong-featured and of stalwart build.
+
+The ordinary man he would not have feared in any meeting; of the woman
+he was about to meet he had some apprehension.  He knew her quality,
+but--she had worked for him a tie!  He went up the broad path to the
+doorway, between flowers and trees and shrubbery.  It was three o'clock
+in the afternoon, and he would find her alone, he thought, for chances
+of calls are not so great in the smaller towns as in the cities; there
+is an average to be maintained, and Mrs. Jones or Mrs. Smith does not
+receive on days particularized.  He was compelled to wait in the parlor
+but a moment.  She came in, and he saw her for the first time in two
+years.
+
+What a gift women have in producing physical effects upon the creature
+male, no matter what the woman's status.  Mrs. Rolfston came in with a
+look of half inquiry on her face and with a presentation of herself
+which was perfect in its way.  She wore some soft and fluffy dress--a
+man cannot describe a garb in detail--with that lace-surrounded
+triangular bareness upon the bosom just below the chin which is as
+irreproachable as it is telling.  There was a relation between the
+swing of her drapery and, the movements of her body.  She was rich of
+figure, and flexile.  And she was glad to see Mr. Harlson, and said so.
+He was not really embarrassed.  The time had passed when that could be
+his way.  But he was puzzled as to what to say.  Some comment he made
+upon the quality of the season and upon Mrs. Rolfston's appearance of
+good health.  Then he entered upon his subject with no link of
+connection with preceding sentences.  "I but learned to-day," he said,
+"that the tie I wear was made by you.  All fellows have little fancies,
+I suppose.  I have, anyhow.  I liked this, though I did not know who
+made it.  My sister told me, and I have come to thank you.  Why did you
+do it for me?"
+
+That was putting the case plainly enough, certainly, and promptly
+enough, but it was not of a nature to trouble Mrs. Rolfston.  This was
+a clever woman, married ten years, and of experiences which varied.
+She even glanced over the visitor from head to heel before she
+answered, and her color deepened and her eyes brightened, though he did
+not note it.
+
+"You have changed," she commented.  "I should hardly have known you but
+for your lips and eyes.  You are broader and taller, and a big man, are
+you not?  How long do you stay in town?  Will you spend the summer
+here?"
+
+"I wish I could," he answered.  "It is pleasant here, but I must work,
+you know.  I may idle for a little time.  You haven't said anything
+about the tie."
+
+"Oh, the tie?  Don't speak of that.  I had the whim to make something
+for somebody--I have an embroidering mania on me sometimes--and there
+was a chance to dispose of it, you see."
+
+The young man's face fell a little as he looked upon the great,
+handsome woman and heard her seemingly careless words.  He did not want
+to go away, yet what excuse was there for staying?  He rose, hat in
+hand.
+
+Here, now, was the woman in a quandary.  She had not anticipated such
+abruptness.
+
+"Don't go yet," she said, impetuously.  "I want to talk with you.  Tell
+me all about the college, and yourself, and your plans.  And---about
+the tie--I wouldn't have made one for any one else.  I remembered your
+face.  You know I was go often at your home, and I wondered how it
+would suit you.  You should take that interest as a compliment.  And I
+am lonesome here, and you are idling, you say, and why should we not be
+good friends for the summer?  The men in town annoy me, and the girls
+here are not bright enough for you.  Let us be cronies, will you not?
+Take me fishing to-morrow.  I want you to teach me how to catch bass in
+the river.  I heard some one say once you knew better than any one else
+how that is done.  Is not this a good idea of mine?  It will help both
+of us kill time."
+
+She sat there on the sofa, half stretched out, yet not carelessly nor
+ungracefully, but in an assumed laziness of real felinishness, a woman
+just ten years older than the man she was addressing, yet in all the
+lushness of magnificent womanhood, and emanating all magnetism.
+
+Harlson said he would call for her and that they would go fishing.  And
+they went.
+
+The light is tawny upon the lily-pods in shady places on the river.
+And rods, such as are used for bass, are light upon the wrist, and, in
+the lazy hours of mid-afternoon, when bass bite rarely, demand but
+slight attention.  And two people idling in a boat get very close in
+thought together and come soon to know each other well.  And a ruthless
+young man of twenty and a tempestuous woman of thirty are as the
+conventional tow and tinder.
+
+And there were books she had never read in Mrs. Rolfston's library--for
+she was not a woman of books--which interested Harlson, and it was
+easier to read them there than take them home.  And Mrs. Rolfston
+waited upon him--how gifted is a woman of thirty--and he felt bands
+upon him, and liked it, and would not reason to himself concerning it.
+
+And one night, late, came a panting servant--Mrs. Rolfston had no men,
+only two women domestics, with her in her home--to say that her
+mistress had heard some one evidently attempting to open a window on
+the piazza, and that they were all in fear of their lives, and that she
+had fled out of the back way to ask Mr. Harlson the elder, or his son,
+to come over at once and look around.
+
+The father laughed, and said that, had there been a burglar, he must
+have fled already, and the young man, laughing too, said that some one
+must go anyhow, in all courtesy to defenseless women, and that if Mrs.
+Rolfston feared for her front porch, he would lie upon a blanket in the
+lawn beside it to set her mind at rest.  He had not slept beneath the
+stars alone, he said, since the family had left the farm.  And there
+was much laughing, and Harlson took home the servant girl, and she,
+growing bold as they approached the house, ran up the path ahead of
+him.  The lawn between the better house and street in the lake country
+town is often a little forest, so dense the trees and their foliage.
+And added to the fragrance of the leaves in later midsummer are the
+mingled odors of petunias and pinks and rosemary and bergamot and musk,
+for all these flourish late.  And the moon comes through the tree-tops
+in splashes, and there is a softness and a shade, and it is all like a
+scented garden in some old Arabian story, and the senses are affected
+and, maybe, the reason.  Harlson went up the path, half dreaming, yet
+alive in every vein.  There was no burglar visible, but a wonderful
+woman, in fleecy dishabille, was sure she had heard a sound most
+sinister, and endangered women must be guarded of the strong.
+
+And Grant Harlson returned not home that night; yet the moon, shining
+through the trees, revealed no form upon a blanket in the garden.
+
+And the summer days drifted by; and the young man fresh from college,
+full of ambitions and dreams, found himself a creature he had never
+known, a something conscience-stricken, yet half-abandoned, and with a
+leaden weight upon his feet to keep them from carrying him away from
+the temptation.
+
+He would force himself to a solitary day at times, and go out into the
+country with dog and gun, and tramp for miles, and wonder at himself.
+He had all sorts of fancies.  He thought of his wickedness and his
+wasted time, and compared himself with the great men in the books who
+had been in similar evil straits,--with Marc Antony, with King Arthur
+in Gwendolen's enchanted castle, and with Geraint the strong but
+slothful,--rather far-fetched this last comparison,--and of all the
+rest.  It was a grotesque variety, but amid it all he really suffered.
+And he would make good resolves and, for the moment, firm ones, and
+return to town when the dew was falling and the moonlight coming, and
+the tale was but retold.  And the woman was wise, as women are, and
+conscienceless, yet suffering a little, too.
+
+She had found more than a summer's toy, and she had grown to fear the
+great boy in his moods, and to want to keep him, and to doubt the
+measure of her art.  This must be a hard thing, too, for such splendid
+pirates to bear.  They may not even scuttle all the craft they capture.
+
+And the root of all evil is sometimes the root of all good.  The dollar
+pulls all ways.  Harlson must earn his way.  One day his father dropped
+a chance word regarding some one, miles in the country, who wanted a
+fence built inclosing a tract out of the wood.  It was isolated work, a
+task of a month or two for a strong man, a mere laborer.  Young Harlson
+became interested.
+
+"Why shouldn't I try it?" he asked.
+
+His father laughed.
+
+"It's work for a toughened man, my boy.  You have softened with six
+years of only study."
+
+The boy laughed as well.
+
+"You needn't fear," he said.  "All strength is not attained upon a
+farm, and I want to swing an ax and maul again."
+
+And that day he set out afoot for the home of the man who needed a
+fence.  He told Mrs. Rolfston briefly.  She paled a trifle, but made no
+objection.  He said he would make visits to the town.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+THE BUILDING OF THE FENCE.
+
+An ax, a maul, a yoke of oxen; these are the great requisites for him
+who would build a rail fence through a forest.  Grant Harlson made the
+bargain for the work, hired a yoke of oxen, as you may do in the
+country, and secured the right to eat plain food three times a day at
+the cabin of a laborer.  A bed he could not have, but the right to
+sleep in a barn back in the field, and there also to house his oxen for
+the night, was given him.  He slept upon the hay-mow.  He went into the
+forest and began his work.  The wood was dense, and what is known all
+through the region as a black ash swale, lowland which once reclaimed
+from nature makes, with its rich deposits, a wondrous meadow-land.  He
+"lined" the fence's course and cleared the way rudely through the
+forest, a work of days, and then he made the maul.
+
+The mace of the mediaeval knight is the maul of to-day.  No longer it
+cracks heads or helmets, but there is work for it.  And it has
+developed into a mighty weapon.  There are two sorts of maul in the
+lake country.   As the stricken eagle is poetically described as
+supplying the feather for the arrow by which itself was hurt to death,
+the trees furnish forth the thing to rend them.  Upon the side of the
+curly maple, aristocrat of the sugar bush, grows sometimes a vast wart.
+This wart has neither rhyme nor reason.  It has no grain defined.  It
+is twisted, convoluted, a solid, tough and heavy mass, and hard,
+almost, as iron.  It is sawed away from the trunk with much travail,
+and is seasoned well, and from it is fashioned a great head, into which
+is set a hickory handle, and the thing will crush a rock if need be.
+This is the maul proper.
+
+There is another maul, or mace, made from a cut of heavy iron-wood, a
+foot in length and half a foot in thickness, with the hickory handle
+set midway between iron bands, sprung on by the country blacksmith.
+This is sometimes called the beetle.
+
+The beetle is a monster hammer, the maul a monster mace.  Each serves
+its purpose well, but the beetle never has the swing and mighty force
+of the great heavy maple knot.  Grant Harlson bought a seasoned knot of
+an old woodman and shaped a maul.  He had learned the craft in youth.
+
+The ash trees fell beneath the ax, the trunks were cut to rail lengths,
+and the oxen dragged logs through muck and mire and brush and bramble
+to the line of fence, and there the maul swung steadily in great
+strokes upon the iron and wooden wedges, the smell of timber newly
+split was in the air, and the heavy rails were lifted, and the fence
+began its growth.
+
+And it was lonesome in the depths of the wood, for the black ash swale
+is not tenanted by many birds and squirrels as are the ridges, and only
+the striped woodpecker or a wandering jay fluttered about at times, or
+a coon might seek the pools for frogs.  Harlson had circumstance for
+thought.  Only the hard labor cleared his blood and brain, and helped
+him.
+
+Could fortune come to him who had such a load upon his conscience?  Was
+not he a violator of all law, as he had learned it,--law of both God
+and man?  Had he an excuse at all, and what was the degree of it?  He
+could not endure the time when it became too dark in the wood for work,
+and when he drove the jaded oxen out into the field and to the barn,
+and it was yet too early for seeking the hay-mow, which was of clover,
+and there seeking sleep.  A clover mow is a wonderful sleep-compeller.
+There are the softness and fragrance, but, sometimes, even with that,
+he would be wakeful.  To avoid himself, the young man would, at last,
+go in early evening to the older farmers' homes,--for it was his own
+country and he knew them all,--and there, with the sons and hired men,
+pitch quoits in the road before the house.
+
+Quoits is still a game of farmers' sons, and the horseshoe is superior
+to the quoit of commerce and the town.  The open side affords facility
+for aggressive feats of cleverness in displacing an opponent's cast,
+and the corks upon the shoes reduce some sliding chances, and the game
+has quality.  And Harlson found rather a distraction in the contests.
+He found, maybe, distraction, too, in chatting with slim Jenny Bierce,
+who was a very little girl when he was in the country school, but who
+had grown into almost a woman, and who was a trifle more refined,
+perhaps, than most of her associates.  She had a sweetheart, a stalwart
+young farmer named Harrison Woodell, one of the schoolmates of
+Harlson's early youth, but she liked to talk with Harlson.  He was
+different from her own lover; no better, of course, but he had lived
+another life, and could tell her many things.
+
+And Woodell, who expected to marry her, glowered a little.  She did not
+care for that.  Grant Harlson had not noticed it.
+
+But neither quoits nor Jenny Bierce sufficed at all times for
+forgetfulness.  Harlson was in the grasp of that enemy--or friend--who
+gives vast problems, and with them no solution.  He could not rest.  He
+read his Bible, but that only puzzled him the more, because there
+seemed to him, of necessity, degrees of wrong, and he could not find a
+commandment which was flexible.  He chafed because there was no measure
+for his sentence.
+
+A pebble at the rivulet's head will turn the tiny current either way,
+and so change the course of eventual creek and river.  The pebble fell
+near the source in Grant Harlson's case, for never before in his life
+had he studied much the moral problem.  His had been the conventional
+training, which is to-day the training which asks one to accept,
+unreasoning, the belief of yielding predecessors, and, until he felt
+the prick of conscience, he had never cared to question the
+inheritance.  Now he wanted proof.  If he could not plead not guilty,
+might he not, at least, find weakness in the law?  Then fell the pebble.
+
+It was only a country newspaper, and it was only the chance verses
+clipped from some unknown source which turned the tide that might have
+grown yet have run forever between narrow banks.
+
+For the verses--who wrote them?--were those of that brief poem which
+has made more doubters than any single revelation of the
+hollow-heartedness of some famed godly one; than any effort of oratory
+of some great agnostic; than any chapter of any book that was ever
+written:
+
+  I think till I'm weary of thinking,
+    Said the sad-eyed Hindoo king,
+  And I see but shadows around me,
+    Illusion in every thing.
+
+  How knowest thou aught of God,
+    Of His favor or His wrath?
+  Can the little fish tell what the lion thinks,
+    Or map out the eagle's path!
+
+  Can the Finite the Infinite search!
+    Did the blind discover the stars?
+  Is the thought that I think a thought,
+    Or a throb of a brain in its bars?
+
+  For aught that my eyes can discern,
+    Your God is what you think good--
+  Yourself flashed back from the glass
+    When the light pours on it in flood.
+
+  You preach to me to be just,
+    And this is His realm, you say;
+  And the good are dying with hunger,
+    And the bad gorge every day.
+
+  You say that He loveth mercy,
+    And the famine is not yet gone;
+  That He hateth the shedder of blood
+    And He slayeth us every one.
+
+  You say that my soul shall live,
+    That the spirit can never die:
+  If He was content when I was not,
+    Why not when I have passed by?
+
+  You say I must have a meaning:
+    So must dung, and its meaning is flowers;
+  What if our souls are but nurture
+    For lives that are greater than ours?
+
+  When the fish swims out of the water,
+    When the birds soar out of the blue,
+  Man's thoughts may transcend man's knowledge,
+    And your God be no reflex of you!
+
+One night in after life I sat with Grant Harlson, in his rooms in a
+great city, and he told me of this, his time of doubt and tribulation,
+and repeated to me the poem.
+
+"The questions it asks have not yet been answered, so far as I know,"
+said he, "and I do not think they can be by the alleged experts in such
+things."
+
+Then a sudden fancy seized him, and he broke out with a novel
+proposition:
+
+"You have little to do to-morrow, nor have I much on my hands.
+Speaking of this to you has awakened an old interest in me and made me
+curious.  Help me to-morrow.  We'll make up now a list of twenty
+leading clergymen.  I know most of them personally, and some of them
+can reason.  We'll each take a cab and each visit ten, exhibiting these
+verses, going over them stanza by stanza, explaining the doubts they
+have aroused, and asking for such solution as the clergymen have, and
+such solace as it may afford.  That will be rather an interesting
+experiment, will it not?"
+
+I fell in with his whim, and the next day we made the rounds agreed
+upon.
+
+What a curious thing it was!  How men of various creeds felt confident
+and repeated the old platitudes, and would be anything but logical!
+How one or two were honest, and said they could not answer.
+
+And how absurd, we said at night, the keeping of men to tell us what
+can no more be learned in a theological school than in a blacksmith
+shop, and in neither place as well as in the woods or on the sea!  Yet
+there was no scoffing in it.  We were neither irreligious.
+
+To this young man building the fence there came a resisting mood, and
+he was puzzled still, but slept more pleasantly again upon his
+clover-mow.  He was groping, but less despondent, that was all.  It
+seemed all strange to him, for the old farm life had become largely a
+memory, and it was but yesterday that he was in college, one of a
+thousand, full of all energy and lightsomeness, and here he was alone
+in the wood as in a monastery, and all else was somehow like a dream.
+Only the oxen and the logs and the ax and the maul and the growing
+fence were real by day.  But, in the evening, there was Jenny Bierce,
+and she was very real, as well as charming.
+
+Ho wondered if she cared for him.  She was apparently pleased when he
+found her, and they had taken long walks alone in the twilight.  Once
+he had kissed her, and she had not been angry.  What sort of drift was
+this, and why was he so carried by it?  How different it all was from
+even the life of a few weeks ago!  Then there came before his eyes a
+picture of the great, splendid animal in town, and it remained with
+him.  It bothered him for many a day and night.
+
+If the Hindoo king were right, if all were so undefined, why not do as
+did the birds and squirrels, and seek all sunny places?  He could not
+work at his fence Sunday.  He had not done that yet, but he would walk
+the miles Saturday night and spend his Sunday in the town.
+
+As he thought, so he did.  He did not swing the maul late the next
+Saturday that came, but took up his journey and reached home in early
+evening.
+
+He had been absent but three weeks, yet his family had much to ask, and
+his father laughed at his hardened palms, and congratulated him.  He
+changed his garb and took the way toward Mrs. Rolfston's.  She had not
+looked for him sooner, though she knew men well, for she had seen his
+growing trouble and she knew his will.  Her eyes blazed as might the
+eyes of some hungry thing to which food is brought.  It was late when
+he reached his home again, and the next day he must read a book, he
+said, that he had found at Mrs. Rolfston's.  At night he was stalking
+across the country again, to his couch on the dry clover; and he
+thought not even of the Hindoo king.  Mrs. Rolfston's school of
+theology was not of the sort which worries one with puzzling things,
+and he had been in a receptive mood.
+
+The next day he worked like a giant.  In the early evening he found
+Jenny Bierce.  She questioned him, but he had not much to answer.
+
+"Is there some one in the town ?" she asked.
+
+"There are several hundred people there."
+
+"You know what I mean.  Is there any one in particular?"--this
+poutingly.
+
+He said that of late the only one, to speak of, he had found anywhere
+was a girl in a calico dress.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+SETTLING WITH WOODELL.
+
+So passed the days away.  What added brawn came to the strong young
+fellow's arms from the driving of the rails and lifting them to place!
+Brown, almost, as the changing beech-leaves his face, and the palms of
+his hands became like celluloid.  He was unlike the farmers, though,
+for he lacked the farmers' stoop--he had not to dig nor mow, nor rake
+nor bind.  He swung his ax or maul, and commanded the red oxen in
+country speech, and deeper and deeper into the forest grew the fence.
+And, of evenings, he was with Jenny, and Sundays he was in the town.
+What days they were, with all their force, and health, and lawless
+abandonment, though in the line of nature.  He drank not, nor smoked,
+nor ate made dishes.  He was like an unreasoning bobolink, or hawk, or
+fawn, or wolf.  But there grew apace the problem of Jenny.
+
+One night, as the two were walking, each caught a glimpse of something
+dark, which moved swiftly through the bushes some distance from the
+road.
+
+The girl started.
+
+"What is the matter?" Harlson said.
+
+"Did you not see it--that shadow in the bushes?"
+
+"Yes.  Some one was there.  What of it?  Some of the boys are
+coon-hunting."
+
+"It wasn't that," she whispered.  "I know what it was.  It was Harrison
+Woodell, and he is watching."
+
+"Well, he might be in much better business.  Are you fond of him?"
+
+"I like him very much," she answered, simply, "but sometimes I am
+afraid."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"He'll not hurt you.  He dare not."
+
+"But he may hurt you."
+
+Another laugh.
+
+"Don't you think I can take care of myself?"
+
+"Oh, yes"--hurriedly--"but one of you may get hurt, and I don't want
+anything to happen to either of you.  Oh, Grant!  You must be careful!"
+
+He was impressed, though he did not show it.  There may have been some
+of that magnetic connection, of which the scientists have told us so
+little, between minds tending toward each other, with sinister intent
+or otherwise, when all conditions are complete.  Harlson felt in his
+heart that the girl's apprehensions were not altogether groundless,
+but, as was said, he was in perfect health and had a pride, and he cast
+away the thought and but made love.  And he prospered wickedly.  It was
+late when the girl reached her home again, and she went in tremblingly
+and silently.  So bent had been their footsteps that neither Harrison
+Woodell nor other living thing could have been near them and unseen.
+
+Down the tree-fringed roadway and across the field to the barn went
+Harlson, and wondered somewhat at himself.  Into what had he developed,
+and how would it all end?  He was elated, but uneasy.  He was glad the
+fence was nearing completion, and that with the money due him life in
+the big city would begin.  He clambered upon the clover-mow, and tossed
+about uneasily on the blanket upon which he had thrown himself still
+dressed.  It was some time before he slept, and then odd dreams came.
+
+He thought he had taken Jenny to the town, and that Mrs. Rolfston
+seemed always near them, yet in hiding.  They could not get away from
+her.  Then came a time when she had crept up behind them and over his
+head had thrown a noose, and was drawing it tighter and tighter and
+strangling him, and he could not, somehow, raise his hands to free
+himself.  He was suffocating!  He struggled in his agony and
+awoke--awoke to find his dream no dream at all! to feel a hand on his
+throat, a knee upon his chest, and to know that he was being choked to
+death!
+
+More than once in later life Grant Harlson felt himself very near the
+line which men who have crossed once may not repass, but never later
+came to him the feeling of this moment.  It was but a flash of thought,
+for the physical being's upheaval followed in an instant, but it was a
+flash of horror.  Then began an awful struggle.
+
+Borne down deeply in the yielding clover, Harlson had little chance to
+exert his strength, which, with that grip upon his throat, could not
+last long at most; but he writhed with all the force of desperation,
+and wrenched loose, at last, one arm, which had been pressed useless
+against his side.  With the free hand he clutched his adversary's
+collar and strained at it, while he heaved with all his power to turn
+himself below.  The couch was not far from the edge of the great mow,
+but of that he was not thinking, nor of the fact that the hay had, in
+the stowing away, been built out, so that the mow well overhung the
+barn floor.  Well for him that it was so!  There was a sudden loosening
+and sliding as the struggle in the darkness became fiercer, and then,
+parting from the mass, a section of the mow, a ton at least in weight,
+shot downward, carrying upon it the two men, who, as it struck the
+floor beneath, rolled from its surface through the great open doors,
+down the steep incline, up which wagons were driven on occasion, and
+leaped to their feet together, there in the clear moonlight.
+
+They stood glaring at each other.  Grant Harlson gasping, but himself
+again, as he inhaled the blessed air.  Each stood at bay and watchful.
+
+"Woodell!"
+
+The man glared at him savagely.
+
+"What does it mean!  What were you going to do?"
+
+"I was going to kill you."
+
+"Then they would have hung you."
+
+"No, they wouldn't; they would never have found you."
+
+"Did you have a knife?"
+
+"I didn't need one--if the cursed hay hadn't come away."
+
+"What are you going to do now?"
+
+"I'm going to kill you."
+
+There was a look in the man's eyes which showed he was not jesting.
+Harlson thought very rapidly just then.  He recognized the earnestness
+of it all, but his sudden terror was now gone.  Here were light and air
+and even terms with the other.  The effect of the choking had passed
+away.  He felt himself a match for Woodell.
+
+With the revulsion of feeling came then suddenly upon him a rage
+against this would-be midnight slayer so great that he was calm in his
+very savagery.  He laughed, as was his way.
+
+"You were very foolish.  You should have brought a knife or club.  Kill
+me!  Why, man, do you suppose if you were to try to get away now I
+would let you go?  I want you, you murderer, I want you!"  And he
+reached out his hands toward the other and opened and shut them
+clutchingly; and then with a snarl Woodell leaped forward and the two
+men grappled like bull-dogs.
+
+Well for Harlson was it that through all the weeks he had been swinging
+the maul and ax, and that his muscles were hard and his endurance
+great, for Woodell was counted one of the strong men of the region.  As
+it was, in point of sheer strength, the two were about evenly matched,
+but there was a difference in their resources.  One was
+gymnasium-trained, the other not.
+
+In country wrestling there are the side-hold, and square-hold, and
+back-hold, and rough-and-tumble, the last the catch-as-catch-can of
+stage struggles.  In early boyhood Harlson had learned the tricks of
+these, and in the college gymnasium he had supplemented this wisdom by
+persistent training in every device of the professional gladiators.  He
+was there considered something better than the common.  And this,
+though a life depended on it, was but a wrestling-match.  It was but a
+struggle to see which should get the other in his power, and blows
+count but little in a death-grapple.
+
+They swayed and swung together, but so evenly braced and firm that
+minutes passed, while, from a little distance, they would have seemed
+but motionless.  All who have watched two well-matched wrestlers will
+recognize this situation.
+
+In each man's mind was a different immediate aim.  Woodell wanted
+Harlson on the ground and underneath him; he wanted his hand upon his
+throat, and to clutch that throat so savagely and so long that the
+man's face would blacken and his tongue protrude, and his limbs finally
+relax, and the work attempted on the hay-mow be done completely!
+Harlson had but one thought: to overmaster in some way his assailant.
+
+There was a sudden change, a mighty movement on the part of Woodell,
+and in an instant the struggle was over.
+
+Glorious are your possibilities, O pretty grip and heave, O
+half-Nelson, beloved of wrestlers!  What a leverage, what a perfection
+of result is with you!  What a friend you are in time of peril!
+Woodell, too bloodthirsty to feint or dally, released his hold and
+stooped and shot forward, his arms low down, to get the country hold,
+which rarely failed when once secured.  And, even as he did so, in that
+very half-second of time, there was a half-turn of the other's body, an
+arm about his neck, a wrench forward to a hip, and, big man though he
+was, nothing could save him!
+
+His feet left the earth; he whirled on a pivot, high and clear, and
+came to the ground with a force to match his weight, his body, like a
+whip-lash, cracking its whole length as he struck.
+
+Stunned by the awful shock, he did not move.  His adversary stood
+glaring at the still form for a moment, dazed himself by the sudden
+outcome, then dashed into the barn, came out with a harness
+throat-latch and a pitchfork, strapped Woodell's hands together, pulled
+them over his knees, and between the knees and wrists passed the long
+ash fork-handle.  The man, slowly recovering his senses, was "bucked"
+in a manner known to any schoolboy; as securely bound as if with
+handcuffs and with shackles; as helpless as a babe!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+INCLINATION AGAINST CONSCIENCE.
+
+The shock had affected Woodell very much as what is known as a
+"knock-out" in sparring affects a man.  Absolutely unconscious at
+first, he recovered intelligence slowly, though practically uninjured.
+Harlson stood beside the grotesquely trussed figure and watched the
+return to consciousness with curiosity.  The cool night air assisted
+the restoration.
+
+Woodell opened his eyes, seemed to be wondering where he was, and then,
+as realization came, made an attempt to rise.  The effort was
+ridiculous, and he but flopped like a winged loon.  The contortion of
+his face was frightful as there came upon him full understanding of his
+situation.  He struggled fiercely once again, then lay quiet, looking
+up at Harlson with malignant eyes.
+
+Harlson's fit of rage had gone entirely.  There had come upon him a
+swift compunction.  "Why did you try to murder me?" he asked.
+
+"You know well enough, ---- you!" came from between the teeth of the
+man on the ground.
+
+"I do not.  I can't understand it!  Have I ever injured you?"
+
+"Injured me?  You dodging, lying thief!  What are you quibbling for?
+You know just how you have injured me.  Why don't you finish the thing?
+Get a club and knock out my brains!  They won't hang you, for you can
+say it was in self-defense, and my being here will prove it.  Do it!
+Have a complete job of what you have done this summer!"
+
+The man, writhed in his ignoble position, and tears gushed from his
+eyes.  Harlson reached forward and withdrew the pitchfork handle.
+Woodell scrambled to his feet ungracefully, for his hands were still
+strapped together before him.
+
+"Look here, Woodell," said Harlson, "let us go to the road and walk
+down toward your place.  I'll not unstrap your hands just yet.  I think
+I'll feel a trifle more comfortable having you as you are.  I want to
+talk with you.  I want you to be fair with me.  Was it because of Jenny
+Bierce?"
+
+"You know it was."
+
+"But why haven't I as good a right to make love to Jenny as you or any
+other man?"
+
+Woodell turned fiercely: "More quibbling."  Then in a tone of demand:
+"Tell me this: Are you going to marry her?"
+
+Harlson hesitated.  "I don't know."
+
+"You do know!  You know you haven't any idea of such a thing.  You are
+just amusing yourself until you get your cursed fence built."
+
+"What is that to you?"
+
+"To me!  She was engaged to be married to me, and we were happy
+together until you came; and you've come, broken up two lives and done
+no one any good, not even yourself, you hungry wolf!  She cares more
+for me to-day than she does for you.  She is better suited to me!  But
+with your trick of words and your ways you tickled her fancy at first,
+and, finally, you charmed her somehow as they say snakes do birds.  And
+she'll not be fit for anybody when you go away!"  The big man sobbed
+like a baby.
+
+Harlson made no immediate reply.  Was not what Woodell was saying but
+the truth?  Did he really care for Jenny or she for him?  What had it
+been but pastime?  He could give her up.  It would be a little hard, of
+course.  It is always so when a man has to surrender those close
+relations with a woman which are so fascinating, and which come only
+when there has been established that sympathy between them which, if
+not love, is involuntarily considered by each something that way.
+There was a struggle in his mind between the instinct to be honorable
+and straight-forward and fair, and to do what was right, and the
+impulse, on the other hand, to refuse anything demanded by an
+assailant.  But the would-be murderer was not a murderer, after all.
+He was only a temporary lunatic whom Harlson himself had driven mad.
+That was the just way to look at it.  As for Jenny, she would not
+suffer much.  There had not been time enough.  Not in a day does a man
+or woman have that effect produced upon the heart which lasts forever.
+So, were he to disappear from the affair, nothing very serious, nothing
+affecting materially the whole of any life would follow.  The odds were
+against him, or rather against the worst side of him, in the reflection.
+
+He acted promptly.  "I don't know about it," he said; "I'm puzzled.  I
+don't care much.  I don't know just where I stand, anyhow.  I want to
+be decent, but it seems to me I have some rights; I'm all tangled up.
+I don't think you imagine I am afraid--I wasn't when I was a little boy
+in school with you as a bigger one.  You know that--and I'm not now.
+But that doesn't count.  I've been studying over a lot of things, and I
+don't know what to do.  I think you may be right, and that I have been
+all wrong.  I give it up.  But I do know that a fellow can't make any
+mistake if he tries to do what is right, and, in figuring out the
+thing, takes the side that seems to be against him.  He can fight, he
+can do anything better after he feels that he has done that.  Hold on."
+
+Woodell stopped, wonderingly.  Harlson unbuckled the strap about the
+man's hands and threw it into the bushes at the roadside.
+
+The farmer straightened himself up, reached out his arms, clutched his
+palms together, and looked at the other man.  Harlson spoke bluntly.
+
+"Yes, I know you want to try it again.  But, as I feel now, it could
+only end one way.  I don't mind.  I only wanted to loose you before I
+say what I wanted to say, so that you wouldn't think I was making terms
+on my own account."
+
+"Go on," said Woodell, gruffly, still stretching his arms.
+
+"Well, it is just this.  I don't think I've been doing the right thing.
+I am going to leave Jenny Bierce to you.  She will not care much, and
+it will be all right in a little time.  That is all.  No, not quite!
+You tried to kill me.  Maybe I would have been as big a fool, just such
+a crazy, jealous man as you, if things had been the other way.  I don't
+know.  But I do know this, that your coming here to-night, except that
+it has made me think, has nothing to do with what I have made up my
+mind to.  Here we are in the road.  I don't want to sleep uneasily in
+the barn.  You tried to kill me.  I have tried to decide on what is
+right, and I will do it.  Now, I want it settled with you.  Here I am!
+Do you want to fight?"
+
+Woodell's face had been something worth seeing while Harlson was
+speaking.  He had followed the words of his late antagonist closely.
+He grasped in a general way the intent expressed.  There was a radiance
+on his rough features.
+
+"Do you really mean that?"
+
+"Of course I do.  What should I say it for if I didn't?"
+
+"Then it will be all right."
+
+"But do you want to fight?"
+
+"No, I don't.  I won't say you could lick me.  It was partly luck
+before.  I won't give up that way.  But you might.  That doesn't
+matter.  I'm sorry I tried to kill you.  I was crazy.  You would have
+been, in my place.  And you won't have anything to do with Jenny again?
+Oh, Harlson!"
+
+And the two shook hands, and Harlson went back to his bed on the
+clover-mow.  He thought he had done a great and philosophically noble
+deed--remember, this was but a boy little over twenty--and he slept
+like a lamb.  And next evening he went over to Woodell's home and said
+he wanted some supper, and after the meal laughed at Woodell, and said
+he was going off to another farm to pitch quoits until it got too dark,
+and the two young men walked down the road together and exchanged some
+confidences, and when they parted each was on good terms with the
+other.  This was strange, following an attempted murder, but such
+things happen in real life.  And it may be that Woodell had the worst
+of the bargain in that conversation.
+
+He was better equipped for the winning of Jenny, but the troubled man
+with whom he had been talking had reached out blindly for aid in
+another direction.  Not much satisfaction was the result.  Woodell was
+of the kind who, if religious at all, believe without much reasoning,
+but Harlson had repeated to him the reasoning of the Hindoo skeptic.
+Woodell had at least intelligence enough to follow the line of thought,
+and, in after time, when he was a family man and deacon, the lines
+would recur to vex him sorely.
+
+And Jenny did not pine away and die because she saw little more of
+Harlson.  He met her and explained briefly that they had been doing
+wrong, and that he and Woodell had talked.  She turned pale, then red,
+but said little.  Of the struggle in the night Jenny never learned.
+She inferred, of course, that her lover had gone in a straightforward
+way to Harlson, and that his demands had been acceded to.  She was
+gratified, perhaps, that she had become a person of much importance.
+She thought more of Woodell and less of Harlson, because of the issue
+of the debate, as she understood it, and, when the first pique and
+passion were over, became resigned enough to the outlook.  She had been
+on the verge of sin, but she was not the only woman in the world to
+carry a secret.  Woodell's pleadings were met with yielding, and the
+wedding occurred within a month.  Perhaps she made a better wife
+because her husband did not know the truth in detail, and she felt the
+burden of a debt, but that is doubtful.  Though fair of feature, she
+was not deep enough of mind to even brood.  Of course, too, by this
+standard should be lessened the real degree of all erring.  Harlson,
+wiser, was much the more guilty of the two and deserved some
+punishment, but, as an equation, it could, at least, since he was
+young, be said in his defense that as he was to Jenny so had Mrs.
+Rolfston been to him.  The person who had changed things was that same
+fair animal of the town.
+
+And shallow-minded legislatures will enact preposterous social laws for
+the regulation of the morals of boys, and imagine they have placed
+another paving-stone in the road to the millennium, while the Mrs.
+Rolfstons are having a riotous time of it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+FAREWELL TO THE FENCE.
+
+When the first frosts of autumn come the black ash swales are dry, and
+there is more life in them than in midsummer.  Hickory trees grow in
+the swales, and the squirrels are very busy with the ripened nuts.  The
+ruffed grouse, with broods well grown, find covert in the tops of
+fallen trees, or strut along decaying logs.  There are certain berries
+which grow in the swales, and these have ripened and are sought by many
+birds.  The leaves are turning slowly to soft colors.  There is none of
+the blaze and glory of the ridges where the hard maples and beeches
+are, but there is a general brownness and dryness and vigor of scene.
+It is good.  The fence was nearly done, and the money for its building
+was almost owned.  The rails stretched away in a long line through the
+narrow lane hewed through the wood, the tree-tops meeting overhead, and
+a new highway was built for the squirrels, who made famous use of the
+fence in their many journeys.  The woodpeckers patronized it much, and
+tested every rail for food, but only in a merely incidental way, for
+each woodpecker knew that every rail was green and tough, and sound and
+tenantless as yet.  There was a general chirp and twitter and pleasant
+call, for all the young life of the year was out of nest and hole and
+hollow, and now entering upon life in earnest.  It was a season for
+buoyant work.
+
+The great maul, firm and heavy still, showed an indentation round its
+middle, where tens of thousands of impacts against the iron wedges had
+worn their way, and even the heads of the wedges themselves were
+rounded outward and downward with an iron fringe where particles of the
+metal had been forced from place.  The huge hook at the end of the log
+chain was twisted all awry, though no less firm its grip.  The fence,
+the implements and all about showed mighty work, something of mind, but
+more of muscle.
+
+Most perfect of all tonics is physical, out-door labor, particularly in
+the forest, and it is as well for mind as body.  It eliminates what may
+be morbid, and is healthful for a conscience.  Why it is that, under
+most natural conditions which may exist, the conscience is not so
+nervously acute, is something for the theologians to decide,--they will
+decide anything,--but the fact remains.  The out-door conscience is
+strong, but seldom retrospective.
+
+Grant Harlson swung his maul and delighted in what was about him, and
+breathed the crisp October air, scented with the spice bushes he cut to
+clear the way, and pondered less and less upon the puzzles of the
+Hindoo king.  His mood was all robust, and when he visited the town he
+was a wonder to Mrs. Rolfston, who was infatuated with the savagery of
+his wooing and madly discontent with the certainty that she must lose
+him.  She made wild propositions, which he laughed at.  She would
+remove to the city; she would do many things.  He said only that the
+present was good, and that she was fair to look upon.  And from her he
+would go to his other sweetheart, the great maul, and be faithful for
+six days of the seven.  He did not work as late of afternoons now.  He
+was enjoying life again in the old healthful, boyish way.
+
+He had a friend from town with him, too--a setter, with Titian hair and
+big eyes, which slept on the clover beside him, and an afternoon or two
+a week he would take dog and gun and go where the ruffed grouse were or
+where a flock of wild turkeys had their haunts among the beech trees.
+He would announce, with much presumption and assurance, at some
+farm-house door, that he would be over for dinner to-morrow, and that
+it would be a game dinner, and that he would leave the game with them
+on his way back that same evening.  There would be chaffings and
+expressions of doubt as to reliance upon such promise and "First catch
+your rabbit" comment, but they were not earnest words, for his ability
+as a mighty hunter was well known.
+
+Craft and patience are required when the wild turkey is to be secured,
+for it is wise in its generation, and will carry lead, but it is worth
+the trouble, for no pampered gobbler of the farm-yard has meat of its
+rich flavor.  Beech-nuts and berries make diet for a bird for kings to
+eat.  And when Harlson brought a couple of noble young turkeys to the
+board the banquet was a great one, and the boys pitched quoits that
+night no better for it.  A good thing is the wild turkey, but even a
+better thing, when his numbers and quality are considered, is the
+ruffed grouse, the partridge of the North, the pheasant of the South.
+How, in the lake region, he dawdles among the low-land thornberry
+bushes in autumn, how he knows of many things to eat beside the
+thorn-apples, and how plump he gets, and how cunning!  How watchful he
+is, how knowing of covert, and with what a burst he lifts himself from
+his hiding-place and whirls away between the tree-trunks!  How quick
+the eye and hand to catch him when he rises from the underbrush and is
+out of sight in the wood before the untrained sportsman stops him with
+what is little more than a snapshot, so instantaneously must all be
+done!  Yet what a dignified thing is he, and how easy to find by one
+who knows his ways and what hold habit has upon his gray-brown majesty.
+Should the sudden shot fail, there is the fatal weakness of the bird of
+flying, as the bee flies, straight as an arrow goes, and of alighting
+high, say about two hundred yards away, and trusting to the trick which
+fools all other enemies to fool the man.  Following the straight line
+of his flight, scanning the tree-tops, will you note at last, upon some
+great limb and close to the tree's trunk, an upright thing, slender,
+still-hued, silent and motionless.  It is so like the wood it well
+might miss the tyro.  It is not unsportsmanlike, it is in fair chase to
+shoot, and then there comes to the ground, with a great thump, the cock
+of the northern woods, and you have one of the prizes man gets by
+slaying.  But this is only in the wood.  In the open it is quite
+another thing.  What a toothsome bird, too, is your ruffed grouse, how
+plump and yet gamey to the taste!  You must know how to cook him,
+though.  He must be broiled, split open neatly and well larded with
+good butter, for not so juicy even as the quail is the ruffed grouse,
+and he must have aid.  But, broiled and buttered and seasoned, well,
+what a bird he is!
+
+There were woodcock, too, in the lowlands, and Harlson found with them
+such buoyant life as we men find in sudden death of those small,
+succulent creatures.  To stop a woodcock on the wing as it pitches over
+the willows is no simple thing, and he who does it handily is, in one
+respect, greater than he who ruleth a kingdom.  And, at the table--but
+why talk of the woodcock?  There are other game birds for the eating,
+good in their various degrees, but the woodcock is not classed with
+them.  In him is the flavoring drawn by his long bill from the very
+heart of the earth, the very aroma of nature, and all richness.  They
+ate peacocks' brains in Caesar's time.  Later, they found there was
+something greater in the ortolan, and in some of the similar smaller
+things which fly.  But as the ages passed, and palates became
+cultivated by heredity, and what made all flavors became known, the
+woodcock rose and was given the rank of his great heritage--the most
+perfect bird for him who knows of eating; the bird which is to others
+what the long-treasured product of some Rhine hillside or Italian
+vineyard is to the vintage of the day, what old Roquefort or Stilton is
+to curd, what the sweet, dense, musky perfume of the hyacinth is to the
+shallow scent of rhododendron.  Even the Titian-haired setter
+recognized the imperial nature of the woodcock, and was all emotion
+about the willow-clumps.
+
+Of course, from one point of view it is absurd, to thus depart from a
+simple story upon the killing or the cooking or the flavor of a bird.
+But I am telling of Grant Harlson and the woman he later found, and it
+seems to me that even such matters as these, the sport he had, and the
+facts and fancies he acquired, are part of the story, and have
+something to do with defining and making clear the forming knowingness,
+and character, and habits and inclinations of the man.  Between him who
+knows old Tokay and woodcock, and the other man, there is every
+distinction.  Harlson had learned his woodcock, but the Tokay was yet
+to come.
+
+And the fence neared its end.  The young man almost regretted it, eager
+as he had become to test his strength in the great city.  Physically,
+it was grand for him.  What thews he gained; what bands of muscle
+criss-crosses between and below his shoulders!  What arms he had and
+what full cushions formed upon his chest!  That was the maul.  How he
+ate and drank and slept!
+
+The days shortened, and the hoar frosts in the early morning made the
+fence look a thing in silver-work strung through the woods.  Where the
+oxen had stepped in some soft place were now, at the beginning of the
+day, thin flakes of ice.  Even in the depth of the clover-mow the
+change of temperature was manifest, and Harlson slept with a blanket
+close about him.  The autumn had come briskly.  And the last ash was
+felled, the oxen for the last time scrambled through the wood with the
+heavy logs, and for the last time ax and maul and wedge did sturdy
+service.  One day Grant Harlson lifted the last rail into place; then
+climbed upon the fence, looked critically along it, and knew his work
+in the country was well done.  He was absorbed in the material aspect
+of it just then.  It was a good fence.  Fifteen years later he strolled
+one afternoon, cigar in mouth, across the wheat-field where the wood
+had been, and inspected the fence he had built alone that summer, away
+back.  The rails had grown gray from the effect of time and storms, and
+a rider was missing here and there, but the structure was a sound one
+generally, and still equal to all needs.  It was a great fence, well
+built.  He looked at the wasting evidence of the great ax strokes upon
+the rail ends, and said, as did Brakespeare, when he visited the castle
+of Huguemont and noted where his sword had chipped the stairway stone
+in former fight; "It was a gallant fray."
+
+There was the getting of pay--the selling of a Morgan yearling colt
+sufficed the owner of the land for that--and the end of one part of one
+human being's life was reached.  He went to town again and lived there
+a week or two.  A life not held in bonds, but somehow under all
+control.  It was curious; he could not understand it; but, even in the
+wood, he had out-grown Mrs. Rolfston.  He was with her much.  There was
+no let nor hindrance to their united reckless being, but all was
+different from the beginning.  He was not selfish with her; he grew
+more courteous and thoughtful, yet the woman knew she could not keep
+him.  There were stormy episodes and tender ones, threats and tears,
+and plottings and pleadings, and all to the same unavailing end.  Your
+woman of thirty of this sort is a Hecla ever in eruption, but becoming
+sometimes, like Hecla, in the ages, ice-surrounded.  She has her
+trials, this woman, but her trials never kill her.  The rending of the
+earth, earthy, is never fatal.  She recovers.  With her, good digestion
+ever waits on appetite, though an occasional appetite be faulty.
+
+And one day Grant Harlson left the town, his face turned cityward.  The
+country boy--this later young man of the summer--was no more.  To fill
+his place among the mass of bipeds who conduct the affairs of the world
+so badly and so blunderingly, was but one added to the throng of
+strugglers in one of men's great permanent encampments.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+A RUGGED LOST SHEEP.
+
+The journal of Marie Bashkirtseff is a great revelation of the hopes
+and imaginings and sufferings of a girl just entering that period of
+life when woman's world begins.  Many upon two continents have been
+affected by the depths and sadness of it, yet it is but a primer, the
+mere record of a kindergarten experience, in comparison with what would
+be the picture showing as plainly a heart of some man of the city.  Did
+you ever read the diary, unearthed after his death, and printed in part
+but recently, of Ellsworth, the young Zouave colonel, who was slain in
+Alexandria, and avenged on the moment, at the very beginning of the
+great civil war?  That is a diary worth the reading.  There is told the
+story of not alone vain hopes and ungratified ambitions, but of an
+empty stomach and dizzy head to supplement the mental agony and make
+its ruthlessness complete.  There were, too, the high courage which was
+sorely tested--and an empty stomach is a dreadful shackle--and the
+bulldog pertinacity which ever does things.  That was a diary of real
+life, with little room for dreams, and much blood upon the pen.
+
+It befell Grant Harlson to learn how helpless in the great city is the
+man as yet unlearned in all its heartlessness and devious ways and lack
+of regard for strangers, and the story of Ellsworth was very nearly his.
+
+It was well enough at first.  He had some money, and had occupation at
+a pittance, intended only by the law firm with whom he was a student to
+serve for his car or cab-hire when on service outside the office.  His
+privilege of studying with the firm was counted remuneration for his
+services, and he was, so far as this went, but in the position of other
+young men of his age and value under such circumstances, but, unlike
+others, he had relied upon the law of chance to aid him.
+
+One hundred dollars does not last long when one is healthy and has a
+mighty appetite, and, that gone, two dollars and fifty cents a week,
+and hard work for it, is very little to live on, and Harlson found it
+so.  Not for all the comforts of the world would he have written home
+for aid in the town.  It seemed there was nothing for him to do.  It
+had become mid-winter, and the winter was a cold one.  Gaunt men
+followed the coal wagons or visited the places where charity is
+bunglingly dispensed by the sort of people who drift into smug
+officials at such agencies as naturally as some birds fly to
+worm-besprinkled furrows for their gleanings.
+
+Harlson saw much of this, and knew his fate was not the worst among so
+many, and it aided him in his philosophy, but he had a mighty appetite.
+He was a great creature, of much bone and brawn, and being hungry was
+something he could not endure.  He thought--how far back it seemed--of
+the farmers' dinners, and the turkey and ruffed grouse and woodcock.
+Woodcock!  Why, his whole two dollars and fifty cents would not feed
+him for a single time upon that glorious bird!  He looked through the
+fine restaurant windows, and it amused him.  His own meals were taken
+in restaurants of a poorer class.  With thirty-five cents and a
+fraction to live upon for a day, one does not care for game.
+
+Harlson's dress became of the shabby genteel order.  The binding upon
+coat and vest had begun to show that little wound which is not wide nor
+deep, but is past the healing, and the shininess at knees and elbows
+reflected the light that never was on land or sea, or, at least, ought
+not to be.  He felt a degradation with it all, though it was with him
+the result of folly, not of fault, and he made a struggle for reform in
+his finances.  He abandoned the cheap room in which he lived, and slept
+upon the office floor at night, the place in decent weather being
+moderately warm.
+
+The individual from China and the individual from more than one other
+land, who comes to live with us, can exist on thirty-five cents a day
+and think his provender the fat of the land.  But he is not a great
+meat-eater.  The fiber of him is not our own.  His style of tissue was
+not fixed in northern bay and fjord and English and Norman forests, and
+his ancestors transmitted to him a self-denying stomach.  He can live
+in the city upon thirty-five cents a day, and clasp his hands across
+his abdomen and say, with the thankful, "I have dined."  Not so the man
+of Harlson's type, and of his size.  The sum of two dollars and fifty
+cents, the young man found, would not feed and clothe him for a week.
+He was a boy still, in the freshness of his appetite, yet his demands
+in quantity were manly, to a certainty.  Six feet of maul-swinging
+humanity had eaten much, even in midsummer.  That same six feet
+required more now, when the temperature was low and the system needed
+carbon.  Perhaps he got all that was good for him; it is well to train
+down a little occasionally; but Harlson wandered about sometimes with a
+feeling of sympathy for the wolf of the forest, the hawk of the air,
+and the pickerel of the waters, all hungry ever and all refusing to
+live by bread alone.
+
+As time passed this condition of things wore upon the man.  His
+fancies, if not morbid, became a trifle ugly.  He worked feverishly,
+but he chafed at his own ignorance of city ways, such that he could not
+increase his income.  He sought manual labor which could be done at
+night, but failed even in this, for at that time he lacked utterly the
+way about him which fits the city, and persuades the man of business
+when there is little labor to be done.  It was almost a time of panic.
+He would wander about the streets at night like a lost spirit.
+Sometimes he would meet old college friends.  He had classmates in the
+city, some of them well-to-do and well established, and they were glad
+to meet him, the man who had done a little to give the class its
+record, and he was invited to swell dinners and to parties.  He would
+but feign excuses, and to none of them told bluntly, as he should have
+done, just what his situation was, and how a trifling aid would make
+his future different.  He was very proud, this arrogant product of the
+old Briton blending and the new world's new northwest, and he lacked
+the sense which comes with experience in the bearings of a life all
+novel, and so he remained silent, and, incidentally, hungry.
+
+It was at this period of his career that Harlson was in closest
+sympathy with the sad-eyed Hindoo king.  He was not doing anything out
+of the way; he was working hard, with clean ambitions, yet he was
+hungry.  He could not understand it.  No doubt an empty stomach
+inclines a man to much logic and the splitting of straws.  There comes
+with an empty stomach less of grossness and more of abstract reason,
+and an exaltation which may be all impractical, but which is recklessly
+acute.
+
+"I want to do things, I want to help others--I don't know why, but I
+do--I have ambitions, but I try to make them good.  I am doing the best
+I can with the brains I have.  I get up in the morning from the office
+floor and do my utmost all day, and try to do better when I get out,
+but nothing helps me!  Where is the God who, it is said, at worst,
+helps those who help themselves.
+
+  "'You say that we have a meaning;
+  So has dung, and its meaning is flowers.'
+
+"The Hindoo king must be right.  I am, we all are but like horses, or
+trees, or mushrooms; and it is only some sort of accident which makes
+each thing with life successful or unsuccessful, happy or unhappy, as
+the case may be."
+
+So, at this time, Grant Harlson reasoned, blindly, yet in his heart
+there was something which protested against his own deductions and kept
+him in the path which was straightforward, and from staking all the
+future on the morrow.  So drifted away the days, and this strong-limbed
+young fellow became hungrier and hungrier, and more shiny at knees and
+elbows, and more lapsided of foot-gear, and more thoroughly puzzled at,
+and disgusted with, the city world.
+
+Sometimes the young man would resolve that in the morning he would
+abandon all his plans, and seek the country again, and there, where he
+could hold his own and more, live and die apart from all the
+feverishness and chances of another way of living.  And he would awake
+and sniff in the morning air, and say to himself that he was a cur last
+night, and that he would stay and hold his own, and, in the end, win
+somehow.  The bulldog strain asserted itself, and he was his own again.
+At night, after a fruitless day, he might become again depressed, but
+the morning restrung the bow.  Sometimes--these were his weaker
+days--he would abandon all effort, and seek the free public library,
+and there plunge into books and find, for the passing time,
+forgetfulness.  These were his only draughts of absolute nepenthe, for
+at night he dreamed of the yesterday or of the morrow, and it marred
+his rest.  The library gave him, for the time, another world, though it
+had harsh suggestions.  He would stop his reading to wonder how
+Chatterton felt when starving, or if Hood had as miserable a time of it
+as alleged, or if Goldsmith was jolly when, penniless, he argued his
+way through Europe, or if even Shakespeare went without a meal.  But
+the library, on the whole, was a solace and a tonic.  It rested him,
+since it made him, for a time, forget.
+
+It was but characteristic of Harlson that, in the midst of all this
+test of endurance of a certain sort, he should do what deprived him of
+all chance of greater ease and greater vantage-ground with time
+expended out of the line he had established.  One of his old college
+friends, guessing, perhaps, his real condition, came to him with an
+offer of what was more than a fair income, if he would teach one of the
+city's high-schools.  The hungry fellow only laughed, and said that was
+not on his programme.  He still went hungry and grew more shabby in
+appearance, and then came to him what was, perhaps, a sear upon his
+life--perhaps what broadened, educated, and made him wiser.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+THE STRANGE WORLD.
+
+One night Harlson, with a great appetite, as usual,--for he had not
+eaten since his scant breakfast,--went out to get his supper.  It was
+not dinner, for he never, at that time, dined.  He had in his pocket
+twenty cents.  The next day he would get his usual weekly stipend.  He
+would spend fifteen cents, he thought, upon his supper, then return to
+the office to sleep, and would have five cents remaining for the
+morning meal.  That would do to buy buns with, and he would endure what
+stomach clamor might come until evening, when he would be a capitalist,
+and riot in all he could eat, even though he doubled a cheap order.
+
+So he reasoned, as he went down the garish street, and looked right and
+left for some new restaurant, for he chanced to want a change.  One's
+love for cheap restaurants is not perpetual.  A mild illuminated sign
+over a small building attracted his attention.  It had the aspect of
+what would be cheap, but clean.
+
+Harlson entered the place and found what he had looked for.  There was
+the small front room with scattered tables, the partition at the back,
+reaching but half way to the ceiling, with the usual curtained door,
+and there was no one in the room.  He took a seat beside one of the
+tables and there waited.  He had not long to wait.  The curtains parted
+and a woman entered.  The woman who came into the room was possibly
+thirty-five years of age.  She was strong of frame, though not uncouth,
+and had keen, laughing gray eyes, heavy eyebrows and chestnut hair.
+She was a half jaunty, buxom amazon, with a brazen, comrade look about
+her, and was evidently the proprietress of the place.  She came to
+where Harlson was seated and asked him what he wished to eat.  The
+patron of this restaurant was studying the bill of fare intently.  He
+wanted to get what was, as Sam Weller says, "werry fillin," at the
+price, and yet he had certain fancies.  He looked up at the woman and
+said, bluntly:
+
+"I have only fifteen cents to spend.  What would you advise for the
+money?"
+
+For the first time the eyes of the two met.  Harlson was interested in
+the fraction of a second.  In the fraction of a second he knew that it
+was not a restaurant pure and simple that he had entered, for he had
+learned much already in the city.  The woman who looked at him was not
+merely the proprietress of a place where food was sold.
+
+The woman did not answer at once.  She was looking at the customer.
+She pulled out the chair opposite him and sat down.
+
+"Have you lived here long?" she said.
+
+Harlson had been so isolated, that to have an inquiry made in relation
+to his personal affairs seemed droll.  It seemed something like
+humanity again, as well.
+
+He studied more closely the woman opposite.  She did not convey any
+idea of a creature of innate dishonesty or treacherous character.  She
+had the appearance of being a shrewd, merry, healthy sinner.  He forgot
+that she owed him an answer as he met her question:
+
+"No, I have not lived here long, but I am as hungry as if I had lived
+here for half a century.  What shall I order?"
+
+She looked at him curiously.  His language was not of the kind she had
+been accustomed to.  She measured him from head to heel, while he noted
+her examination and was amused, and showed it in his face.  She
+blushed, or rather flushed, and measured him again.  Then she told him
+what he should order most wisely for the sum he had named.  He was
+surprised at the quantity and quality of it.
+
+The woman, meanwhile, had left him without further comment.  As he was
+ending his meal, she came in again and took the seat in front of him.
+
+"You are hungry," she said.
+
+"I was, decidedly.  I'm not now."
+
+She looked him over.
+
+"You have spent only fifteen cents.  What is the matter?"
+
+He was surprised.  He looked into her eyes and was perplexed.  Why
+should this woman ask him this question?  But he could see nothing in
+those eyes save a gray inquisition.
+
+"I had only that much to spend to-night, that's all.  Do you see
+anything absurd about it?"
+
+The woman was puzzled in turn.  She looked into the man's face in a
+fearless way enough, but did not know what to say.  Then again came
+that odd way of looking over him.  Finally she broke out:
+
+"You haven't any more money, and yet you put on airs.  I like it."
+
+"I am much obliged," said he.
+
+"That isn't fair.  You know what I mean.  And you know already--you're
+not a fool--what this place is.  It is mine.  The little restaurant in
+front is but a part.  Women come here--and men.  Two women live here.
+Did you think that?"
+
+Harlson said he had inferred, since he came in, that the restaurant was
+not a restaurant alone.
+
+"It's a funny world," he said.
+
+She was bothered.  "I don't know what you mean about the world, and I
+don't care.  But I would like to know what your business is, and how
+you are doing?"
+
+"I am not doing well, and get hungry sometimes.  Had it not been for
+that I should not have come here to-night.  But what is it to you?"
+
+"Can't you see?  Why am I talking to you?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+She looked at him steadily again.
+
+"What do you want?" was his inquiry.
+
+"Where do you live?"
+
+"I have no bed.  I am in a lawyer's office.  I can't afford a
+boarding-house just now, and I sleep on the office floor."
+
+"How do you like that?" she asked.
+
+"I don't like it."
+
+"Then why do you stay there?"
+
+"Where else would I sleep?  I have only so much a week."
+
+"Would you like to stay here to-night?"
+
+"Maybe.  This is better than the office floor; at least I imagine it
+is."
+
+The curtains parted and there was a heavy step upon the floor.  A man
+came in.  He stopped and looked at the couple grimly.  He was a big man
+whose cheeks had jowls and whose eyes were red.  He had the air of a
+bully.  He seemed perfectly at ease and conscious of his status, and
+the woman started, then looked up half anxiously and half defiantly.
+The man spoke first:
+
+"What are you doing here?"
+
+"I am talking with this gentleman at the table."
+
+"You mustn't talk with these fellows.  Get out of here!" he said,
+turning to Harlson.
+
+Harlson was not really in a pleasant frame of mind; he had been too
+hungry.  It was not the occasion on which a flabby bully should have
+thus addressed him.  He did not answer the man, but turned to the woman.
+
+"Is that your husband?" he asked.
+
+"No."
+
+"What is he, then?"
+
+It was the intruder who answered, violently:
+
+"She belongs to me, and you'd better get out of here."
+
+"I don't belong to him!  He has lived here, but I want to get away from
+him!  Now," turning recklessly to the man, "you may do what you please!"
+
+The man paid little note to what the woman said.  His attention was
+bestowed upon Harlson.
+
+"Look here, young fellow!  Get out of this, and get out quick!  You're
+in the way!"
+
+Now, upon this young man Harlson, during this conversation, had come a
+certain increased ill humor.  He was in no violent mood, as yet, but he
+was not, as has been said, one for a big flabby brute to thus annoy.
+He was quiet enough, though.
+
+"I've come into a restaurant to get my supper."
+
+The man's red face became redder still.  "If you don't get out, I'll
+throw you out!"
+
+Harlson stood up.  "I'll not go!" he said, and then the man rushed upon
+him.
+
+It was only a clean, quick blow, but there was no check nor parry to
+mar its full effectiveness.  The man plunged forward too confidently,
+the blow caught him fairly in the face, on the fullness of the cheek,
+just under the eye, and those bronzed knuckles cut in to the bone.  It
+was a wicked blow, and its force was great enough to hurl the whole
+body back.  The man whirled away under it, and he went toppling down,
+with his arms thrown up wildly.  As he fell, he pitched still further
+back, in his effort to save himself, and his head struck the
+wainscoting as he reached the floor.  Blood gushed from his cut cheek.
+It was a moment or two before he clambered slowly to his feet.
+
+"Shall I hit you just once more?" was Harlson's query.
+
+The man did not answer.  The woman stood looking on curiously, but
+saying nothing.  Harlson waited for a time, then told his assailant to
+go away; and the man picked up his hat and stumbled out upon the street.
+
+The woman sat down again.  It was some time before she spoke.
+
+"You are strong, and will fight," she said.
+
+"I had nothing else to do."
+
+"Do you want to stay here?"
+
+"It is better than the office floor."
+
+"Will you stay here?"
+
+He hesitated.  It was a turning-point in his life, and he knew it.
+There was something rather startling to him in it.
+
+Then came the swift reflection: He wanted to know all of life.  This
+was the under-life, the under-current, of which reformers prate so much
+and know so little.  Why not be greater than they?  Why not have been a
+part of it, and in time to come speak knowingly?  He was but a part of
+this world, as accident had made it.  He hoped if the world wagged well
+to be a protector for certain weak ones.  It was a world wherein
+immediate brute force told.  Well, he could supply that easily enough.
+And what would he not learn?  He would learn the city, the ignorance of
+which had resulted in his being hungry--he, a young man college-bred,
+and with some knowledge of Quintilian's crabbedness, or the equations
+of X and Y in this or that or the Witch of Agnesi.  And were not these
+people part of the world, and was not this life something of which he
+ought to know the very heart?
+
+Still, there were relations of things to be considered.  There were
+people at home, and it would not do.
+
+Then, just as he turned to refuge the woman who sat looking at him, the
+curtains parted again and a face appeared.  It was the face of a woman,
+not of the world about him.  It was some accident, some sinister,
+unexampled happening, which had brought the face to the surroundings.
+It gave to the wavering man a new idea of this world of shame and sin,
+and it may have been the deciding ounce.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+THE REALLY UGLY DUCKLING.
+
+He turned, to the woman across the table: "All right; I will stay."
+
+I am but telling the story of a man of whose life from this time for
+two years I know but little.  He was always reticent about these years,
+yet always said he had no occasion to regret them.  With the life's
+outlines, though, with what it really was, aside from details, I
+became, in a degree, familiar.
+
+What does the average person in one class know of the life in another?
+There are "classes," certainly, with great bars between them here,
+though this is a republic, and all men and women are supposed to be
+free and equal and alike in most things.  There are lower and wider
+grades of existence, such that the story of them may never be told save
+in patch-work or by inference, yet which have as full a history, and
+where there are loves and hates and hopes and despairs as deep as are
+ever felt in the mass where the creed-teachers and Mrs. Grundy and the
+legislatures are greater factors.
+
+And of this more reckless, hopeless people Harlson learned much.  With
+them he was; of them he could never fully be.  The extent to which a
+man is permanently defiled by pitch-touching cannot, of course, be
+known.  It depends upon the pitch and upon the man.  It was not a quiet
+life the young man led!  On the contrary, it was a very feverish one,
+for he labored hard in the office by day--he never for an instant
+abandoned his ambitions and his plans--and at night he drifted into the
+land where were warmth and light and lawlessness.  He had his duty
+there, such as it might be, for he was both a gambler and a protector,
+and, young as he was, callow as he was, within a year he had become one
+in demand, no trifler at the table, and an object of rivalry among
+those whose regard means fee of body and of soul.  He, himself, at that
+time, did not appreciate the remarkable nature of his changing.  So
+rapidly he aged in knowledge of all undercurrents that he passed into
+full maturity without a comprehension of the change.  It is said that
+some Indians teach their children to swim, not by repeated gentle
+lessons, but by throwing them into a deep stream recklessly, saving
+them only at the last moment.  So had some power hurled Grant Harlson
+into the black waters, and he had not drowned, and had taken rank among
+strong swimmers.
+
+It is, as I have said, difficult to write intelligently of this portion
+of this man's life.  I want to do him justice, for I have always cared
+for him; yet, from the conventional point of view, at least, nothing
+can excuse his lapse at this one time.  He should have continued
+starving, I suppose, as have so many others, and have either died or
+won, as they did, instead of tasting all that is denied, and gaining
+much knowledge of the world, of much use in the future, all at the
+expense, perhaps, of that purity attaching to certain ignorances, as
+much in the man as the woman, since between the sexes all things are
+relative.
+
+There were enough odd things in this most odd career.  There were
+friendships and feuds with those who were of the lower multitude
+morally, but who were politicians and had their followings.  There were
+romances of the order which makes the story of Dumas such a success
+upon the stage, and risks and escapes enough to satisfy the hungriest
+of romance-readers.  It was all grotesque in its grim reality, and the
+young man did not know it.  He was an unconscious desperado, and the
+odd thing about it all was the ease with which he led the double life.
+
+In the morning, clear-headed and competent--for he did not drink at all
+of liquors--he appeared and was resolute at his work.  He was becoming
+more and more considered.  That he, somehow, knew the town so well, was
+in his favor.  More than one case of importance was decided in another
+way from which it might have been, because of his knowledge of the
+outcasts and their connections, and how they had been used or trifled
+with on this occasion or on that one.  He was zealous and studied
+furiously, and in the mere letter of the law became most confident.
+His examination was a trifling thing, and, once admitted to the bar, he
+did not remit his efforts.  He was valuable to the firm.  He was their
+watch-dog, and he suggested many things.
+
+One day the senior partner called Harlson in, and a long conference was
+held.  The younger man was offered a partnership on condition that he
+would make a specialty of certain branches of the firm's varied
+practice; but the offer had its disadvantages.  It was not in the line
+political at all, but in one with vexatious business demands and
+requisites; yet it was accepted in a moment.  And within the next week
+all the wicked, nervous night-life was abandoned, all the friendships
+formed there put upon probation, all the soiled sentiment made a thing
+to be ended surely and forgotten, if possible.
+
+There were some wrenches to it all.  Camille learns to love sometimes,
+and Oakhurst, the gambler, does not want to part with one who has stood
+a friend in an emergency.  But Camille knows that, for her, few flowers
+are even annual, and Oakhurst is practical and a fatalist.
+
+From that day, all his life, Grant Harlson kept away from close touch
+with this ever-existing group who live from day to day because they
+have been branded and do not care.  Good friends he ever had among
+them, but they never claimed him, though, on many occasions, the men
+served him.  They recognized the fact that he had never been more than
+an adopted wanderer among them, and rather prided themselves upon him.
+In later times he would occasionally exchange a word or two on that old
+life with some one who had grown outwardly respectable, with some
+one-time thug, later saloon-keeper and alderman and what may follow,
+and would be reminded of what happened on the night when the mirrors
+were all broken, and the Washington woman shot the man she was seeking,
+or when "we did the Coulson gang;" but it had long grown to seem unreal
+and dreamlike.  He grew away from the memory, and there was no glamour
+to him in what might attract some other men to evil-doing, because to
+him there could be no novelty.  He was a past-master in the ceremonials
+of fallen, reckless human nature, and the ritual bored him.  He
+deserved no credit further than that.  True, he was but young when he
+learned the rites, but that he was not still a member of the order was
+only because his ambition was dominant and his tastes had changed.
+That his will was strong, that he had tastes to develop, was because of
+the blood which filled his veins, and of nothing else.  He had gone
+with a current absolutely, though swimming and always keeping his head
+above water until he swam ashore.  Yet, as told in the beginning of
+this chapter, he always said to me that he did not regret this
+experience of abandonment.  And he became a man seeking place and money.
+
+He liked to visit his old home, and was faithful to his old crony, his
+aging mother, still; and, for a time, after any of these sojourns among
+the birds and squirrels and in the forest, he would be distrait and
+preoccupied with something; but all this would wear off, and then would
+come the press for place and pelf again.  He was not entirely
+unsuccessful, and finally he married, as a prospering young man
+should--married a woman with money and presence for a hostess, and with
+traits to make her potent.  He lived with her for a season, and found
+another, without his dreams and sympathies and understandings, but with
+a will and a way.
+
+I do not care to tell the story of it,--indeed, I do not know it,--but
+the man learned the old-fashioned lesson, which seems to hold good
+still, that for a really comfortable wedded life a little love, as a
+preliminary, is a good thing always--usually a requisite.  The woman
+lacked neither perception nor good sense.  It was she who proposed,
+since they were ill-mated, they should live apart, and he consented,
+with only such show of courtesy as might conceal his height of
+gladness.  There were money features to the arrangement made, and it
+was all dignified and thoughtful.  The world knew nothing of the
+agreement, though that generation of vipers, the relations of Mrs.
+Grundy, wondered why Mr. Harlson's wife and he so lived apart, and if
+either of them were opium-eaters, or dangerous in insane moods.  The
+relations of Mrs. Grundy have the reputation of the universe on their
+hands, and, the task being one so great, they must be pardoned if they
+err occasionally.
+
+From the day he was alone, Grant Harlson appeared himself again, and I
+speak knowingly, for I was with him then.  His old self seemed then
+restored.  The buoyancy of boyhood was his as it had never been to me
+since we were young together.  It matters not what a chance,--this is a
+land where all men drift about,--but I was in the city near him now,
+and the old relationship was resumed.  We rioted in the past of the
+country, and we visited it together.  As time went on, Harlson seemed
+to forget that he was, or ever had been, a married man, and eventually
+the woman found other things in life than awaiting old age without
+social potency, and suggested, from a distance, that the separation be
+completed.  Perhaps there was another man.  I know that Harlson did not
+hesitate.  He responded carelessly, and then reverted to things
+practical.
+
+The reflection came that the mismated in this present age must
+ordinarily bear the burden to the end.  Collusion, which in such case
+is but a term for a mutual business agreement, is not allowable.  The
+social problem is a puzzle the solution of which is left to those whose
+ideas were given to them stereotyped.  The separation was delayed, but
+was, vaguely, a thing possible.  And Harlson laughed and threw out his
+arms, and made friends of many women.
+
+They were the variety of his life, which else was a hard-working one.
+He was not a saint nor a deliberate sinner.  He but drifted again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+"EH, BUT SHE'S WINSOME."
+
+"Eh, but she's winsome!"
+
+Grant Harlson entered my room one evening with this irrelevant
+exclamation.
+
+I have remained unmarried, and have learned how to live, as a man may,
+after a fashion, who has no aid from that sex which alone knows how to
+make a home.
+
+Harlson, at this time, had apartments very near me, and we invaded each
+other's rooms at will, and were a mutual comfort to each other, and a
+help--at least I know that he was all this to me.  I have never yet
+seen a man so strong and self-reliant or secretive--save some few who
+were misers or recluses, and not of the real world--who, if there were
+no woman for him, would not tell things to some one man.  We two knew
+each other, and counted on each other, and while I could not do as much
+for him as he for me, I could try as hard.  He knew that.
+
+"Eh, but she's winsome!"
+
+He went to the mantel, took a cigar, and lit it, and turned to me
+indignantly:
+
+"You smoke-producing dolt, why are you silent?  Didn't you hear my
+earnest comment?  Where is the trace of good behavior you once owned?"
+
+"Who's winsome?"
+
+"She, I tell you!  She--the girl I met to-night.  And you sit there and
+inhale the fumes of a weed, and are no more stirred by my announcement
+than the belching chimney of an exposition by the fair display around
+it!"
+
+"You big, driveling idiot, how can I know what you are talking about?
+You come in with an obscure outburst of enthusiasm over something,--a
+woman, I infer,--and because the particular tone, and direction, and
+mood of your insanity is not recognized within a moment, you descend to
+personalities.  If your distemper has left you reason enough for the
+comprehension of words, sit down and tell me about it.  Who's winsome?
+What's winsome?  And have you been to a banquet?"
+
+"There is a degree of reason in what you say--that is, from the point
+of a clod.  I'll tell you.  I've met a woman."
+
+"I dare say.  There are a number in town, I understand."
+
+"Spoken in the vein of your dullness.  A person not sodden with
+nicotine and dreams would have recognized the fact that I had met a
+Woman, one deserving a large W whenever her name is spelled, a woman of
+the sort to make one think that all poems are not trickery, and all
+romances not romance."
+
+"What's her name?"
+
+"Do you suppose I'll tell you, you scheming wife-hunter!  If I do,
+you'll get an introduction somehow, and then you'll win her, for I'm
+afraid she has good sense."
+
+And Harlson laughed and looked down in the brotherly way he had.
+
+"But this is nonsense.  Why don't you tell me something about her?  Is
+she fat and fifty and rich, or bread-and-buttery and white-skinned and
+promising, or twenty and just generally fair to look upon, or
+twenty-five and piquant and knowing, or some big, red-haired lioness,
+or some yellow-haired, blue-eyed innocent, with good digestion and
+premature maternal ways, or----"
+
+"Rot!  She's a woman, I tell you!"
+
+"All right.  Answer questions now categorically."
+
+"Go ahead."
+
+"How old is she?"
+
+"Twenty-seven or eight."
+
+"Married?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Ever been married?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+Harlson looked surprised, and then he became indignant again.
+
+"Alf," said he, "you have good traits, but you have paralysis of a
+certain section of your brain.  You don't remember things.  Don't you
+think I could tell whether or not a woman were married?"
+
+I did not answer him off-hand.  I could not very well.  He knew that
+his reply had set me thinking of many a curious test and many a curious
+experience.  Harlson had an odd fad over which we had many a debate.
+
+It occurred usually upon the street cars.  He would make a study of the
+women in the car when we were together--it seemed to amuse him--and
+tell me whether they were married or not.  He would not look at their
+hands--that would be a point of honor between us--but only at their
+eyes, and then he would say whether any particular woman were married
+or single, and we would leave it to the rings to decide.
+
+Sometimes he would lose, but then he would only say: "Well, if she
+didn't wear a wedding ring she should have done so," and would pay for
+the cigars we smoked.
+
+He had some sort of fancy about their eyes which I could never quite
+understand.  He said that a woman who had been very close to a man, who
+had been part of him in any way, had nevermore the same look, and that
+the difference was perceptible to one who knew the thing.  I tested him
+more than once, and I found that he had never actually failed.
+Sometimes the woman with the look had proved unmarried, but there were
+facts that made the difference.
+
+One night Harlson and I were wandering about the city, mere driftwood,
+after a dinner, and our mood carried us into the haunts of those
+without the pale, not that we cared for any new emotion or excitement,
+but that we wanted to look at something outside the commonplace.  To me
+there might be, of course, some novelty in the things that might
+confront us, though to Harlson they were, at their utmost, but a
+reminiscence.  We went where a man alone was not in safe companionship,
+but there were enough who knew my companion well, and all was curious
+to me, without even the spice of care for self.
+
+It chanced that at one period of the wandering, very late at night, or,
+rather, early morning, Harlson became hungry, and insisted upon
+entrance to a restaurant where were gathered the very refuse of the
+reckless and non-law-abiding, and I went with him, perforce, and saw a
+motley gathering.  There were all sorts of people there, from thief to
+pander, all save those who might retain a claim to faint
+respectability.  Harlson demanded comparative cleanliness at our table,
+and the food was fairly decent.  We ate, then smoked, and looked about
+us.
+
+I have seen many people, and many strange faces, but never such a
+person nor such a face as of an old woman who sat at that early hour of
+the morning at a table near us.  The figure was a warped and withered
+caricature, the face that of a hag, a creature vixenish and viperish,
+and mean and crafty.  It was the face of a procuress of the lowest and
+most desperate type, of a deformed she-wolf of the slums, of the worst
+there is in all abandoned human nature, and Harlson was as interested
+as I was disgusted and repelled.  He noted the woman closely.
+
+"By Jove! look there!" he said.
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Look at her hand."
+
+I looked.  I saw a hand which was a claw, a strong, shriveled thing
+with long, dirty nails and a vulturous suggestion.  It was not a
+pleasant sight.  On the third finger of the left hand, though, was a
+slight gleam amid the carnivorous dullness.  There was a slender band
+of gold there, a ring worn down to narrowness and thinness.  I turned
+to Harlson, but he spoke first:
+
+"Do you see that old wedding ring?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It's queer.  It's good, too.  There's a streak of what was good left
+in everything, it seems to me.  I'm going to talk to her."
+
+"Don't do it.  She'll throw the plate in your face."
+
+"No, she won't."  And he rose and went over to the table of the beldame
+and sat down beside her.  She looked up at him glaringly.  He did not
+smile, nor, apparently, make any apology or excuse, but began talking
+to her, looking at the ring, and saying I know not what.  And I watched
+that miserable old woman's face and wondered.  There was more than one
+emotion shown--fierce resentment at first, then the half fear of the
+hound or the hound-bitch yielding to the master, and then the yielding
+of the heart, not touched, perhaps, for a quarter of a century.
+Harlson talked.  The woman did not speak for minutes, then made some
+short reply, and then, a little later, there were tears in her old foxy
+eyes.
+
+He rose, glared at the one or two hard-faced waiters who had ventured
+near him, and took upon a card something she said.  Then he came back
+to me as the old woman left the place.
+
+"Queer-looking, wasn't she?" he said.
+
+"Decidedly," said I.  "What were you talking about?"
+
+"Oh, nothing but the ring.  It's wonderful how they always wear the
+ring when they have the right to."
+
+"But what was the use of it all?  What came of your talk?"
+
+"Nothing to speak of.  It was only a fad of mine.  I have a right to an
+occasional whim, haven't I?  I'll be hanged if I'll see a wedding ring
+worn that way buried in unbought ground.  The old hag was a marvel of
+all that is unwomanly and sinful.  But that ring shall be properly
+buried, and the hand that wears it, because it _does_ wear it.  So I'm
+going to take the woman out of this and put her where she will not have
+to be a monster in order to live."
+
+And he did what he said he would do.  He found a place in some old
+women's home for that aged demon, and one day he made me go with him to
+see her.  Maybe it was the different dress and the different
+surroundings, but, it seemed to me, her eyes were not as they were in
+the low restaurant.  The hand that wore the thin gold ring was clean in
+its pitiful shrunkenness.  The creature looked neither hunted nor
+hunting.  She was but an old woman going to the grave so near her, and
+going, I could not but imagine, to find the one who had given her that
+gold circlet some half century ago.  I rather fancied Harlson's fad.
+As for him, when I told him so, he only said:
+
+"Oh, of course.  Peter told the third assistant bookkeeper to credit
+Harlson with such or such an amount."  And he added; "If those people
+don't take good care of that old woman there'll be a new
+superintendent."  But they took good care of her.
+
+This is lugging in an incident at great length as an illustration, but
+I know of no other way to explain how Harlson so expressed himself when
+I asked him how he knew whether the woman of whom he had been talking
+was married or not.  He felt confident enough.
+
+"Well, what is she like?  Can't you describe her?  Has she seared your
+eyes with her loveliness?"
+
+"She hasn't seared my eyes.  She has only opened them.  Listen to me,
+you thing of mud!  She is just a little brown streak."
+
+"That's an odd description of a woman."
+
+"It's the correct one, though.  She's just a little brown streak of a
+thing."
+
+"Well, I've heard of a man in love with a dream, and in love with a
+shadow, but never before did I hear of one infatuated with a streak.
+Where did you meet this creature?  Have you known her long?"
+
+"Only for a month or so, and but slightly.  We have not met half a
+dozen times.  It was only tonight, you see, that I began to know her
+well.  We talked together, and I got a glimpse of her real self--of her
+slender little body, of her earthly tenement, of course, I had an idea
+before.  She is a lissom thing, with eyes like wells, and with a way to
+her which conveys the idea of wisdom without wickedness, and which
+makes a man wish he were not what he is, and were more fitted to
+associate with her."
+
+"That's one good effect, anyhow.  I don't know of any man who more
+needed to meet such a woman.  How long do you expect this influence to
+last?"
+
+"Longer than one of your good resolutions, my son; as long as she will
+have anything to do with me."
+
+"Does this brown streak of a saint live in the city?  Is her shrine
+easy of access?  What are you going to do about it?"
+
+"She's not a saint; she's a piquant, cultivated woman; but she is
+different, somehow, from any other I've ever met."
+
+"You've met a good many, my boy."
+
+His face fell a little.
+
+"Yes," he said, "and I almost wish it were different; but the past is
+not all there is of being.  There's a heap of comfort in that."
+
+"Cupid has thumped you with his bird-bolt, certainly.  Why, man, you
+don't mean to say that you're in earnest--that you are really stricken;
+that this promises to be something unlike all other heart or head
+troubles with you?"
+
+He laughed.
+
+"I am inclined to believe that the gravest diagnosis is the correct
+one."
+
+"But how about the present Mrs. Harlson?"
+
+No friend less close than I could have asked such a question.  I almost
+repented it myself, when I noted the look which came upon the man's
+face after its utterance.
+
+I suppose such a look might come to one in prison, who, in the midst of
+some pleasant fancy, has forgotten his surroundings, and is awakened to
+reason and suddenly to a perception again of the grim walls about him,
+and of his helplessness and, maybe, hopelessness.  Harlson left the
+mantel against which he bad been leaning, and walked about the room for
+a moment or two before speaking.
+
+"It's true," he said, "I am certainly a married man.  The law allows
+it, and the court awards it, as things are in this society, bound by
+the tapes of Justice Shallow and the rest.  I entered into a contract
+which was a mistake on the part of two people.  They discovered their
+error, and rectified it as far as they could.  Had they been two men or
+two women who had gone into ordinary business together, and
+subsequently discovered they were not fitted for a partnership, the law
+would have assisted cheerfully in their absolute separation.  But with
+this, the gravest of all contracts, the one most affecting human
+welfare, no such kindness of the statutes may exist.  Some of the
+churches say the contract is a sacrament, though the shepherd kings,
+whose story is our Bible, had no such thought, nor was it taught by the
+lowly Nazarene; but the law supports the legend, within certain limits.
+What are we going to do about it?"
+
+I told him that I didn't know, and there were several thousand
+people--good people--in the city facing the same conundrum.
+
+I called attention to the fact that the conventional band was a strong
+one at this time, and could not be burst without a penalty, even by the
+shrewdest.  The dwarfs were so many that, united, they were stronger
+than any Gulliver.  And I added that, in my opinion, as a mere layman,
+he was very well off; that he had been at least relieved of the great,
+continued trouble which follows a mismating, and that it would be time
+enough for him to chafe at the light chain still restraining him, when
+he was sure he wanted to replace it by another.
+
+"It's not your fashion," I said, "to fret over the morrow, and it is my
+personal and profound conviction that you have no more real idea of
+marrying again than you have of volunteering in the service of the
+Akhoond of Swat--if there be an Akhoond of Swat at present.  You're
+only wandering mentally to-night, my boy, dreaming, because this wisp
+of a young woman of whom you have been telling has turned your brain
+for the time.  You'll be wiser in the morning."
+
+All this I said with much lofty arrogance, and a great assumption of
+knowing all, and of being a competent adviser of a friend in trouble,
+but, at heart, I knew that, in Harlson's place, I should not have shown
+any particular degree of self-control.  I have never felt the thing,
+but it must be grinding to occupy a position like that of this man I
+was addressing.  The serving out of a society sentence must be a test
+of grit.
+
+We dropped the discussion of the problem, and Harlson referred to it
+again but incidentally.
+
+"The fact is," said he, "I had almost forgotten that I was not as free
+as other men.  I have not regulated my course by my real condition.
+I've drifted, and there have been happenings, as you know well.
+There's Mrs. Gorse.  I've never concealed anything.  Those who know me
+at all well know my relationships, but I imagine that I have been
+deceiving myself.  I am not a free agent--though I will be.  It's not
+right as it is."
+
+"And when am I to see this woman who has interested you, and restored
+the old colors to the rainbow?  You will allow me to admire her, I
+suppose, if only from a distance?"
+
+"Oh, yes!  Come with me to the Laffins' to-morrow night.  She'll be
+there, I learned, and I said I was going to be there too.  Come with
+me.  Of course, you understand that if she smiles on you at all, or if
+you appear to have produced a favorable impression upon her, I shall
+assassinate you on our way home."
+
+I told him that I thought my general appearance and style of
+conversation would preserve me from the danger, and that I would take
+the risk and accompany him.
+
+The next night I met Jean Cornish.  We were destined to become very
+well acquainted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+THE WOMAN.
+
+  Only a little brown woman she.
+  Man of the world and profligate he,
+  Hard and conscienceless, cynical, yet,
+  Somehow, when he and the woman met,
+  He learned what other there is in life
+  Than passion-feeding and careless strife.
+  There came resolve and a sense of shame,
+  For she made as his motto but "Faith and fame."
+
+  The world is foolish: we cover truth;
+  We're barred by the gates that we built in youth.
+  Two were they surely, and two might stay,
+  But she turned him into the better way;
+  His thoughts were purified even when
+  He chafed and raged at the might-have-been;
+  He learned that living is not a whim,
+  For the soul in her entered into him.
+
+  He fights, as others, to win or fall,
+  And the spell of the Woman is over all.
+  Bravely they battle in their degree,
+  For--"The woman I love shall be proud of me!"
+  And the man and woman, the one in heart,
+  May be buried together or hurled apart,
+  But the strong will battle in his degree,
+  For--"The woman I love shall be proud of me!"
+
+There were men and women, and music and flowers, and some of the people
+had intelligence, and I drifted about at the Laffins' party, and rather
+enjoyed myself.  Of course I wanted to see the woman a fancy for whom
+had gripped Harlson so hardly.  I had forgotten about her until, with a
+pleasant and clever person upon my arm, I had found something to eat
+and had come upstairs again, and released her to another.  I wandered
+into an adjacent room, and there ran upon Harlson among a group.  I was
+presented to Miss Cornish.
+
+I do not know how to describe a woman.  This one, whom I have known
+better than any other woman in the world, is most difficult of all for
+me to picture.  She stood there, not uninterested altogether, for, no
+doubt, Harlson had been telling her already of his closest friend, his
+lieutenant in many things, and I had an opportunity to study her with
+all closeness as we exchanged the commonplaces.  I understood, when I
+saw her, how it was that he had referred to her so absurdly as a little
+brown streak of a thing.  Little she was, assuredly, and brown, and so
+slender, that his simile was not bad, but the brownness and the
+slenderness were by no means all there was noticeable of her.  She was
+not imposing, this woman, but she was not commonplace.  Supple of
+figure she was, and there were the big eyes this stricken friend of
+mine had told me of, and rather pronounced eyebrows, and her lips were
+full and red, and there was that fullness of the chin, or, rather, the
+vague dream or hint or vision of a daintily double chin at fifty, which
+means so much, but the forehead was what a woman's should be, and the
+glance of the eyes was clean and pure, though, in a clever woman's way,
+observant and comprehensive.  It was a cultivated and fascinating woman
+whom I met.
+
+We talked together, and Grant Harlson looked on gratified, and she
+seemed to like me.  She made me feel, in her own way, that she liked me
+because she knew of me, and as we were talking I felt that she was
+paying, unconsciously, the greatest compliment she could to the man
+beside us.  I knew it was because of the other, and of something that
+he had said of me, that she was so readily on terms of comradeship.
+And I knew, in the same connection, and from the same reasoning, that
+she had already begun to care as much for him as he for her--the man
+who, the night before, had so comported himself with me.  Of course, it
+appears absurd that I could reach such a conclusion upon so little
+basis, but to tell when people are interested in each other is not
+difficult sometimes, even for so dull a man as I.
+
+"You have known Mr. Harlson many years, I believe," she said, and added
+smilingly: "What kind of a man is he?"
+
+"A very bad man," I replied, gravely.
+
+She turned to him in a charming, judicial way:
+
+"If your friends so describe you, Mr. Harlson, what must your enemies
+say?  And what have you to say in your own defense?  What you yourself
+have owned to me in the past is recognition of the soundness of the
+authority."
+
+"I haven't a word to say.  Of course, I had not expected this
+unfriendly villain to be what he has proved himself, but what he says
+is, no doubt, true.  I'm going to reform, though.  In fact, I've
+already begun."
+
+"When was the revolution inaugurated?"
+
+He looked at her so earnestly that there came a faint flush to her
+cheek.  "Since my eyes were opened, and I saw the light," he answered.
+
+She diverted the conversation by turning to me, and saying that, while
+the information I had given her was no doubt valuable, and that she
+should regulate her course accordingly, and advise all her friends to
+do the same, yet she felt it her duty to reprimand me for telling the
+truth so bluntly.  She knew that I had done it for the best, but if
+there were really any hope for this wicked man, if he had really
+decided upon a new life, we ought to encourage him.  Did I think him in
+earnest?
+
+I told her that it hurt me to say it, but that I had no great
+confidence in Mr. Harlson's protestations.  He was of the earth,
+earthy.  A friend, it was true, should bear a friend's infirmities, but
+he should not ask other people to bear them, nor should he testify to
+anything but the truth.  Mr. Harlson might or might not be in earnest
+in what he had declared, but, even if in earnest, there was the matter
+of persistency.  I doubted seriously his ability to overcome the habits
+of a lifetime.
+
+She was becoming really interested in the chaffing.
+
+"What is the nature of Mr. Harlson's great iniquity?"
+
+"There, Miss Cornish, I am justified in drawing the line in my reply.
+I have conscientiously explained that he was, in a general way, a
+villain of the deepest dye, but to make specifications would be
+unfriendly, and I know you wouldn't have me that."
+
+Harlson said that he was very much obliged for my toleration, or would
+be until he got me alone, and Miss Cornish showed a proper spirit, and
+so I left them.  But I had no evidence that she believed what I had
+said.
+
+As we walked home together in the early morning, Harlson told me more
+of the young lady.  She was living with an aunt, he said, and was,
+otherwise, alone in the world.  She had but a little income, barely
+enough to live on, but she had courage unlimited, and tact, and was not
+insignificant as a social factor.  She had the sturdiness of her
+ancestry, in which the name of Jean ran.
+
+"I like it," Harlson said; "it fits her--'Jean Cornish'--little brown
+'Jean Cornish'--little leopardess, little, wise, good woman."
+
+I told him that he was mixing his similes, and that in a broad,
+comprehensive way he had become a fool.
+
+"I tell you I'm in love with her already," he blurted out, "and
+somehow, some day, I will have her, and wear her and care for her!"
+
+"But, my dear boy, don't be insane.  There is the problem we were
+discussing last night.  Have you a solution of it?  And first catch
+your hare.  Have you caught your pretty hare yet?  I'll admit it's
+possible.  Women are fools over such fellows as you when they should be
+adhesive to good, plodding members of society, like the friend who is
+now advising you, but Miss Cornish is not a fool, you see, and I don't
+think you deserve her."
+
+"For that matter, neither do I," he answered; "but I will deserve her
+yet.  I must do more of many things, and cease to do many things.  I
+believe I comprehend better now than I ever did the words in the
+service, 'We have done those things and left undone,' and all that.
+But you'll see a difference.  I'll make her proud of me.  That's the
+right way to become clean, isn't it, old man?"
+
+I said I thought it a wholesome and commendable resolution, on general
+principles, and, of course, the idol would gradually disintegrate.  All
+idols were of clay.  But it didn't matter about the idol, so long as
+the effect was produced.  He might count on me any time for good
+advice.  He only glared at me, and called me hard names, and we dropped
+in at the club and finished our cigars, and separated.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+PURGATORY.
+
+And Grant Harlson made love to Jean Cornish and won her heart.
+
+But all the time, unconsciously, he was a man of false pretensions, one
+dishonorable and unworthy of her.  His friends knew of his marriage and
+its sequel.  He had never concealed nor thought of concealing his
+condition, and it never occurred to him that Jean Cornish was not aware
+of it.  He had supposed her, if she cared for him as he hoped, to be
+somewhat troubled, but to understand that he would do no mean thing,
+and that all would be well in time.  Then came the sorrow of it, for
+Jean Cornish learned, quite accidentally, that Grant Harlson was a man
+with a living wife.
+
+She would not believe it at first, and, when convinced, was dazed and
+could not understand.  No such shock had ever before come into her
+life.  This man, of whom she had made a hero, a trickster and a liar!
+It seemed as if the world were gone!  There was a meeting and an
+explanation, and she learned how wrong she had been, in one way.
+
+He put the case earnestly and desperately.  He would not yield her.  He
+knew she loved him, and he knew she was too good and wise to suffer
+forever herself or let him suffer because, in society, there were
+blunders.  There was a way out--a clean, right way--and they must take
+it.  He could get a divorce on grounds of mere desertion, and three
+people, at least, would be better off.  It was pitiful, the scene, one
+afternoon.  He had called to see her, and was pleading with her.  It
+was in the drawing-room, and there were stained windows they both
+remembered in later years.  He had talked of his bondage and of his
+hopes.  She was not quite herself; she was suffering too much.  I know
+what happened.  Grant told me once of the wrench of him then, and of
+all the scene.  There had been a fierce appeal from him.  He had become
+almost enraged.
+
+"And so," he said, "you would have a man's marriage like the black
+biretta of Spain that is drawn over the prisoner's head before they
+garrote him?"
+
+She did not move nor speak, but stood straight and silent, her hands
+hanging at her sides with the palms loosely open, the very abandonment
+of pathetic helplessness.
+
+Such a little woman, to withstand a storm of passion!
+
+As he wondered at her curiously blended strength and weakness, a
+sun-shaft blazed through the crimson glass of the upper window.  The
+reddened light, falling on her up-springing almost coppery locks,
+seemed to the man's excited fancy a crown, of thorns, crimsoned with
+blood, and there was, oddly enough, a cross in the window.
+
+The thought of another vicarious sacrifice awed him.  Must this be one,
+too?
+
+"Mistakes, dear, are not crimes.  Can you not understand?  I have been
+mistaken, have suffered, have atoned for my error.  Is that enough?"
+
+"But," she said, and her voice seemed to have suddenly grown old and
+thin, "you have no right to talk of mistakes.  She is your wife."
+
+"The biretta, that ends all, again!  No, not so.  It is as insane and
+inhuman to force two people to remain in wedlock after it has become
+odious to them, as it would be to force them into that marriage at
+first.  Oh, my tender-hearted little one, can you not see that the
+bondage is more humiliating, more craven than is the idea of the
+veriest chattel mortgage?  Yet you refuse to let the injured one go
+free, as you would not refuse the poorest prodigal whose one chance for
+home and happiness was passing from his sight."
+
+"I cannot answer you when you discuss learnedly on such questions," she
+said, with a weary dignity, "for I have never thought about them.  Why
+should I?  It has always seemed to me that a man with more than one
+wife was a--a--Mormon.  It is all so dreadful.  Surely, if a marriage
+is anything, it is a vow before God."
+
+"It is you that make the mistake now," he said, "for the mere form of
+marriage is nothing but the outward evidence of a union that has
+already taken place.  The first is the vow before God--not the latter.
+I understand why you think all this; clergymen have so long been called
+upon to officiate at marriage rites that, with the fatherly assumption
+notable in the order all the world over, they have grown to regard
+themselves as the especial and heaven-appointed guardians of the
+institution.  It is all so grotesque when one remembers how ready they
+are to 'solemnize'--save the mark!--marriage, no matter what the
+conditions.  Have the candidates to be known as right and fitting
+persons?  Is there even the simplest formula of preparatory
+examination?  None!  Two wholly unsuited people may rush into
+marriage--and misery--any day by simply presenting themselves before a
+sleek-faced person who mumbles drowsily over their clasped hands, and
+calls it a vow before God!--as he hurries back to his dinner!"
+
+Still she was silent.
+
+An errand boy trudging by whistled a few bars of the wedding march,
+doubtless heard that day at some open church door.
+
+"Dear, there is a higher, holier law of the great Power, who made us
+what we are, than this one of slavish obedience to a tradition.  Why
+must our feet go in the burning ruts?"
+
+"It is not the well-worn ruts that burn, but the by-paths," she
+answered, "and oh! _how_ they burn!"
+
+"Let me lift you in my arms and carry you over them, then, that your
+feet may not touch.  Do not be unjust to yourself.  Cannot you see how
+right, how good it is?  It is not as if I came to you from another
+woman----"
+
+The girl faced around on him almost fiercely.
+
+"No, you could not be so bad as that!  To have felt the morning kiss of
+another woman, to have watched her good-night smile, and then to have
+come to me--that would have been too base, too degrading--I should have
+hated you because I despised you.  I should have loathed you
+instead----"
+
+"Of loving me!  Be honest and true, little Jean--you do care."
+
+"Yes, I have cared."
+
+"And do still?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Her tone was as cold and as clear as the sound of an icicle striking
+the frozen earth in the fall.  It angered him, and his voice shook
+roughly.
+
+"A man who binds up his life in the love of a woman is a fool!  Because
+she is all the world to him, all he works to receive praise from, all
+he fears in the blaming, he thinks her capable of as much love as
+himself.  And even as he watches, he sees her pass from fervor into
+apathy.  Her affection is but the dry husks of what he hoped to find.
+You never cared!"
+
+"Grant," she said, earnestly, "you have told me to be honest.  I will
+be.  I think"--with a little laugh--"that if I had been a man I should
+not have been a coward.  I shall not be now.  You wrong me and yourself
+when you say that I never cared.  It is because my caring has been so
+much a part of myself that I have never been able to stand aloof and
+look and comment upon it.  It was just me.  When I lived, it lived;
+when I die----"
+
+"My love!"
+
+"When--no.  I do not believe it can die even then!  I think it is a
+part of my soul, and will outstand all time."
+
+She hesitated as if devising words to express herself with even more
+sweet abandon.  There was a certain loving recklessness in what she
+uttered now:
+
+"Not care?  I wish you, too, would understand!  Perhaps it is because
+we care in such different ways.  I don't know, but to me it has been
+all!  There is no joy, no pleasure, however petty, through all the day,
+but it brings with it the swift desire to share it with you.  Every
+morning I waken with your half-uttered name on my lips, as though, when
+I slipped hack through the portals of consciousness into the world of
+reality, I came only to find you, as a timid child awakes and calls
+feebly for its mother.  Once, not long ago, in a street accident, such
+as you know of in our busy city, I seemed very close to death, and in
+an instant my spirit seemed to have overleaped the peril and the
+terrible scene, and was with you.  Afterward, one who sat near me said
+that, while some screamed or prayed, I said only 'Grant,' and he asked,
+lightly, now that danger was over: 'Is the great general your patron
+saint?'  And I--I did not know that I had said it, since the name can
+never be as near to my lips as it is to my heart."
+
+Harlson did not reply.  He could not then.  His head was bent.
+
+"And when you were ill--ah! then it was the hardest of all!  I dreamed
+of the little things I could do for you--how your dear head could rest
+on my shoulders, and it might help to ease the pain; how I could save
+you from annoyances; how I could--love you!"
+
+"Then come, love of me; I need you--we need each other."
+
+"No, I think a woman who loves a man could scarcely bear that he had
+ever been bound to another still living, or even dead."
+
+"But----"
+
+"No.  It is not right."
+
+It is not always that even he who is right and strong in the
+consciousness of it, and resolute toward the end he is seeking may
+express himself as he would in protest against the object yielding to
+what is in the social world, though it be wrong.  Grant Harlson looked
+down upon the slender figure and into the earnest face and was helpless
+for the time.  Yet he was fixed of mind.
+
+He was very tender with her, but this was not a man to give up easily
+what was his.  He pleaded with her further, but in vain.  She would not
+yield.
+
+And so the weeks passed, with the problem yet unsolved.  They were
+still much together, for she could not turn him away, and he would not
+stay away.  There was more pleading on his part, and more anger
+sometimes.  It seemed to him absurd that lives should be blighted
+because of a legend.
+
+And she was unhappy, and, it may be, gradually attaining to broader
+views and moral bravery.  Jean Cornish was courageous, but there was
+the legend.
+
+And suddenly all was changed, the problem finding a solution not
+expected.  Grant Harlson's wife was, as has been said, a woman of
+reason and of force, and she had her own life, with its objects.  She
+chafed under the bond which still connected her with Harlson, and she
+broke it cleanly.  It was she, not he, who sought divorce, and the
+simple logical ground of incompatibility of temperament was all that
+was required, in the State where she resided.  There was no defense.
+Grant Harlson became free, and Jean Cornish, since his freedom came in
+this way, promised, at last, to become his wife.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+TWO FOOLS.
+
+They loved.  They were to marry, but there were the conventionalities
+to be observed, and they could not be wed at once.  That was understood
+by Grant Harlson, though he chafed at it a little.
+
+There were certain months to be passed before the two would be as one
+completely, and those months were very sweet months to the twain.  They
+were much together, this man and woman who were plighted to each other,
+for why should they not be, since they were to become man and wife, and
+since neither was so happy under other circumstances?  They were not
+what a profound, unsentimental person would consider models of
+common-sense, but they were not depending upon the opinions of
+profound, unsentimental persons for anything in particular; so this did
+not affect them.
+
+They exhibited no great interest in society, though each commanded a
+place there, but they would go to church or theater together, and they
+were much addicted to luncheons.  She would come down town at noon to
+meet him, and then--what banquets!  Sometimes they would visit the
+restaurants where there were fine things, and he would seek to make of
+her a gourmet.  He taught her the beauties of the bobolink in his later
+attractive form, the form he assumes when, after having been
+transformed into a reed bird, he comes back on ice to the region where,
+in the midsummer, he disported himself, and stirs the heart of the good
+liver, as in June he did the heart of the poet.  He taught her the
+difference between Roquefort cheese, that green garden of toothsome
+fungi, that crumbly, piquant apotheosis of the best that comes from
+curd, and all other cheeses, and taught, too, the virtues of each in
+its own way.  She learned the adjuncts of black coffee and hard
+crackers.  She even learned to criticise a claret, and once, with
+Harlson, she tested a _pousse cafe_, but only once.  He didn't approve
+of it, he said, for ladies.  And, besides, a _pousse cafe_ was not of
+merit in itself.  It was but a thing spectacular.
+
+And in the matter of made dishes from the man about town she acquired
+much wisdom.
+
+The man in his great happiness was buoyant and fantastic, and well it
+was that the woman, too, possessed the sense of humor which makes the
+world worth occupancy, and that the two could understand together.  He
+was but a foolish boy in this, his delicious period of probation.
+
+And she was but a loving woman who had given her heart to him, who
+understood him, and who, in a woman's way, was of his mood.  It was an
+idyl of the clever.
+
+At the more modest restaurants were the lunches of these two the most
+delightful.  He would, somehow, find queer little places where all was
+clean and the cooking good, but far away from the haunts of men, that
+is, far away from the haunts of the men and women they knew, and there
+the two would have great feasts.  At one unpretending place he had one
+day found pork and beans,--not the molasses-colored abomination
+ordinarily sold in town, but the white beans, baked in a deep pan, with
+the slashed piece of pork browned in the middle of the dish,--and this
+place became a great resort for them.  They would sit at a small table,
+and have the beans brought on, and mustard of the sharpest and
+shrewdest, and dishes such as formed a halo about the beans, which were
+the central figure, and then would they eat, being healthy, and look
+into each other's face, and riot in present happiness, having certain
+brains and being in love.  The very rudeness of it pleased him mightily.
+
+One evening they had dined together.  She had been shopping or doing
+what it is that women do down town of afternoons, and he had met her at
+the close of business, and they had eaten together as usual, and when
+they emerged into the open air it was but to learn that the mercury had
+dropped some few degrees, and that the jacket she wore was light for
+the occasion.  She became cold before her home was reached, and he was
+troubled.
+
+"I wish it were months later," he said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because then I could care for you, and see to it that you did not
+suffer from the chill.  I don't know though, even with the admirable
+supervision I'd have over you then, whether you would take proper care
+of yourself, my Brownie.  What would you do?"
+
+"I don't know quite," she answered.  "I think I should want to get
+pretty near the grate.  I'd pull one of the tiger-skins or bear-skins
+on the rug, very close to the fire, and I'd curl down on the fur and
+turn about a little, and get very warm."
+
+He assumed a lofty air, and announced that he was under the impression
+that, when chilled, she would do nothing of the sort!  He had his own
+ideas regarding the treatment of chills of small, brown women.  What
+would really occur, what the solid, tangible fact of the occasion would
+be, required no effort to describe.  He should merely draw a great
+easy-chair before the grate.  Then some one would be picked up and
+turned about before the fire until thoroughly warmed and with full
+circulation of the blood again.  She should be simply, but
+scientifically, toasted:
+
+  "I'd hold you thus before the brand,
+  To catch caloric blisses,
+  And you should be my muffin and
+  I'd butter you with kisses."
+
+She responded that the gift of doggerel was not one to be desired, and,
+furthermore, that she was not a muffin, nor anything in the culinary
+way.
+
+All of which, of course, served but as provocation to further
+flippancy, and, for days later, the lady was referred to as his own
+sweetest soda biscuit, his bun, his precious fruit-cake, and so on,
+until a bakery's terms were so exhausted.  All this was, no doubt,
+silliness.
+
+The woman, in her way, was not less inexcusable than the man.  She was
+as much in love as he, and the strictly personal equation was as strong
+within her.  She would watch him when they were at lunch together, and
+if her gaze was not so bold and feeding as was his, it was at heart as
+earnest.
+
+She wanted to do something, because of the passionately loving mood
+within her.  She wanted to "hurt" him just a little, and one day
+occurred an odd thing.
+
+They were chatting across a little table in a restaurant almost vacant
+save for them, and he had made some grotesque sweetheart comment which
+had pleased her fancy, lovingly alert, and she suddenly straightened in
+her seat and looked at him with eyes which were becoming dewy, but said
+never a word.
+
+She looked all about the room in one swift, comprehensive glance, and
+then, leaning over, with her small right hand she smote him hardly upon
+the cheek.  There was no occasion for such demonstration.  It was but
+the outpouring, the sweet, barbaric fancy of the woman, in line with
+the man's grotesquerie, and not one whit less affectionate.  And he,
+thus smitten, made no remonstrance nor defense, further than to refer
+incidentally to his slender sweet assailant as "a burly ruffian."
+
+That evening, at her home, he suddenly, just before leaving, picked up
+the woman, as if she were a baby, and threatened to carry her away with
+him.  She did not appear alarmed, at least to the extent of hysteria,
+though she struggled feebly, and said that somebody was a big, brutal
+gorilla, and that she did not propose to be snatched from the bosom of
+her tribe to be conveyed to some tree-top refuge, and there become a
+monster's bride.
+
+He would assert at times, and the idea was one he clung to with great
+persistency, that the person with him was not even of the race, but had
+been substituted in the cradle for a white child stolen by an Indian
+woman with some great wrong to avenge.  He would call her his Chippewa
+Changeling, and at lunch would be most solicitous as to whether or not
+the Wild Rose would have a little more of the chicken salad.  Would the
+Flying Pawn try the celery?  Some of the jelly, he felt confident,
+would please the palate of the Brown Dove.  Might the white hunter help
+her to a little more of this or that?  Only once she rebelled.  She was
+laughing at something he had said, and he referred to her benignantly
+as his Minnegiggle, which was, admittedly, an outrage.
+
+A great fancy of these two it was to imagine themselves a couple apart
+from the crowd, and unversed in city ways, and just from the country.
+Not from the farm would they come, but from some town of moderate size,
+for they prided themselves on not being altogether ignorant.  Far from
+it.  Was there not a city hall in Blossomville, and a high-school, and
+were there not social functions there?  But, of course, it was a little
+different in a great city, and it would be well not to mingle too
+recklessly with the multitude.
+
+They would even visit the circus when one of those "aggregations" made
+the summer hideous, and he would buy her peanuts and observe all the
+conventional rules laid down for rural deportment on such occasions.
+The whimsicality, the childishness of it all, gave it a charm.  They
+appreciated anything together.  Harlson said, one day:
+
+"I believe that an old proverb should be changed.  'He laughs best who
+laughs last,' is incorrect.  It should be: 'He laughs best who laughs
+with some one else.'  And that is what will make us strong in life, my
+love.  Some trying times may come, but we shall be brave.  We'll just
+look at each other, and laugh, because we shall understand.  We know.
+We, somehow, comprehend together.  Don't you see?  Of course you do,
+because, if you didn't understand, what I am saying would be nonsense."
+
+She understood well enough.  She understood his very heart-beats.  It
+had grown that way.
+
+"I am getting very much like you, I think," she said, "and I want you
+to understand, sir, that I do not regret it.  I'm afraid I'm lost
+totally.  I'm not alarmed that it is as if your blood were in my veins.
+What can a poor girl do?"
+
+"You might as well abandon yourself," he answered.  "What is it they do
+in a part of Africa, when something to last forever is intended?  I
+think they drink a little of another's blood.  Could you do that?"
+
+She laughed.  "I could drink yours."
+
+He bared his arm in an instant, and sank the point of a pen-knife into
+a small vein.  The red current came out upon the smooth skin prettily.
+She looked at Harlson's act in astonishment, and turned a little pale;
+then, all at once, with a great resolve in her eyes, she bent swiftly
+forward and applied the red of her lips to that upon the arm.  She
+raised her head proudly, and he looked at her delightedly.
+
+"How did it taste?"
+
+"Salty"--with a pucker of her lips and a desperate effort to keep from
+fainting.
+
+"Yes, there is much saline matter in blood.  Even such admirable blood
+as that you have just tasted is, no doubt, a little salty.  Are you
+sorry you did it?"
+
+"No," she said, bravely, but she was pallid still.
+
+"Allow me to remind you that science has learned many things, and that
+you will have, literally, some of my blood in your veins.  Not much, it
+is true, but there will be a little."
+
+She replied that she was glad of it.
+
+And henceforth, when her moods most pleased his lordship, he would
+comment on the good effect of the experiment, and when they differed he
+would regret that she had not taken more of him.
+
+They were two fools.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+"MY LITTLE RHINOCEROS-BIRD."
+
+It was not all sweet nonsense, though, with this man and woman.  Some
+practical things of life became theirs soon, because of the love which
+was theirs.
+
+A curious thing, and to me a pleasant thing, occurred one night.  I was
+with Grant Harlson in his room, and he was lying on a sofa smoking,
+while I lounged in an easy-chair.  Harlson was pretty well fagged out,
+for it was the end of a hard day for him, as, for that matter, it had
+been for me.  There was a ward to be carried against a ring, and
+Harlson was in the midst of the fray for half a hundred reasons, and I
+was aiding him.  He headed the more reputable faction, but in the
+opposition were many shrewd men and men of standing.
+
+It was no simple task we had before us, and we had been working hard,
+and we were not quite satisfied with the condition of things.  The
+relations of two men of prominence we wanted to know particularly.  Had
+there, or had there not, been a coalition between them?  If there had,
+it would change Harlson's policy, naturally, but work so far had been
+conducted on the supposition that an ancient political feud between the
+two was not yet ended, and that upon the support of one against the
+other he could count with reasonable certainty.  We were discussing
+this very matter when there came a ring at the door, and a cab-driver
+entered.
+
+"There is a lady in my cab," said he, "who wants to see Mr. Harlson."
+
+Harlson was puzzled.
+
+"I don't know what it means," he said.  "Come down with me and we'll
+solve the mystery," and we went to where the cab was drawn close to the
+sidewalk.
+
+The door was opened with some energy, and a woman's head appeared--a
+head with brown hair.
+
+"Grant!"
+
+"Jean!  What is the matter?  What brings you here at such a time?  My
+poor child."
+
+She laughed.  "There is nothing the matter, you big baby.  Only I heard
+something I thought you would care to know, and which I thought you
+should know at once, so I came to tell you."
+
+"Yes, tell me."
+
+"It was this way, you see."  All this impetuously.  "I was at Mrs.
+Carlson's party, and among the guests were Mr. Gordon and Mr. Mason,
+with their wives.  I didn't listen intentionally, of course, but Mr.
+Mason and Mr. Gordon came close to where I was sitting and I heard your
+name mentioned, and I suppose that made my hearing suddenly acute, and
+I heard in two sentences enough to know that those two gentlemen are
+working together against you in something political.  So, sir, knowing
+your foolish interest in such things, and actuated by my foolish
+interest in you, I told aunt I'd like to go home early, and a cab was
+called and I was put into it, and I told the driver to come here,
+and--you know the rest, you staring personage."
+
+Women can read men's faces, and Jean Cornish must have been repaid for
+what she had done by the mere look of the man before her.  He said
+nothing for a moment, and then uttered only these words softly:
+
+"My little rhinoceros-bird."
+
+"Will you kindly explain the meaning of that extraordinary phrase?"
+
+He did not answer just then, but got into the cab with her and directed
+the driver to her home.
+
+She had removed her wraps in the drawing-room when she turned to him
+and demanded further information as to the term applied to her.  He
+made comment on some people's general ignorance of natural history,
+took a big arm-chair, placed the young lady in a low seat close beside
+him, and, assuming a ponderous, pedagogical air, began:
+
+"The rhinoceros, my child, as you may possibly be aware, is a huge
+beast of uncouth appearance, with a horn on its nose, and inhabiting
+the wild regions of certain wild countries, notably Africa.  It is a
+dangerous animal, and has enemies galore and friends but few.  The
+hunter counts it a noble prize, and steals upon it in its fastnesses,
+and even a rhinoceros may not withstand the explosive bullet of modern
+science.  Somewhat sluggish and dull, at times, is the rhinoceros, and
+it is in his careless, listless moods that he is liable to fall a
+victim.  Well for him is it on such occasions that he has a friend, a
+guardian, a tiny lover.  Well for him that the rhinoceros-bird exists!
+The rhinoceros-bird is a little thing which never deserts the mighty
+beast.  It perches upon his head or back, and flutters about him, and
+makes of him its world.  To the rhinoceros-bird the rhinoceros is all
+there is of earth.  And well is the brute repaid for liking the bird
+about him.  Though the monster may have stupid periods, the bird has
+none, and, hovering about bushes, fluttering over openings, ever alert,
+watchful and solicitous, naught may escape its eye, and, danger once
+discovered, swift is the warning to the slumbering giant, and then woe
+to the intruder on his domain!  And such, dear pupil, is the
+rhinoceros-bird.  And you are my rhinoceros-bird."
+
+She understood, of course.  The look in her eyes told that, but her
+words belied her.
+
+She said that, in a general way, the simile had application, the
+rhinoceros being a huge beast of uncouth appearance.
+
+And, so far as this conversation was concerned, he perished miserably.
+
+But that was only the beginning of a practical exhibition of the
+woman's earnestness and acuteness, and her great love.  It was but
+evidence that she was to be, what she became in time, his
+rhinoceros-bird in all things, his right hand, prompter in such
+relations as a woman's wit and woman's way best serve.  She was of him.
+But with two who blended, so there must be many added intervals of
+delicious nonsense before the reality of marriage came.
+
+They made odd names for things.  They ate lobster together one day, and
+he, in some mood, kept misquoting and distorting passages from the
+Persian poet, and thenceforth broiled lobster was known to the two as
+"a Rubaiyat."  And there were a score or two of other bizarre titles
+they had made for things or for localities, with the instinct of so
+embalming a perfect recollection.  And each had certain tricks of
+speech, of course, as have all human beings, and these two, so living
+in each other, caught all these, and mocked and gibed and imitated,
+until there was little difference in their pronunciations.  To some one
+overhearing them they might have been deemed as of unsound mind, though
+they were only talking in love's volapuk.
+
+They resembled each other, these two beings, as nearly in bodily
+fancies as in other ways.  Each, for instance, was a great water lover,
+each addicted to the bath and perfumes, he perhaps because of his long
+gymnasium training, and she from the instinct of all purity which
+appertains to all women worth the owning.
+
+One afternoon they had fled from the city and were walking on the
+beach, beside the lake, with no one near them.  For a mile in either
+direction, they could look up and down and see that no intruder was in
+sight.  He sent flat stones skipping and galloping over the waves with
+some whirling trick of underthrow, and tried to teach her the device of
+it, and they sat upon the sand and ate the luncheon he had secured
+preparatory to this great excursion, a luncheon devised with great
+skill by a great caterer, and packed in a paper box which would go in a
+coat-pocket, and they talked of many things and delighted in being
+together, and alone.  And he, floundering in the sand, must needs get
+much of it inside his shoe.  And then this reckless person, having
+removed the shoe to rid himself of the sand, must needs step in a
+treacherous spot and wet his stocking dismally.  And the sensible thing
+to do was to remove the stocking and dry it in the sun.
+
+There should be, so far as its relation to society is concerned, no
+difference between the human hand and the human foot, but, somehow, the
+average man is not, as a rule, ready to exhibit his bare feet
+carelessly to the one woman, and to the average woman a similar
+revelation would seem a thing indelicate; but these two were not of the
+common sort.  Harlson pulled off his stocking as carefully as he would
+have done a glove, and spread it on the sand where it might dry, and,
+laughing at his disaster, he dabbled with his foot in the sand.
+
+She looked at him curiously.  She looked at the foot, too, being a
+woman, and this being the man above all others to her, and then she
+laughed out joyously and frankly.
+
+"I don't believe any one but you would have done that, Grant.  And what
+a foot you have!"
+
+He replied, with much pomposity, that it was the far-famed Arabian
+foot, the instep of which arched so beautifully that water could flow
+beneath it without wetting the skin.  Just at present, though, he
+thought a little water might run over it to advantage, instead of
+under, the sand being a trifle mucky.  And why would no one else have
+done such a thing?  And he was glad she liked his foot; in fact, he was
+glad she liked anything about him, and rather wondered that she did,
+and the world had become to him a good place to live in.
+
+All of which was but the sentimentalism which appertains to a man and a
+woman in love with each other, but the drift of thought continued in
+the direction suggested by his action and her comment.  They looked at
+the lake, with its shifting coloring of green and blue and purple, and
+he told her how, some day, he would teach her to swim like a Sandwich
+Island beauty, and she said she would like to learn.  She liked the
+water.
+
+"I'm very glad of that," he commented; "I like it myself.  I am a great
+bather.  I admire the English for the 'tubbing' which is made such a
+subject of jest against them by other people.  There must be water into
+which I may tumble when I rise in the morning, or water in abundance in
+some way, else I should be a trifle uncomfortable all day long.  I
+don't mean just a mild lavatory business, you know, but a plunge or a
+cataract, or something of that sort.  It is barely possible, my dear,
+that you are going to marry a man whose remote ancestors were the
+product of evolution from otters, instead of monkeys.  Think of that!"
+
+And she confessed, half-blushingly, her own regard for water, and that
+she had been laughed at by other women for what they deemed a fancy
+carried to an extreme.  And she said she was very glad that a great big
+Somebody was dainty in his ways.  While in many respects she could not
+approve of him, it was a comfort, at least, to be enabled to think of
+him as ever clean and wholesome, and as having one weakness of which
+she could condone.
+
+He looked at her majesty, as she sat enthroned upon a little mound, but
+to her small oration made no reply.  He was worshiping her bodily.  And
+from this conversation came a sequel, a day or two later, which was but
+the worshiping put into things material.  Of his love and the bath he
+would have fancies, and he wanted what touched her to be from him.  She
+was surprised by a cumbrous package which, opened, revealed great
+things for a woman's dalliance with water--the soft Turkish towel, vast
+enough to envelop her, the perfumed soaps, and even the bath-mittens.
+And she was a little frightened, maybe, at the personality of it all,
+but she recognized the nature of his fancy, and but loved him the more
+because he had it.  It was an odd gift, it is true, but they were odd
+people.  They were very close together.
+
+An eventful day in other respects, that is, from a lover's point of
+view, was this one of the outing by the lake.  The stocking dried, and
+in its proper place upon the foot, and inside the shoe again, and the
+lunch dispatched, there was more idle rambling by the lakeside, and, of
+course, more lovers' talk.  At one place there was a little wood which
+extended to the water's edge, and there she perched herself in a seat
+formed by the bent limb of an upturned tree, and he produced from his
+coat-pocket a paper of macaroons for her dessert, and she sat there
+munching them like a monkey, while he sprawled, again upon the sand.
+She made a pretty picture, this small, brown woman, thus exalted; to
+him a wonderful one.  Suddenly she ceased her munching and spoke to him
+imperiously:
+
+"Come here, sir."
+
+He rose and went to her, standing before her, obedient and waiting.
+She reached up and took his face between her hands, and pulled his face
+gently downward until the faces of the two were close together.  She
+looked into his eyes.
+
+"I merely called you up, sir," she said, "to impart a certain piece of
+information.  I am in love with you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+TWO FOOLS STILL.
+
+When a woman, who is all there is in the world to a man, falls into the
+deliciously generous mood of abandonment, and is revealing what is in
+her heart, the man, I understand from various excellent authorities,
+gets about as near heaven as he may ever do in the flesh.  And Harlson
+formed no exception to the rule.  The small personage on the limb of
+the fallen tree owned him as absolutely and completely as ever
+Cleopatra owned a slave, or Elizabeth a servitor.
+
+"I don't know what to say," he murmured.  "There aren't any
+words--but--you understand."
+
+She pulled his face still closer and kissed him on the lips, though
+blushing as she did so, for this young woman had fancies regarding lips
+and regarding kisses which should be entertained by a greater number of
+the women of the land.  Then she told him to lie upon the sand again;
+that she wanted to look at him.  And he obeyed, machine-like.
+
+She was in a fantastic mood assuredly.  She watched him, her cheek
+resting upon one little hand for a long time, a thoughtful look upon
+her face.  Then she broke out impetuously:
+
+"How smooth and clean your face is!  Do you--do you go to--you know
+what I mean.  Do you go to a barber every day?"
+
+He answered that he shaved himself.
+
+"Is it very hard?" she asked.
+
+"Well, that depends."
+
+She studied once more for a long time, then spoke again, on this
+occasion blushing furiously:
+
+"Grant, dear, I want to _do_ things for you always.  I want to take
+care of you.  It seems to me that, some time, I might learn, you know.
+It seems to me that some time I might almost"--with a little
+gasp--"shave you."
+
+He wanted to gather her up in his arms and smother and caress her,
+after that climax of tender admission, but she waved her hand as she
+saw him rising.  He fell back then upon his ignoble habit of talking
+vast science to her.
+
+"My dear, that dream may, I hope, be realized.  I'd rather have my face
+slashed by you than be shaved by the most careful, conscientious and
+silent barber in all Christendom, but shaving is a matter of much
+gravity.  It is not the removal of the beard which tests the intellect;
+it is the sharpening of the razors."
+
+"How is that, sir?"
+
+"All razors are feminine, and things of moods.  The razor you sharpen
+to-day may not be sharp, though manipulated upon hone or strap with all
+persistence and all skill.  The razor you sharpen to-morrow may be far
+more tractable.  Furthermore, the razor which is comparatively dull
+to-day may be sharp to-morrow, without further treatment."
+
+She said that, in her opinion, that was nonsense, and that he was
+trying to impose upon a friendless girl, because the topic was one of
+which men would, ordinarily, have a monopoly, and regarding which they
+would assume all wisdom, and, perhaps, make jests.
+
+"I am in earnest," he said.  "Razors have moods, and are known to sulk.
+But science has solved the conundrum of their antics.  It has been
+discovered that whetting changes the location of the molecules of
+metal, that there is frequently left what is not a perfect edge after
+the supposed sharpening, but that, given time, the molecules will
+readjust themselves, and the edge return.  My dear, you are now, or at
+least should be, a woman rarely learned in one great mystery.  Is there
+no reward for merit?"
+
+She scorned reply to such a screed, but slid down from her perch with
+the remark that she had "et hearty."  A man who had eaten near them in
+a restaurant had used the expression, and they had both promptly
+adopted it.
+
+He rose, went to her side, and leaned over, and inhaled the perfume of
+her hair.
+
+She looked up mischievously.  "You are a big black animal!"
+
+As already remarked, these two were very foolish.
+
+That same evening, when Grant Harlson reached his office, he found a
+note awaiting him.  It was a pretty, perfumed thing, and he knew the
+handwriting upon it well.  He had not seen the writer for three months.
+He had almost forgotten her existence, yet she had been one with whom
+his life had been, upon a time, closely associated.  He opened the
+envelope and read the note:
+
+
+MY DEAR GRANT: Yon know I am philosophical--for a woman--and that I
+have never been exacting.  I have formed habits, though, and have
+certain foolish ways.  One of these ways was to be much with Grant
+Harlson, not very long ago.  I lost him, somehow, but still have a
+curiosity to see his face again, to note if it has changed.  I have
+something to say to him, too.  Please call upon me to-night.  ADA.
+
+
+The effect of the note upon the man was not altogether pleasant.  He
+felt a certain guiltiness at his own indifference.  This clever woman
+of the social world he knew was not to be trifled with by one unarmored
+or irresolute.  He had hoped she would forget him, that his own
+indifference would breed the same feeling upon her part, and now he
+knew he was mistaken, as men have been mistaken before.  There was an
+interview to be faced, and one promising interesting features.  He
+started on the mission with a grimace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+JUST A PANG.
+
+Mrs. Gorse was at home, the servant said, and Harlson found her
+awaiting him in a room which was worth a visit, so luxurious were its
+appointments and so delicate its colorings and its perfumes.  A woman
+of admirable taste was Mrs. Gorse, and one who knew how to produce
+dramatic effect.  But dramatic effects as between her and Grant Harlson
+were things of the past.  People sometimes know each other so well that
+the introduction of anything but reality is absurd.  Mrs. Gorse
+attempted nothing as Harlson entered.  She was not posed.  She was
+standing, and met him at the door smilingly.
+
+"How do you do, Grant?"
+
+"I'm well," he said, "and how are you?  Certainly you are looking well."
+
+"I am not ill.  I think I am not plumper nor more thin than usual.  I
+imagine my weight is normal."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"And how much is that?"
+
+The woman flushed a little.
+
+"It is hardly worth the telling, since you do not remember.  There was
+a time, you know, when you had some whim about it, and when I had to
+report to you.  You professed to be solicitous about my health or
+personal appearance, or whatever it was that led you to the demand.
+And you have forgotten."
+
+He was uneasy.  "That is true, Ada.  I did have that fad, didn't I?
+Well, I forget the figures, but I see that you are still yourself, and
+as you should be."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders.  "Take the big chair.  It's the one you
+like best.  You see I don't forget certain trifles" (this with a slight
+trembling inflection).  "And tell me about yourself.  I haven't seen
+you for three months and over.  Haven't you been out of town.  Couldn't
+you have written me a note."
+
+"I've not been out of town.  I might have written you a note, but I
+didn't suppose it mattered."
+
+"Yet there is a legend to the effect that men and women sometimes get
+to be such friends, and have such relations, that a sudden unexplained
+absence of three months matters a great deal."
+
+"That is so.  But--what is the use, Ada?  It doesn't matter with us,
+does it?  Are we not each capable of taking care of ourselves?  Were we
+ever of the conventionally sentimental?"
+
+She sighed.  "I suppose not.  But it grew that way a little, didn't it,
+Grant?  Has it all been nothing to you?"
+
+"I won't say that," he answered.  "It has been a great deal to me, but
+isn't it wiser to make all in the past tense now?  What have we to
+gain?"
+
+She tried to smile.  "Nothing, I suppose."  Then breaking out fiercely:
+"You are a strange man!  You are like the creature Margrave, in
+Bulwer's hard 'Strange Story,' with mind and body, but with no soul nor
+sympathy."
+
+The man in his turn became almost angry.  He spoke more grimly:
+
+"You are not just!  Have I broken any pledge or violated any promise,
+even an implied one?  Have we not known each other on even terms?  It
+was but a pact for mutual enjoyment until either should be weary.  We
+have no illusions.  You a Lilith of the red earth, not of Adam; you a
+woman sweet and passionate and kind, but soulless, too, and fickle; and
+I a trained man, made as soulless by experience, we met and agreed,
+without words, to break a lance in a flirtation.  And that both lances
+were splintered doesn't matter now.  We had joy in the encounter,
+didn't we, and more after each surrendered captive?  But it has been
+only mimic warfare.  It has not been the real thing."
+
+"Evidently not--to you!  Unfortunately one forgets sometimes, and then
+one is endangered."
+
+He was troubled.  He rose and came to her side, and put his hand upon
+her head, the usually proudly carried head of a handsome woman, now
+bowed in the effort to hide a face which told too much.  "It is all
+unfortunate.  It is unfortunate that we met, if you care as you
+profess.  I had counted us as equal; that you were, with me, caring for
+the day and never for the morrow, so far as we two were concerned."
+
+She raised her face.  "Do you love me?" she said.
+
+He hesitated.  "I am fond of you."
+
+"Do you love me?"
+
+"In the sense that I suppose you mean, no."
+
+She did not look at him for a moment; then she rose swiftly to her feet
+and looked squarely in his face.
+
+"Is there some one else?"
+
+He did not answer.
+
+"Is there some one else?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then it _is_ unfortunate, as you say--and for her."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"I mean that I will not endure to be dropped by you as a child drops a
+toy of which it is weary.  I mean that I will not surrender you to some
+new creature who has intervened!  What does it matter that there has
+been no pledge between us?  You have made me love you!  You know it!
+The very being to each other what you and I have been is a pledge for
+the future.  Oh, Grant!"
+
+The woman's eyes were full of tears, and her voice was a moan.  The man
+was suffering both shame and agony.  He knew that, careless as he had
+been, the relations had grown to imply a permanency.  The woman was at
+least justified in her claims that words are not always necessary to a
+contract.  What could he do?  Then came the thought of Jean.  One hair
+of her brown head was more to him than this woman, or any other woman
+he had ever known.  He was decided.
+
+"I am a brute, Ada," he said, "or, at least, I have to be brutal.  We
+do care for each other in a certain way, and we have found together
+many of the good things in living, but we are not lovers in the greater
+sense.  We never could be.  It means much.  It means a knitting
+together of lives, a oneness, a confluence of soul and heart and
+passions, and a disposition to sacrifice, if need be.  We have not been
+that way, and are not.  We have been more like two chess-players.  We
+have had a mutual pleasure in the game, but we have been none the less
+antagonists.  The playing is over, that is all.  It doesn't matter who
+has won the game.  We will call it drawn, or you may have it.  But it
+is ended!"
+
+She stood with one hand upon her breast.  There came a shadow of pain
+to her face, and a hard look followed.
+
+"It is nonsense talking about the game.  The playing ended a year ago,
+and you were the winner.  Now you are careless about the prize!  Well"
+(bitterly), "it may not be worth much--to you."
+
+"It is worth a great deal.  It has been worth a great deal to me.  But
+I must relinquish it."
+
+"Why did you make me care for you?" she demanded, fiercely, again.
+
+"I did not do more than you did.  As I said before, we played the game
+together.  It is but the usual way of a flirting man and woman.  We
+should have each been more on guard."
+
+The woman was silent for a little time, and it was evident that she was
+making an effort at self-control.  She succeeded.  She had half-turned
+her back to Harlson, and when she again faced him, she had assumed her
+dignity.
+
+"You are right, after all," she said.  "I did not consider your own
+character well enough.  You tire of things.  You will tire of the woman
+you love now.  And you will come back to me, just because I have been
+less sentimental, and, so, less monotonous than some others.  Whether
+or not I shall receive you time will determine.  Is that the way you
+want me to look at it?"
+
+He bowed.  "That is perhaps as good a way as any.  It doesn't matter.
+Will you shake hands, Ada?"
+
+She reached out her hand listlessly, and he took it.  A minute later
+and he was on the street.  And so the last link of one sort with the
+past was broken.  It was long--though he had no concealments from
+her--before he told Jean of this interview.  And then he did not tell
+the woman's name, nor did she care to know.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+AS TO THOSE OTHERS.
+
+Time passes, even with an impatient lover, and so there came an end at
+last to Grant Harlson's season of probation.  There was nothing
+dramatic about the wedding.
+
+To him the ceremony was merely the gaining of the human title-deed to
+the fortune which was his on earth, and to Jean Cornish it was but the
+giving of herself fully to the man--that which she wished to do with
+herself.  There were few of us present, but we were the two's closest
+friends.  They were a striking pair as they stood together and plighted
+their faith calmly: he big and strong, almost to the point of
+burliness, and she slight, sweet and lissom.  There was no nervousness
+apparent in either, perhaps because there was such earnestness.  And
+then he carried her away from us.
+
+They had not been long away, this newly wedded couple, when they
+returned to the home he had prepared.  As he remarked half grimly to
+me, in comment on lost years, they had met so late in the nesting
+season that time should not be wasted.  Of that home more will be told
+in other pages, but it is only of the two people I am talking now.
+
+I noted a difference in their way when I first dined with them, which I
+did, of course, as soon as they had returned.  I had thought them very
+close together before in thought and being, but I saw that there was
+more.  The sweet, sacred intimacy which marriage afforded had given the
+greater fullness to what had seemed to me already perfect.  But I was
+one with much to learn of many things.  And yet these two were to come
+closer still--closer through a better mutual understanding and new
+mutual hopes.  It was long afterward when I understood.
+
+It was after dinner one day, and in the sitting-room, which was a
+library as well.  They were going out that evening, but it was early
+still, and he was leaning back in a big chair smoking the post-prandial
+cigar, and she coiled upon a lower seat very near him, so near that he
+could put his hand upon her head, and they were talking lightly of many
+things.  She looked up more earnestly at last.
+
+"Will you ever tire of it, Grant?"
+
+He laughed happily.
+
+"Tire of what, Brownie?"
+
+"Of this, of me, and of it all; will you never weary of the quietness
+of it and want some change?  You must care very much, indeed, if you
+will not."
+
+He spoke slowly.
+
+"It seems to me that though we were to live each a thousand years, I
+would never tire of this as it is.  But, of course, it will not be just
+this way.  We could not keep it so if we would, and would not if we
+could."
+
+"Why should it change?"
+
+He drew her close to him and placed his hand upon her face and kissed
+her on the forehead.
+
+"I shall be more in the fray again.  I must be.  You would not have
+your husband a sluggard among men, and that will sometimes take me from
+you, though never for long, because I'm afraid I shall be selfish and
+have you with me when there are long journeys.  And it will change,
+too, you know--because you see, dear, there may be the--the others.
+You hope so, with me, do you not?"
+
+Her face remained hidden for a little time.  When she raised it, there
+was a blush upon her cheeks, but her eyes had not the glance he had
+anticipated.
+
+"No!" she said.
+
+He did not reply, because he could not comprehend.  He looked at her,
+astonished, and she broke forth recklessly:
+
+"I love you so, Grant!  I love you so!  I want you, just you, and no
+one else.  Are we not happy as we are?  Are you not satisfied with me,
+just me?  You are like all men!  You are selfish!  You--oh, love!  You
+love me so--I know that--but you think of me--it seems so, anyhow--as
+but part of a scheme of life, of the life which will make you happy.
+My love, my husband! why need it be that way?  Why am I not enough?
+Why may we not be one, just one, and be that way?  I want nothing more.
+Why should you?  Are we not all our own world?  I will be everything to
+you.  Oh, Grant!"  And she ceased, sobbingly.
+
+The man said nothing.  He could not understand at first; then came upon
+him, gradually, a comprehension of how different had been their dreams
+in some ways.  It was inexplicable.  He thought of the mother instinct
+which gives even to the little girl a doll.  He had supposed that his
+own fancies were but weak reflections of what was in the innermost
+heart of the woman he loved so.  He blurted out, almost roughly:
+
+"'Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife.'"  Then added, bitterly, "It
+is the man who is saying it this time, you see."
+
+A second later, shame-faced and repentant, he had caught the slender
+figure in his arms and was holding it close to him.
+
+"I'm a brute, dear," he said, "and there is no excuse for me.  I
+understand, I think.  We dreamed differently.  That was all.  Had you
+loved me less, dear heart, you would have been more like other women.
+But it doesn't matter.  It shall be as you say, as you may wish or
+fancy.  We thought unlike, yet you were as much the pivot of my thought
+as I of yours.  It was of you, for you, and because of you, I had my
+visions.  That is all.  And we will not talk more of it."
+
+She nestled closer to him, and he stroked the brown mass of her hair
+and remained silent.  Some moments passed that way.  Then she roused
+herself and sat up squarely, and looked him bravely in the face.
+
+"I have been thinking," she said, "and I can think very well when I am
+so close to you, with my head where it is now.  I have been thinking,
+and it has occurred to me that I was not a wise, good woman, and I want
+you to forgive me."
+
+His answer involved no words at all, but it was meet for every purpose.
+She pushed him away from her, and spoke gravely:
+
+"Will you do something for me, Grant?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you do it now?"
+
+"Yes--if it be good for you."
+
+"I want you to do this.  I want you to imagine me some one else, some
+one you regard, but for whom you do not care particularly.  And then I
+want you to tell me what you think, what you would think best about
+the--'the others'"--blushing more fairly than any rose that ever grew
+on stem.  "Will you do that?"
+
+His face was very earnest.  "I will try," he said, "but it will be
+difficult to imagine you someone else.  How can I do that when I can
+look into your eyes, my little wife?  I'll try, though."
+
+"Then talk to me, now."
+
+He was troubled.  He did not know how to express himself in the spirit
+asked of him, and he did not look at her in the beginning.
+
+"Sweetheart, you are a part of me, and you are the greatest of what
+there is of my life.  It is about you that all my thoughts converge.  I
+do not suppose there will be any happier, any dearer time ever than
+this we are passing together, with none to molest us, or divert us from
+each other.  You know me well now.  I am what I am, and never was a man
+of stronger personal moods or one who so hungered for the one woman.
+And you are the one woman, the one physical object in the world, I
+worship.  There is no need that I tell you anything.  And you have
+learned, too, how I care for you in all greater, and, it may be, purer
+ways.  We are happy together.  But, love of me, we are a man and wife,
+an American man and wife, of the social grade--for there are social
+grades, despite all our democracy--where, it seems to me, a family has
+come to be esteemed almost a disgrace, as something vulgar and
+annoying.  And it seems to me this is something unnatural, and all
+wrong.  Whatever nature indicates is best.  To do what nature indicates
+is to secure the greatest happiness.  Trials may come, new sorrows and
+incumbrances be risked, but nature brings her recompense.  I want you
+the mother of our child, of our children, as it may be.  I know what
+your thought has been, I understand it now, but how can children
+separate us?  When a man and woman look together upon a child, another
+human being, a part of each of them, a being who would never have
+existed had they not found each other, a being with the traits of each
+combined, it seems to me as if their souls should blend somehow as
+never before.  They are one then, to a certainty.  They have become a
+unit in the great scheme of existence.  And so, darling, I have thought
+and thought much.  I have dreamed of you as the little mother, the one
+who would not be of the silly modern type, the one who, with me, would
+not be ashamed any more than were our sturdy ancestors of a sturdy
+family, should we be blessed so.  The one who would be glad with me in
+the womanhood and manhood of it.  And, as I said, it could never part
+us.  It would but make me more totally your own, more watchful, if that
+were possible, more tender, if that could be, more worshipful of you in
+the greater life of us two together, us two more completely.  And that
+is all.  It shall be as you say, and I will not complain, for I know
+your impulse in what you said and all its lovingness."
+
+She had listened to each word intently, and her face had flushed and
+paled alternately.  When he had done she snuggled more closely to him,
+and still said nothing.  When she did speak, this is what she said, and
+she said it earnestly:
+
+"I was wrong, my husband; I was a selfish, infatuated woman, who loved
+with one foolish idea which marred its fullness.  You have taught me
+something, dear.  You could not give me the thought I had again, even
+were you to try yourself, for I see it now.  And----"
+
+She put her arms about his neck and buried her fair face upon the
+pillow which afforded her such convenient shelter.  As for the man,
+there was something like a lump in his throat, but he spoke with an
+effort at playfulness, though his voice wavered a little:
+
+"It is right, my love.  And we will visit this nature of ours together.
+It is the season now, and next week we go camping.  I want to show old
+friends of mine, the spirits of the forest, how fair a wife I've won."
+
+And, a few days later, there was a pretty little scene down town.
+"Sportsmen's Goods," the sign above the doorway said, and in the
+windows were numerous wooden ducks and dainty rods of split bamboo, and
+glittering German silver reels and gaudy flies, and a thousand things
+to delight the heart of a fisherman or hunter.  Enter, a
+broad-shouldered gentleman and a haughty wisp of a woman, the latter a
+trifle embarrassed, despite her stateliness.
+
+"How are you, Jack?"
+
+This to the proprietor of the place, as he comes forward.
+
+"How are you, Harlson?"
+
+"This is Mrs. Harlson."  The ceremony takes place.  "Now, Jack, here's
+a grave matter of business.  Have you a private room?  And I want you
+to send in a lot of light wading-boots--the smallest sizes.  And I want
+some other things."  And the list is given.
+
+And the lady and gentleman disappear into a small room assigned them,
+and a lot of wading-boots are taken in, and time elapses.  And,
+eventually, lady and gentleman emerge again, the man's eyes full of
+laughter, and the woman's eyes full of laughter and confusion, and a
+package is made up.
+
+"Send it to my house, Jack," says the man, and the couple leave the
+place.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+MATURE AGAIN.
+
+Michigan is divided into two peninsulas, the apexes of which meet.
+
+The State is shaped like an hour-glass, with the upper portion twisted
+to the left.  About all the two peninsulas lie blue waters, the inland
+seas, lakes Michigan, Superior and Huron.  Upon the upper peninsula are
+great mineral ranges, copper and iron, a stunted but sturdy forest
+growth, and hundreds of little lakelets.  The lower peninsula, at its
+apex, is yet largely unclaimed from nature, but, toward the south,
+broadens out into the great area of grain and apple blossoms, and big,
+natty towns, once the country of oak openings, the haunt of Pontiac and
+of Tecumseh, braided and crossed by one of Cooper's romances.
+
+It is with the crest of the lower peninsula that this description
+deals.  There exist not the rigors of the northern peninsula; there the
+timber has not tempted woodland plunderers, nor have dried brook-beds
+followed shorn forests, nor the farmer invaded the region of light
+soil.  There is the dense but stunted growth of the hard maple and pine
+and beech and fir, and there are windfalls and slashes which sometimes
+bridge the creeks.  There are still black ash swales and dry beech
+ridges, but they are not as massive as further south.  There are still
+the haunting deer and the black bear and the ruffed grouse, the
+"partridge" in the idiom of the country, the "pheasant" of the South
+and Southwest.  There are scores of tiny lakes, deep and pure and
+tenanted, and babbling streams, and there are the knighted speckled
+trout, the viking black bass and that rakish aristocrat, the grayling.
+
+One way to cross from Michigan to Huron is in a canoe, threading one's
+way from woodland lake to woodland lake, through brush-hidden
+brooklets, without a portage.  In this region the liverwort blooms
+fragrantly beside the snow-bank in early spring, and here the arbutus
+exists as in New England.  The adder-tongues and violets and anemones
+are here in rare profusion in their time, and the wandering gray wolf,
+last of his kind, almost, treads softly over knolls carpeted with
+wintergreen and decorated with scarlet berries.  It is a country of
+blue water and pure air, of forest depths and long alleys arching above
+strong streams.
+
+This is the southern peninsula of Michigan in its northern part, and
+here came, as the first suspicion of a tinge of yellow came to the
+leaves of certain trees, as the hard maple trees first flashed out in
+faint red, two people.
+
+There were three of them who came at first, for there was the man with
+the wagon, engaged in the outlying settlement, who brought them fifteen
+miles into the depths of the woodland.  They came lumbering through an
+archway over an old trail, the homesteader sitting jauntily, howbeit
+uncertainly, upon the front seat--for the roadway tilted in spots--and
+behind him a couple from the town, a man and a woman, the man laughing
+and supporting his companion as the wagon swayed, and the woman
+wondering and plucky, and laughing, too, at the oddness of it all.  The
+forest amazed her a little, and awed her a little, but from awe of it
+soon came, as they plunged along, much friendliness.  She was
+receptive, this game woman, and knew Nature when she met her.
+
+In the rear of the wagon crouched or stood upright, or laid down, as
+the mood came upon his chestnut-colored grandness, a great Irish
+setter, loved of the man because of many a day together in stubble or
+over fallow, loved of the woman because he, the setter, had already
+learned to love and regard the woman as an arbitrator, as queen of
+something he knew not what.
+
+And so the wagon rumbled on and pitched and tilted, and finally, in
+mid-afternoon, reached a place where the road seemed to end.  There was
+a little open glade, but a few yards across, and there was dense forest
+all around, and, just beyond the glade, the tree-tops seemed to all be
+lowered, because there was a descent and a lake half a mile long, as
+clear as crystal and as blue as the sky.  A little way beyond the glade
+could be heard the gurgling and ruffling of a creek, which, through a
+deep hollow, came athwart the forest and plunged into the lake most
+willingly.  This was the place where these two people, this man and
+woman, were to end their present journey, for the man had been there
+before and knew what there to seek and what to find.
+
+And there was a creaky turn of the wagon, a disembarkment, and an
+unloading of various things.  There was all the kit for a hunter of the
+northern woods, and there were things in addition which indicated that
+the hunter was not alone this time.  There was a tent which had more
+than ordinarily selected fixtures to it, and there were two real
+steamer-chairs with backs, and there were four or five of what in the
+country they call "comforts," or "comforters," great quilts, thickly
+padded, generally covered with a design in white of stars or flowers on
+beaming red, and there were rods and guns and numerous utensils for
+plain cooking.
+
+The wagon with its horses and its driver turned about and tumbled along
+the roadway on its return, and there were left alone in the forest,
+miles from civilization, miles from any human being save the driver
+fast leaving them, the man and woman and the setter dog.
+
+They did not appear depressed or alarmed by the circumstance.
+
+The load from the wagon had been left in a heap.  The man pulled from
+it a camp-chair with a back, and opened it, and set it up on the grass
+very near the edge of the glade, and announced that the throne was
+ready for the Empress, not of Great Britain and India, nor of any other
+part of the earth, but of the World; it was ready, and would she take
+her seat?
+
+He explained that, as, at present, there were some things she didn't
+know anything about, she might as well sit in state.  So the Empress,
+who was not very big, sat in state.
+
+The dog had pursued a rabbit, and was making a fool of himself.  The
+man selected from among the baggage left an ax, heavy and keen, and
+attacked a young spruce tree near.  It soon fell with a crash, and the
+Empress leaped up, but to sit down again and look interestedly at what
+was going on.
+
+The man, the tree fallen, sheared off its wealth of fragrant tips, and
+laid the mass of it by the side of the great tree.  Then from out the
+wagon's leavings he dragged a tent, a simple thing, and, setting up two
+crotched sticks with a cross-pole, soon had it in its place.  He
+carried the mass of spruce-tips by armfuls to the tent and dumped them
+within it until there was a great heap of soft, perfumed greenness
+there.  Then, over all, he spread a quilt or two, and announced, with
+much form, to her majesty, that her couch was prepared for her, and
+that she could sit in the front of the tent if she wished.
+
+And he cut and put in place two more forked stakes, with a cross-bar,
+and hung a kettle and built a fire beneath, and brought water and got
+out a frying-pan and bread and prepared for supper.  All articles not
+demanded for immediate use were stowed away just back of the tent.
+"And," he remarked, "there you are."
+
+The Empress rose from her camp-chair and investigated.
+
+"Are we to sleep in the tent, Grant?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What will we do if it rains?"
+
+"Stay in the tent."
+
+"But we'll get wet, won't we?"
+
+"No; we'll be upon the spruce-tops; the water will run under us."
+
+"Aren't there animals in the wood?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What will you do if they come about?"
+
+"I think I'll kiss you."
+
+The Empress of the World did not seem to fully enter into the spirit of
+his carelessness.
+
+She had her imaginings, after all.  She knew that she was all right,
+somehow, yet she did not quite comprehend.  But she knew her royalty.
+
+She rose and went to the entrance of the tent, and stepped in daintily,
+and sat down in another chair which had been placed there for her
+reception, and then inhaled all the sweetness of the spruce-tips, and
+pitched herself down upon the quilts, and curled herself up there for a
+moment or two, and then rose and came out again into the open, where
+her husband stood watching her.
+
+"Do you like the woods, dear?" he said.
+
+"Don't you see?"
+
+He said nothing, but led her majesty to a seat for a time, while he got
+ready for the evening meal--of food from the town for this first
+time--and then, in a courtier's way, of course, suggested, that she aid
+him.
+
+They cooked and ate the strips of bacon with the soft stale bread he
+had brought, and drank the tea, and the shadows of the trees lengthened
+across the glade, and the chestnut-hued setter came back to camp and
+was gravely reprimanded by his master, and it soon became night, and
+time passed, and the fire flashed against the greenery strangely, and
+the man took the woman by the hand and led her to the entrance to the
+tent, and said:
+
+"We must rise early."
+
+She entered the tent, and not long later he entered, also, or thought
+to do so.  He lifted the flap, which he had let down, and looked inside.
+
+She lay there upon the cushioned spruce-tips, and, as he raised the
+white curtain, the moonlight streamed in upon her.
+
+She looked up at him, and smiled.
+
+The loving face of her was all he saw--the face of the one woman.
+
+He spoke to her.  He tried to tell her what she was to him, and failed.
+She answered gently and in few words.  They understood.
+
+He entered the tent and sat upon the couch beside her as she was lying
+there, and took her small hand in his, but said no more.  From the wood
+about them--for it was into the night now--came many sounds, known of
+old, and wonderfully sweet to him, but all new and strange to her.
+
+"Ah-rr-oomp, ah-rr-oomp, ba-rr-oomp," came from the edge of the water
+the deep cry of the bullfrog; from the further end of the lake came the
+strange gobble, gurgle and gulp of the shitepoke, the small green heron
+which is the flitting ghost of shaded creeks and haunting thing of
+marshy courses everywhere.  Night-hawks, far above, cried with a
+pleasant monotony, then swooped downward with a zip and boom.  It was
+not so late in the season that the call of the whippoorwill might not
+be heard, and there were odd notes of tree-toads and katydids from the
+branches.  There came suddenly the noise of a squall and scuffle from
+the marshy edge of the lake, where 'coons were wrangling, and the weird
+cry of the loon re-echoed up and down.  The air was full of the
+perfumes of the wood.  The setter just outside the tent became uneasy,
+and dashed into a thicket near, and there was a snort and the measured,
+swift thud of feet flying in the distance.  A deer had been attracted
+by the fire-light.  An owl hooted from a dead tree near by.  There was
+the hum of many insects of the night, and the soft sighing of the wind
+through boughs.  It was simply night in the northern woods.
+
+The man rose and went outside, and stood with one hand upon the
+tent-pole at the front.  He seemed to himself to be in a dream.  He
+looked up at the moon and stars, and then at the glittering greenery
+deepening further out into blackness about him.  He looked down toward
+the grass at his feet, and there appeared near him a flash of gold.
+
+What Harlson saw was but a dandelion.  That most home-like and
+steadfast flower blooms in early springtime and later in the season,
+with no regard to the chronology of the year.  It was one of the
+vagrant late gladdeners of the earth that his eye chanced to light upon.
+
+It held him, somehow.  It was wide open--so wide that there was a white
+spot in its yellow center--and close above it drooped, a beech-tree's
+branch, so close that one long green leaf hung just above the petals.
+And upon this green leaf the dew was gathering.
+
+The man looked at the flower.
+
+"Is all the world golden?" he said to himself.  And he straightened and
+moved and went from the tent to where the open was.  He stood in the
+glade in the moonlight, and wondered at it all.
+
+Here he was--he could not comprehend it--here, all alone, save for her,
+in the forest, miles away from any other human being!  He had wholly
+loved but two things all his life--her and nature--and the three of
+them--she, nature and he--were here together!  It was wonderful!
+
+And there in that preposterous covering of canvas, half hid in the
+forest's edge, was Jean Cor--no, Jean Harlson, belonging to him--all
+his--away from all the world, just part of him, in this solitude!
+
+He wondered why he had deserved it.  He wondered how he had won it.  He
+looked up at the pure sky, with the moon defined so clearly, and all
+the stars, and was grateful, and reached out his hands and asked the
+Being of it to tell him, if it might be, how to do something as an
+offset.
+
+The night passed, and the sun rose clearly over the forest.  The
+chestnut setter roused himself from behind the tent, and came in front
+of it, and barked joyously at a yellow-hammer which had chosen a great
+basswood tree with deadened spaces for an early morning experiment
+toward a breakfast.
+
+There issued from the white tent a man, who looked upward toward all
+the greenness and all the glory, and was glad.
+
+He looked downward at the sward, and there was the little flower.  And
+the dew had run its course, and had gathered in a jewel at the leaf's
+tip, and there, fallen in the midst of the disk of yellow, was the
+product from the skies.  There, in the flower's heart, was the perfect
+gem--a diamond in a setting of fine gold!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+ADVENTURES MANIFOLD.
+
+"I've et hearty," said the woman, saucily, as the breakfast, for which
+the birds furnished the music, was done.  And then he initiated her
+into the brief art of washing tin things in the gravel at the water's
+edge.  Then he informed her that target practice was about to begin,
+and brought out four guns from their cases.
+
+Two of the pieces were rifles, and of each kind one was a light and
+dainty piece.  He said they would practice with the rifles; that when
+she became an expert rifle-shot the rest would all be easy, and then
+upon the boll of a tree at one side of the opening he pinned a red
+scrap of paper, and shot at it.
+
+With the report half the scrap was torn away, and then he taught her
+how to hold the piece and how to aim.
+
+She expressed, at last, a desire to shoot, and he gave her the little
+rifle loaded.  She aimed swiftly and desperately, and pressed the
+trigger, and the echoes had not died away when she let fall the gun
+upon the grass.
+
+"I'm hurt," she said.
+
+He sprang to her side, pale-faced, as she raised her hand to her
+shoulder, but he brightened a moment later.  He opened the dress at her
+neck, and turned it down on one side, and there, on the round, white
+shoulder, was a slight ruddy bruise.  He kissed it, and laughed.
+
+"It'll be all right in no time.  Now, do as I tell you."
+
+He put a cartridge in the piece again.
+
+"Try it once more," he said; "aim more deliberately and hold the stock
+of the gun very tightly against your shoulder as you fire."
+
+"But it will hurt me."
+
+"No, it won't.  Do as I tell you."
+
+She would have obeyed him had he told her to leap into the lake, and
+the lake was deep.
+
+She set her lips firmly, held the gun hard against her shoulder, aimed
+carefully and fired.
+
+The red spot flew from the gray trunk of the oak.  She looked up amazed.
+
+"Why, it didn't hurt me a bit!"
+
+"Of course not.  There is a law of impact, and you are learning it.
+The strongest man in the world could not hurt you pushing you against
+nothing.  He could kill you with a blow.  With the first shot your gun
+gave you a blow.  In the second it could only push you.  Listen to the
+wisdom of your consort!"
+
+She made a mouth at him, and he told her she'd had her "baptism of
+fire," and soon they sallied into the forest, hunting.
+
+She was very pretty and piquant in her kilted dress and shooting jacket
+and high boots.  It was a formidable army of two.
+
+There were myriads of bees in the openings, and the fall flowers were
+yielding up the honey to be stored, in the hearts of great trees, and
+at noon-time they sat down in one of the openings for luncheon.
+
+He had shot only a couple of ruffed grouse, for it was a ramble rather
+than a real hunt, this first mid-wood excursion of the pair, and she
+had shot at various things, a grouse or two and squirrels, and missed
+with regularity, and was piqued over it, but he had noted her
+increasing courage and confidence and resolution with each successive
+shot, and knew that he had with him, for the future, a "little
+sportsman," as he called her.
+
+They built a fire, just for the fun of it, and a grouse was plucked and
+broiled with much ado, and never was greater feast.  And, the meal
+over, he produced a cigar and--which was not really good form for the
+woods--lay on the grass and smoked it, looking at her and talking
+nonsense.
+
+She sat upon a log and delighted in the fragrance and the light, and
+the droning sounds and bird-cries, and the new world of it to her.  All
+at once, her gaze became fixed upon some object a little distance away.
+She reached out her hand to him appealingly.
+
+"What is that?"
+
+He rose and looked where she pointed.
+
+Years of decay had made of the trunk of a fallen tree but a long ridge
+of crumbling, brown chips, and, upon this ridge, where the sun streamed
+down hotly, lay something coiled in a black mass, and there was a flat,
+hideous head resting upon it all with beady eyes which seemed, to leer.
+
+Harlson looked at it carelessly.
+
+"Big one, isn't it?" he said.
+
+"What is it?" she gasped.
+
+"What is it, you small ignoramus!  It's a blacksnake and a monster.  It
+is one of the dreads of the small life of the wood, and it was one of
+the dreads of my youth, and its days are numbered."
+
+He reached for his gun, then checked himself.
+
+"Shoot it."
+
+She picked up the little rifle and raised it to her shoulder, as calmly
+as any Leather-Stocking in the land.
+
+The report came like a whip-crack, and up from the dead log leaped a
+great writhing mass, which coiled and twisted and thrashed about, and
+finally lay still.
+
+Harlson walked up and examined what he called the "remains."  Half the
+serpent's ugly head had been torn away by the bullet.
+
+"It was a great shot!  'And the woman shall bruise the serpent's
+head!'" he quoted.  "Egad, you've done it with a vengeance, my
+huntress!  And you are a markswoman among many, and thy price is above
+rubies!  Hooray!"
+
+She informed him, with much dignity, that she never missed such
+monsters as were blacksnakes, and that her undoubted skill with the
+rifle was due to the quality of the tutor she had owned, and, at the
+same time, would he mind moving to some other place to finish his
+cigar, for the sight of the dead monster was not a pleasant thing?
+
+And so was accomplished the woman's first feat with the gun; but on
+that same day, before they had returned to camp, she had slain, at a
+fair distance, a grouse which, when flushed, had sailed away with lofty
+contempt for but a score of yards, and, alighting upon a limb close
+beside the body of a tree, had stood awaiting, jauntily and ignorantly,
+his doom.
+
+She was a proud woman when the bird came plunging to the ground, and of
+that particular fowl he remarked, subsequently, when they were eating
+it, that its flavor was a little superior to anything in the way of
+game he had ever tasted, and he was more than half in earnest.
+
+And the nights were poems and the days were full of life, and the brown
+cheeks of the woman became browner still, and she was referred to more
+frequently than even in the ante-wedded days as merely of the tribe of
+Chippewas.
+
+In one respect, too, she excelled in deserving that same title, for
+your Chippewa, of either sex, takes to the water like a duck, as
+becomes a tribe of the lake regions.  He took her to the lake and
+taught her not to fear it, and they frolicked in its waves together,
+and she learned to swim as well as he, and to dive as smoothly as a
+loon or otter, and was a water nymph such as the creatures of the wood
+had never seen.  He was very vain of her art acquired so swiftly,
+though in conversation he gave vast credit to her teacher.  And in the
+catching of the black bass there came eventually to the nine-ounce
+split bamboo in her little hands as many trophies as to his heavier
+lancewood.  One day, after she had become at home in the water, and had
+better luck than he, and was lofty in her demeanor, he upset the boat
+in deep water, and her majesty was compelled to swim about it with him
+and assist at one end while he was at the other, in righting it.  So
+mean of spirit was he.
+
+All other things, though, were but the veriest trifle compared with the
+adventure which came at last.  He had made her wise in woodcraft, and
+she could tell at the lake's margin or along the creek's bed the tracks
+of the 'coon, like the prints of a baby's foot, the mink's twin pads,
+or the sharp imprint of the hoofs of the deer.  One day another track
+was noted near the camp, a track resembling that of a small man,
+shoeless, and Harlson informed her that a bear had been about.
+
+She asked if the black bear of Michigan were dangerous, and he said the
+black bear of Michigan ate only very bad people, or very small ones.
+
+One afternoon they were some distance from the camp.  They had been
+shooting with fair success, and, returning, had seated themselves in
+idle mood upon one end of a great fallen trunk, upon which they had
+just crossed the gully, at the bottom of which a little creek tumbled
+toward the lake.  The gleam of a maple's leaves near by, already
+turning scarlet, had caught her eye; she had expressed a wish for some
+of the gaudy beauties, and he had climbed the tree and was plucking the
+leaves for her, when, suddenly, the woods resounded with the fierce
+barking of the dog in the direction from which they had just come.  He
+called to her to be ready to shoot, that a deer might have been
+started, when there was a crashing through the bushes and the quarry
+burst into sight.
+
+Lumbering into the open, turning only to growl at the dog which was
+yelping wildly in its rear, but keeping wisely out of its reach, was a
+black bear.  The beast did not see the woman opposite him, but rushed
+at the log and was half way across it when she screamed.  Then it
+paused.  Behind was the dog, before the woman; it advanced slowly,
+growling.
+
+Harlson, in the tree, saw it all, and, as a fireman drops with a rush
+down the pole in the engine-house, he came down the maple's boll and
+bounded toward the log.  The bear hesitated.
+
+"Shoot! you little fool, shoot!" shouted the man, as he ran.
+
+Her courage returned in a moment, at least did partial presence of
+mind.  She raised the gun desperately, and the report rang out.  The
+bear clutched wildly at the log, then rolled off, and fell to the rocky
+bottom, twenty feet below.  Harlson seized his own gun and looked down.
+The beast was motionless, and from a little hole in its head the blood
+was trickling.
+
+And the woman--well, the woman was sitting on the grass, very pale of
+face and silent.
+
+The man seized her, and half smothered her with kisses, and shouted
+aloud to the forest and all its creatures that great was Diana of the
+Ephesians!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+THE HOUSE WONDERFUL.
+
+And the bear's skin was tanned with the glossy black fur still upon it,
+the head with the white-fanged jaws still attached and made natural
+with all the skill of an artist in such things, and it lay, a great,
+soft, black rug, upon a couch in the House Wonderful, or, at least, the
+house to which Harlson gave that name.  It seemed to him the House
+Wonderful, indeed.
+
+Therein was held all there was in the world for him, and he was
+satisfied with it all, and content, save that he felt, at seasons, how
+little man is worthy of the happiness which may come to him sometimes,
+even in this world.  Yet it was not all poetry in the House Wonderful;
+there were many practical happenings, and many droll ones.
+
+The House Wonderful, it is needless to say, was in the city.  The
+bear-skin was but one of many such soft trophies of the chase which
+were spread upon the floors or upon soft lounges and divans.  Over this
+particular skin there was much said, at times, when there were guests.
+
+Jean would explain to some curious person, that she herself had shot
+the original wearer of the skin, and that her husband was up a tree at
+the time, and there would be odd looks, and he would explain nothing,
+and then she, woman-like, must needs spoil the mystery by telling all
+about it, as if any one would not comprehend some jest in the matter!
+It was a home of rugs and books, and very restful.  I liked to go
+there, where they both spoiled me, and where the softness and the
+perfume of it all made me useless and dissatisfied after I had come
+away.  There is no reason in the average man.  But in the Eden was one
+great serpent--not a real serpent, but a glittering one, like the toy
+snakes sold at Christmas time.
+
+There is some weakness in our American training of girls.  Visibly and
+certainly the woman who marries a man engages herself to conduct his
+household--to relieve him of all troubles there--because he is the
+bread-winner.  But very few girls seem trained with such idea, though
+all girls look forward to a marriage and such mutually helpful compact
+between two human beings.  It is, of course, the fault of a social
+growth, the fault of mothers, the fault of many conditions.  And Jean
+did not know how to cook!  She was a woman of keen intelligence, of all
+sweetness and all faithfulness, yet she found herself almost helpless
+when she became the chatelaine of the castle where Grant was to come to
+dinner.
+
+It is needless to tell of all that happened.  The woman was adroit in
+the engagement of domestics, and there were dinners certainly, and,
+possibly, good ones, but the knowingness of it all was wanting.  He
+felt it, and wondered a little, but did not fret.  He knew the woman.
+One evening they were together, after dinner again, just as they had
+been when he told her he would take her to the woods, and she lay
+coiled up upon a divan, while he sat beside her.  It was their
+after-dinner way.  She spoke up abruptly and very bravely:
+
+"Grant, I'm a humbug."
+
+"Certainly, dear; what of it?"
+
+"I mean--and it's something serious--I really am, you know, and I want
+to tell you."
+
+"Go ahead, midget."
+
+She did not seem altogether reassured, but plunged in gallantly:
+
+"You thought I would be a good wife to you.  You thought I knew
+everything a woman should know who agreed to live together with the man
+she loved, and make the most of life.  But, Grant, I was and am really
+a humbug!  I don't know how to manage a house; I have to leave it to
+the servants, and I can see enough, at least, to know that it isn't
+what it should be.  There are a thousand little fancies of yours I
+don't know how to gratify, and I want to do it so, Grant!  What shall I
+do?"
+
+He responded by saying that he was very fond of his little Dora
+Copperfield and that he would buy her a poodle dog.  He added, though,
+that she mustn't die--he needed her!
+
+There was a laugh in his eyes, and he was but the tyrant man enjoying
+the discomfort of the one being to him; but when she curled a little
+closer and looked up in earnestness, he relented.
+
+"That is nothing, dear," he said, "save that I'm afraid you have a
+little work ahead.  Yes, it is right that you should know what you do
+not.  You must learn.  It is nothing for a clever woman, such as the
+one I have gained.  I look to you, love, for the home and all the
+sweetness of it, and I wouldn't do that if I did not think that in the
+end there would be all pride and comfort for you.  Down East they call
+this or that woman 'house-proud.'  I want you to be 'house-proud.'  No
+wife who is that but is doing very much for all about her, and I won't
+say any more, except that you must let me help you."
+
+And thenceforth ensued strange things.  There were experiments, and
+there was even a cooking-school episode, Harlson, at this period,
+professing great weariness, and sometimes, after meals, simulating
+pains which required much attention, though drugs were vigorously
+refused.  All he wanted was strictly personal care.  It is to be feared
+that he was not honest as to details, though honest as a whole.  And he
+would go marketing with the brown woman, who had become so practical,
+and they became critical together, and the gourmands, wise old men
+about town, whom he brought, occasionally, to dine with him, began to
+wonder how it was that they found such perfection at a private table.
+And, as for the woman, well, she passed so far beyond her clumsy Mentor
+that he became but as the babe which doesn't know, and had nothing to
+say in her august presence.  He might talk about a cheese or a wine or
+some such trifle, but how small a portion of living are cheese and wine!
+
+The first year of wedded life is experimental, though it be with the
+pair best mated since the world began.  There is an unconscious
+dropping of all surface traits and all disguises, and a showing of
+heart and brain to the one other.  Never lived the woman so
+self-contained and tactful that, at the end of a year, her husband, if
+he were a man of ordinary intelligence, did not know her for what she
+was worth; never the man so thoughtful and discreet that he was not
+estimated at his value by the one so near him.  This I have been told
+by men and women who should know.  I lack the trial which should give
+wisdom to myself, but I am inclined to accept the dictum of these
+others.  It must be so, from force of circumstances.
+
+It was pleasant to me to watch this man and woman.  It seemed to me
+that the hard lines in Grant Harlson's face became, week by week and
+month by month, less harshly and clearly defined, while upon the face
+of his wife grew that new look of a content and ownership which marks
+the woman who sleeps in some man's arms, the one who owns her--the same
+look which Grant, with his broader experience and keener insight, used
+to recognize when he puzzled me so in telling whimsically, in the
+street cars, who were wedded, without looking at their rings.  It may
+have been a fancy, but it seemed to me the two grew very much to look
+alike.  It was in no feature, in nothing I can describe, but in
+something beyond words, in a certain way which cannot be defined.  It
+may have been but the unconscious imitation by each of some trick of
+the other's speech, or manner, but it appeared a deeper thing.  I
+cannot explain it.
+
+They were not much apart, those two.  Sometimes Harlson would be called
+away by some business or political emergency, and then would occur what
+impressed me as a silly thing, deeply as I cared, for each.  He would
+get railroad tickets for two, and they would go riotously across the
+country, playing at keeping house in a state-room, and enjoying
+themselves beyond all reason.  I explained often to each of them that
+it wasn't fair to the other; that he could attend to business better in
+some distant city without having to report to her at a hotel, and that
+it would be more comfortable for her in her own fair home; and the two
+idiots would but laugh at me.
+
+The library was their fad together, for Jean was as much of a
+bibliomaniac, almost, as was her husband, and I confess I enjoyed
+myself amid the rich collection, made without precedent or reason, but,
+somehow, wonderfully attractive.  They were whimsical, the pair, with
+books as with regard to other things, but the few who might invade
+their library were inclined to linger there.  I always found a mingled
+odor there of cigar-smoke and of some perfume which Jean preferred, and
+I learned to like the combination.  Maybe that was a perverted
+taste,--cigar-smoke and delicate perfumes are not consorted in the code
+of odor-lovers,--but, as I say, I learned to like it.
+
+I have but little more to tell of this first wedded year of my dear
+friends.  One incident I may relate.  It occurred less than a year from
+the date of the outing in the woods.  There were relations each of the
+two should meet, and he was very busy with many things, and it was,
+finally, after much thought, decided that Jean should go her way and he
+his for two long weeks; so they bade good-by to each other and left the
+city, in different directions, the same day.
+
+It was just four days later when I got a note asking me to call at the
+house.  It was from Jean, and she was a little shame-faced when she met
+me.  Certain business complications had arisen in Grant's absence to
+which I might attend, and it was for this that she had summoned me; but
+she had an explanation to make.  She did it, blushing.
+
+"I went to my people, Alf," she said, "but it palled in a couple of
+days.  That is all.  I'd rather be here alone, where he has been, and
+await him here, than be anywhere else.  It's foolish, of course, but
+you, who know us both so well, may possibly understand."  And she
+blushed more than ever.
+
+The next day there stalked into my office a man who asked me to lunch.
+It was Grant Harlson.  There was a quizzical look on his face, and a
+rather happy one.
+
+"I won't tell you anything, old man," he said.  "I was only a few hours
+behind the girl.  That's all.  I suppose we might as well keep up the
+fool record we have begun.  It suits me, anyhow."
+
+And a single man, knowing nothing about such things, could give no
+opinion.  I was abusive and sarcastic, but he insisted on buying a
+great luncheon.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+THE APE.
+
+Given a man and a woman, married, loving each other, and what a recent
+clever writer calls "the inevitable consequences" ordinarily come and
+cause the inevitable anxiety, more, doubtless, to the man than to the
+woman.  There comes a time when she he loves must bear him their first
+child.  In primitive existence this trouble to the man must have been
+much less, must have been little more than the sympathy of an hour,
+because, in nature, unaffected, there is seldom much of suffering and
+almost never death prematurely.  But we have changed all this.  We have
+violated gentle Nature's laws in our ways of living, and inasmuch as we
+have done this, we have lost, to such extent, her soft protecting hand.
+We breathe too little of the pure air; we are lax in physical effort,
+and, even though the individual man or woman be wise, he or she must
+bear the burden of the errors of an ancestry or the evils of the
+present.  So, to the woman gentle-bred there comes a risk in the
+undergoing of that which she has most hoped for since she loved a man,
+and since she would be all there is of perfect womanhood.  There is
+peril, and she knows it, but is braver than man at this time.  There is
+peril, and he knows it, and he is helpless and clinging as a child.
+What can he do?  Nothing, save to bring in a hard hour the presence of
+one who may not bear a portion of the real trial.  Yet this is
+something.  It has saved dear women's lives.  There is something--we do
+not quite understand about it yet--which is a band of more than steel
+between two close together, and which holds back the one sometimes from
+even the grip of that force seldom denied, which is named Death, the
+one who fills the graveyards.
+
+And, one evening, there was a man in deep trouble, and in the morning
+he sat beside a bed in which was his small wife and beside her a tiny
+red thing, "rather underdone," he said, in the buoyant reaction which
+came upon him, for that was Harlson's way when he had emerged from
+trouble; and the small red thing was the son of the two of them.  And
+who can tell what the man said to the woman.  There are precious,
+sacred overflows of love, sweet outbursts of what makes life worth the
+living, never yet in words for all, never yet written in black upon
+some white surface.  There is a sanctuary.
+
+It was a healthy baby, and the mother was soon herself, and the most
+foolish of small women over it.  I rather liked the young animal
+myself, for they let me see it when its days were few, and it clutched
+at my fingers in a way that won me.  It was a curious young animal to
+me.  It took to the water wonderfully, and all three of us together
+sometimes, when I would call, would summon the nurse and see the young
+villain bathe.  This was when he was but a few months old.  He was such
+a royal fellow, so brave and buoyant, that I fell in love with him.
+How could a lonely man help being foolish?
+
+An odd name had the child.  It all came from the hours, when, all
+danger passed, a proud and happy man sat upon a bedside and looked down
+into the face of a proud and happy woman, and, at times, studied the
+quality of the odd mite beside her, half hidden in the waves of pillow
+and of sheet.  He would look at the thing's wonderful hands, and its
+wonderful pink feet, and have remarks to make.  One hour he came in and
+examined the creature and repeated great words from some authority:
+
+"How many people have ever taken notice of a baby's foot, except to
+admire its pinkiness and its prettiness?" said he.  "And yet, to the
+anatomist, it is a revelation.  Take, for example, the feet of a child
+of ten months, that has never walked nor stood alone.  It has a power
+of grasping to some extent, and is used instinctively like a hand.  The
+great toe has a certain independent working, like a thumb, and the
+wrinkles of the sole resemble those of the palm.  These markings
+disappear when the pedal extremity has come to be employed for purposes
+of support.
+
+"The hands and feet of a human being are strikingly like those of the
+chimpanzee in conformation, while the gorilla's resemblance to man in
+these respects is even more remarkable.  The higher apes have been
+classified as 'quadrumana,' or 'four-handed,' because their hind feet
+are hand-shaped; but this designation is improperly applied, because
+the ape's posterior extremities are not really hands at all.  They
+merely look like hands at the first glance, whereas, in fact, they are
+but feet adapted for climbing.  The big toes cannot be 'opposed' to
+other toes, as thumbs are to the fingers, but simply act pincer-wise,
+for the purpose of grasping.  Now, oddly enough, the 'infant's' feet
+have this same power of grasping, pincer-fashion, and the action is
+performed in precisely the same way.  Advocates of evolutionary
+theories take this to signify that the human foot was originally
+utilized for climbing trees also, before the species was so highly
+developed as it is now.  Also, they assert that the fact that the art
+of walking erect is learned by the child with such difficulty proves
+that the race has only acquired it recently.
+
+"There, darling," he said, "you see how it is.  We have but come into
+possession of a little ape!  What shall we do?"
+
+She was not troubled.  In his eyes she saw that which is worth more to
+the young mother than all else the world can give, but she entered into
+the spirit of his mood.  She replied, gently, that she didn't know what
+to do, but had he the bad taste to kiss an Ape?  And he admitted that
+he had, and kissed the object gently, as if afraid of breaking it, and
+kissed the gentle mother a hundred to one.
+
+I liked the Ape--for so they came to allude to that sturdy babe.  He
+may be my heir some day--though he was named, as Jean insisted, for his
+father--and I had many a frolic with him in his babyhood, when I was
+allowed to enter the sanctuary of that home.  He was a little viking, a
+little raider, this child, conceived in the forest.  There seemed to
+have come to him the daring and the vigor of outdoor things, and the
+force of nature.  A great man-child was this.
+
+I was not alone in the rejoicing over the infant, though really he was,
+it seems to me, as dear to me, the isolated man, as to his parents.
+They rioted in their vast possession, and were very foolish people.
+But why should I keep repeating that these two were very foolish people
+together?
+
+They were like other fathers and mothers, in some respects, but one
+difference I noted.  They seemed almost to adore the child, but he was
+never first with either of them.  He but bound the two more closely
+together, and the looks of the man were sometimes almost worshipful as
+he looked upon the mother of his child.  And she--she understood, and
+they were glad together.  Their kingdom had been but enlarged.
+
+It is not to be supposed that this whimsical couple--for they were
+really whimsical, these friends of mine, as must have appeared often in
+my account could rear a child without grotesqueries.  The woman, I am
+afraid, was, before she became a mother, addicted to monkey tricks,
+even to the extent of bounding leopard-like upon the man from
+unexpected places, and the Ape was, in his early days, bred in a way
+barbaric.  They had great times with the Ape.
+
+One day Grant Harlson had his business for the day concluded early.  He
+could reach home as a little after five o'clock, where dinner came at
+six.  One of the fiercest of summer rains was falling.  He started
+buoyantly.  He wanted his wife and boy.
+
+He reached the house and entered.  No wife was there to greet him; no
+drunken-footed babe, for the Ape had learned to walk now, albeit
+unsteadily; not even a servant girl to make some explanation.  He
+stalked through the house wonderingly, back to the kitchen, which
+looked out upon a green back-yard where they had erected a tent, and
+had there had dinners and inhaled the odor of the grass.  He found in
+the kitchen the two girls, who were all delight, and exhibited but
+slight awe at his presence.  He recognized that all was well, and
+looked out through the descending sheets of water.
+
+There, beside the quaint tent set upon the green-sward, were two
+people.  One was a graceful woman, one a sturdy, shouting child.
+Neither was garbed save in the simplest way.  She wore a wrap of some
+sort, a careless thing, the boy a night-gown, and they were moving
+about in the warm rain and bathing in nature's way, and particularly
+happy.
+
+The man was righteously indignant at all desertion of him.  He shouted
+manfully, and at last attracted the attention of the pair.  He told
+them to come in to him.  As well have talked to the wild winds.  He
+looked from the porch upon the riant, dissipated two, and commanded and
+cajoled and made tremendous threats, but to no purpose.  He reproached
+his wife with unwifely disobedience, and with the crime of turning her
+own offspring against his father, and the two but mocked him!  Then he
+disappeared, and appeared five minutes later in a frayed old swimming
+suit, and there was terror in the camp of the foe!  He made a charge
+through sheets of rain, and a fair woman was, in most unmanly way, laid
+in a puddle, and her son set aloft in pride upon his prostrate and
+laughing mother.  And high jinks ensued.  So did these two conduct
+themselves!
+
+But an hour later, when guests came to the dinner, the Ape had gone to
+his nursery without a whimper, and no more grave and courteous man or
+more stately and gracious dame sat down at table that evening in all
+the city of a million people.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+THE FIRST DISTRICT.
+
+The trouble with us in the First Congressional District was that we
+could not carry the Ninth Ward.  But for this weak point we would have
+felt assured at any time.  With the Ninth Ward eliminated we could
+control the district barely.  With the Ninth Ward for us it would be a
+walk-over.  But the ward belonged to Gunderson.
+
+Gunderson employed three thousand men.  He was not a party man, but he
+was a partisan; that is, he would get interested sometimes in a
+campaign, and when he did, each workman in his big manufactory must
+vote as indicated or go.  And Gunderson did not like Harlson.  The ways
+of the big employer were not what Harlson admired, and he had never
+tried much to conciliate him. So it came that in more than one
+legislative and local contest we had lost the Ninth Ward.  And now
+Harlson was a candidate for Congress.
+
+We were puzzled.  "I'm afraid Jean will have to lock me out again,"
+laughed Harlson, as we were discussing the problem one night after a
+committee meeting, and herein he referred to a funny episode, dating
+back to the time when the Ape was but a yearling.  Jean, dignified,
+chatelaine, sweet wife and fond mother, was as interested in politics
+as in anything else that commanded her husband's attention at any time,
+and had learned from our conversations all about the Ninth Ward.  We
+were confident one spring, and as Grant left home on the morning of
+election day he was informed that unless he came as a victor he must
+not expect admission to the home containing his wife and baby boy.  He
+said he would return in triumph or upon his shield, but he did neither.
+At five o'clock in the afternoon we knew that we were whipped, whipped
+beautifully and thoroughly, and all because of that same black demon of
+a Ninth Ward, and the fact was so apparent that we became suddenly
+philosophical, and Grant turned to me and said:
+
+"Come to dinner with me, Alf, and let's go now.  What's the use of
+staying to the funeral?  We'll eat a good dinner and smoke, and good
+digestion will wait on appetite, and we'll plan and say we'll do better
+next time."
+
+So we left the hurly-burly and took the train, and were at Harlson's
+home a little before the dinner hour.  Grant tried his latch-key, but
+it would not serve.  He rang the bell, but there came no answer.  Then
+there came a tapping and clatter from inside a window, and both of us
+left the porch to get down upon the sward and visit the window and
+investigate.
+
+Inside the window, and smiling, was a small, brown woman, holding in
+her arms a crowing youngster, who was making a great ado and reaching
+out his hands toward his father.  She raised the window just a little,
+and put a question, gravely:
+
+"What is it that you wish, gentlemen?"
+
+Grant intimated, humbly, that we wanted to get in and be given some
+dinner.
+
+"Are you the gentlemen who were going to carry the Ninth Ward?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Did you carry it?"
+
+"No."
+
+The laughing face fell a little, but the stately air was recovered in a
+moment.  "Well," she said, with dignity, "I'm very sorry.  We do not
+wish to seem inhospitable, neither the baby nor I, but really we do not
+feel justified in harboring people incapable of carrying the Ninth
+Ward."
+
+We explained and pleaded and apologized and promised, but for a long
+time to no avail.  At last, after the dinner-bell had sounded, and
+after we had pledged ourselves to carry that ward yet or perish, we
+were admitted, only then, though, as was explained, for the child's
+sake.  He was accustomed to climb upon his father after dinner.
+
+So carrying the Ninth Ward became a synonym for any difficult feat with
+us, and if Grant accomplished this or that, or I made a good turn, or
+Jean gave her cook or dressmaker an inspiration, the Ninth Ward was
+referred to as having been carried.  And here was that ward before us
+again in a greater emergency, and in its own proper person.
+
+Gunderson had a wife.  He would have owned two wives had the one in his
+possession been surveyed and subdivided properly, for she was big
+enough, abundantly, for two.  She was the best illustration I ever saw
+of what difficulties burden the ignorant rich who have social
+ambitions.  She was good-hearted, coarse, shy and hopeful.  A woman may
+be coarse and yet timid, as I have noted many a time, and Mrs.
+Gunderson was of this type.  She hungered for social status, but knew
+not how to attain it.  To her burly husband's credit, he wished, above
+all things, to gratify his wife's ambition, but he was as ignorant as
+she regarding ways and means.  He had learned that there was a limit
+even to the power of money.
+
+Jean had met Mrs. Gunderson in a social way, but of course there could
+be no affinity between the two, and the heavy-weight matron, anxious
+for recognition, had hardly attracted a second thought from the small
+aristocrat.  I do not know, by the way, that I have told of the social
+status of these friends of mine.  I don't think either Grant or Jean
+ever gave the matter much attention.  Grant was democratic in every
+principle, and yet, unknowingly, it seems to me, exclusive arbitrarily.
+He had those about him whom he liked, and they were necessarily
+somewhat of his kind.  And Jean was, a little more thoughtfully,
+perhaps, of the same sort.  Unconsciously they were the center of a set
+for admission to which rich men would have given money.  But, as I
+said, this key is one of the few things money cannot buy.
+
+The political fight was on, and fierce.  We did good work in that
+campaign.  The struggle was so keen, the supervision of everything so
+searching, that daring fraud became a thing impossible.  It was simply
+a test of persuasion, of popularity and of relative skill in those
+devices which are but the moves upon the chessboard in a game where
+chances are nearly even.  We were but moderately hopeful.  Harlson was
+immeasurably the better candidate.  He was, at least, earnest and
+honest, and would represent the district well.  I asked once why he
+wanted to go to Congress.
+
+"I'll have to think," he said, "to answer you in full.  Firstly, I
+believe I want to go because I have some fool ideas about certain
+legislation which I think I can accomplish.  I believe they'll like me
+better in this district, and, perhaps, in a broader way, after I have
+been there.  Then I want Jean to enjoy with me all the mummery and
+absurdity of the most mixed social conditions on the face of the
+civilized globe, and, besides that, I've been invited to take black
+bass with her out of a certain stream in the Shenandoah Valley, and to
+kill a deer or two, with headquarters at an old house up in West
+Virginia."
+
+He said this lightly, yet I knew it was not far from the full truth.
+He had ideas of changes and reforms, and was prepared to fight for
+them.  As for Jean and the fishing and the shooting, that was a matter
+of course.  He must get out to nature, and he must have her with him
+certainly.  As for me, personally--well, we had fought the world
+together for many a year, and I never knew him to fail me, and I could
+not very well fail him.  I worried about this battle, though we had
+gained steadily.  There was an element in the district, led by shrewd
+politicians, of the graduated saloon-keeper type, which did not lack
+large numbers.  Outside one ward, though we had practically beaten
+them, Grant had invoked everything.  He had stood up squarely on every
+platform, and as well in every drinking-shop and den, and almost
+bagnio, and explained to whom he found the nature of the contest, and
+told them what he wanted to do, and what all the hearings were, and
+told them then to conduct themselves as they pleased--he had but put
+his case as it was.
+
+And there are men among the thugs, and humanity is not altogether bad,
+even in the slums, and help had come to us from unexpected places.
+More than one man, brutal-looking, but with lines in his countenance
+showing that he had once been something better, came around and worked
+well, and all to his future advantage, for Harlson's memory of such
+things was as the memory of that cardinal--what was his name?--who
+never forgot a face or incident or figure.  We were what the
+politicians call "on top," a week before election, save in that same
+Ninth Ward.  I had seen old Gunderson myself.  He was not what we call
+affable.  I had to wander through many offices, and finally to send in
+my card.  I found this burly man in his private room, looking over
+papers on his desk.  He did not look up as I came in.  I took a seat,
+unasked, and waited.  It was five minutes before he turned his head.
+Then he muttered a "good-morning," for we had met before.
+
+I tried to be companionable and easy.  I returned his salutation,
+somewhat too effusively, it may be, and asked him about his business,
+and then wanted to know, in a general way, how be stood on the
+Congressional issue.  He hardened in a moment.
+
+"I don't know why I should support Harlson," he said.
+
+"Isn't he honest?" I asked.
+
+"Oh, yes, I suppose so," he grunted; "but he's not my kind."
+
+"Is the other man?" I asked.
+
+Even the burly animal before me flushed.  The other man was but a
+tricky politician of the creeping sort, a caterer to all prejudices,
+and a flatterer and favorer.  This everybody knew.  But he had become a
+part of the machine, was shrewd, and, with the machine behind him, was
+a power.
+
+"I've nothing to say about that; but Harlson's not my kind.  He's like
+one of those stag-hounds.  He has nothing to do with the other dogs."
+
+"He's fought some of the other dogs," I suggested.
+
+The man grunted, again: "He's not my kind."  And I left the place.  I
+had little hope of the Ninth Ward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+THE NINTH WARD.
+
+Unaccustomed to story-telling, it is possible that I have neglected
+chronology in this account.  I referred just now to the time we
+couldn't get into Harlson's house because we hadn't carried the Ninth
+Ward and to the Ape crowing at the window in his mother's arms.  Time
+passed after that, and, we all grew older, though, somehow, Jean did
+not seem to change, nor, for that matter, did Grant, though he was
+years her elder.  But the Ape changed amazingly.  He grew into a
+stalwart youth of fourteen, and became, about that time, addicted to a
+bad habit for which I reproved him in vain.  He had discovered that he
+could pick up his little mother and carry her about in his arms, and he
+did so frequently.  And his two younger brothers looked on enviously,
+and his pretty sister, the youngest of the group, with gravest
+apprehension.  But Jean seemed rather to like it, though it was most
+undignified, and Grant, though he ruled his children well, seemed
+rather to approve of their treatment of her majesty.  They were a happy
+lot together.  The Ape was a good deal interested in the election, but
+was not allowed to talk outside the house.  And Jean wore a serious
+look.  She lived for one man.
+
+I attended a party soon after my visit to Gunderson, and a very pretty
+affair it was.  A very pretty incident I saw there, too.
+
+What I saw was the advent of a big, blowsy woman, who was blazing with
+diamonds, whose face was good-natured, but who seemed ill at ease.  She
+was like a Muscovy duck among game fowl.  She was well received by the
+mass and overlooked by the few, and, being a woman, though of no acute
+comprehension, she understood vaguely her condition.  She was unhappy,
+and there was a flush, upon her face.
+
+I saw a small woman, neat in a gown of the Directory, it seemed to me,
+though of course not so pronounced, brought by apparent accident in
+contact with the big, blazing creature.  The smaller woman was
+self-contained and of the blue-blooded in look and unconsciousness from
+head to heel.  The two engaged in conversation, the one affable and
+interested, the other flushed and happy.
+
+I do not know that I ever enjoyed a party more, yet I did nothing on
+that occasion, save to watch at a distance the two people I have
+mentioned.  They drifted along together, and there was soon a group
+about them.  Was not Mrs. Grant Harlson a social power, and was not a
+friend of hers fit friend and confidant for any one?  I do not
+understand the ways of women.  I do not comprehend their manner of
+doing things, but I know a thing when it is done.  And when that party
+ended I knew that fat Mrs. Gunderson had risen to a higher plane than
+she had dared to covet for the time, and that she knew who had
+accomplished it.  Grant was not present at the party, and of the
+incident I told him nothing then.  I wanted him to note its possible
+sequence first.
+
+The day of election came, and a great day it was.  Outside the Ninth
+Ward we had passed beyond our hopes.  That ward, though,--at least from
+the first reports, and we paid slight attention to the later
+ones,--remained, through Gunderson, sullen, incomprehensible,
+uncommitted.  And at night, the voting over, newspapers began to show
+the bulletins as the ballots were counted and the returns came in.  We
+were at campaign headquarters and got the figures early.
+
+The scattering returns were satisfactory.  Through most of the district
+they showed a gain for us over past encounters.  The drift was all our
+way, but it was not big enough to offset all contingencies.  There was
+nothing from the Ninth Ward yet.  The counting was slow there.
+
+It was eleven o'clock before the vote of any precinct from the Ninth
+Ward came in.  It stood as follows:
+
+Harlson, 71.
+
+Sharkey, 53.
+
+Harlson picked up the filled-out blank, glanced at it, and threw it
+down again.
+
+"It's some mistake," he said; "that precinct is one of the stiffest the
+other way.  Wait until we get more of them."
+
+We waited, but not for long.  The returns came fluttering in like
+pigeons now.  The second read:
+
+Harlson, 33.
+
+Sharkey, 30.
+
+There dawned a light upon me; but I said no word.  I was interested in
+watching Harlson's face.  He was a trifle pale, despite his usual
+self-control, and was noting the figures carefully.  Added precincts
+repeated the same story.  Harlson would take up a return, glance at it,
+compare it with another, and then examine a dozen of them together, for
+once in his life he was taken unawares, and was at sea.  He left the
+table at length, lit a cigar, and came over to where I stood, leaning
+against the wall.
+
+"What does it mean, Alf?  If those figures don't lie, the Ninth Ward
+has swung as vigorously for us as it ever did against us.  With an even
+vote in the ward the chances were about even.  Now, unless I'm
+dreaming, we own the district."
+
+"We do."
+
+"But how is it?  What does it all mean?"
+
+"I suppose it means that Gunderson is with you."
+
+"But how can that be?"
+
+"Were you at Mrs. Gorson's party?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Jean was there, though."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"So was Mrs. Gunderson."
+
+The man's face was a study worth the scrutiny.  For a moment or two he
+uttered no word.  The whole measurement of it was dawning on him.  "The
+little rhinoceros-bird!" he said, softly.
+
+The room was thronged, and there was a roar of cheers.  The issue was
+decided beyond all question.  The newspaper offices were flashing out
+the fact from illuminated windows.  There were shouting crowds upon the
+streets.  Hosts of people were grasping Harlson's hand.  He had little
+to say save to thank them in a perfunctory manner.  He was in a hurry
+to get home.
+
+When I dined with Harlson the next day I hoped to learn some details,
+but I was disappointed.  Jean was herself a trifle radiant, perhaps,
+for she remarked to me, apropos of nothing, and in the most casual way,
+that men were dull, and Harlson had little to say.  Judging from his
+general demeanor, though, and the expression on his face, I would have
+given something to know what he said to his wife when he reached home
+the night before.  Something no bachelor, I imagine, could comprehend.
+
+And before the year ended Harlson had the Ninth Ward so that it
+couldn't bolt him under any ordinary circumstances.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+THEIR FOOLISH WAYS.
+
+It is, as I have said so often, but the simple story of two friends of
+mine I am trying to tell, but I wish I had more gift in that direction.
+I wish I could paint, just as an artist with brush and colors
+reproduces something, the home life in the house where much of my time
+was spent.  I can but give a mechanical idea of what it was, but to me
+it was very pleasant.
+
+A very shrewd politician Jean became, after the famous contest in which
+the Ninth Ward aided us to victory, and we were accustomed to consult
+her on the social bearings of many a struggle.  In case she became too
+arbitrary on any occasion Grant had fallen into the way of calling the
+Ape, and asking him to remove her, whereupon the youth would carry off
+his small mother in his arms and insist that, as he put it, from a
+childhood expression, with a long "a," she "'have herself."  There was
+ever this quality of the whimsical about life in this home.  And I am
+inclined to believe that the world is better for such a flavor.
+
+The children, were well grown now, the family was rounded out, and
+Grant's mustache, gray when he was forty, was now grayer still, though
+Jean's brown hair showed yet no glint of silver.  I asked one day after
+dinner, when we two were idling and smoking in the library, and Jean
+was hovering about, if she hadn't a gray hair yet, and Grant said no,
+without hesitation, though the lady herself seemed less assured.  Then
+happened a curious thing, at least to me.  I asked Grant how he knew so
+well, if even his wife, who, being a woman and fair to look upon, would
+be naturally apprehensive of any change in aspect, could not tell if a
+gray hair had come, and he but laughed at me.  "Come here, Jean," he
+said.
+
+She came and stood, beside him, close to me.
+
+"Alf," said he, "I have a vast opinion of you, but there are some
+things I imagine you do not comprehend.  You should have blended your
+life with that of some such creature as this, and you would have
+developed a new faculty.  Now I close my eyes.  Ask me anything about
+her--I don't mean about her dress, but about her head or hands, all you
+can see of the real woman."
+
+I accepted the challenge, and there was great sport, and a little-great
+result.  I made the inquest a most searching and minute affair.  I
+asked him to tell me if there were any mark upon the neck, near one
+ear, and he described the precise locality and outline of a tiny brown
+fleck, no larger than a pin's head.  He told of any little dimple, of
+any sweep of the downward growth of the brown hair, of any trifling
+scar from childhood.  And of her chin and neck he told the very
+markings, in a way that was something wonderful.  His eyes were closed,
+and his face was turned away from us, but this made no difference.  He
+described to me even the character of the wonderful network in the
+palms of her little hands.  Then he opened his eyes and turned to me,
+chaffingly:
+
+"You see how ignorant is a man of your sort.  Having no world worth
+speaking of, he knows nothing of geography."
+
+I do not believe that even Jean herself knew, before, of how even the
+physical being of her had been impressed upon the heart and brain of
+this man.  She listened curiously and wonderingly when, he was talking
+with his eyes closed, and when he opened them and began his nonsense
+with me she stood looking at him silently, then suddenly left the room.
+It was a way of Jean's to flee to her own room for a little season when
+something touched her, and I imagine this was one of the occasions.
+She had known for long years how two souls could become knitted and
+interwoven into one, but I do not believe that before this incident she
+had ever comprehended how her physical self, as well, had become an
+ever present picture upon the mind's retina of her lover and her
+husband.
+
+I am worried, and bothered.  I am a man past middle age.  I shall never
+marry now, and shall but drift into a time of doing some little, I
+hope, toward making things easier for some other men and some women,
+and then--into a crematory.  I have a fancy that my body, this machine
+of flesh and muscle in which I live, should not be boxed and buried in
+seeping earth to become a foul thing.  That was an idea I learned from
+this firm friend of mine.  I want it burned, and all of it, save the
+little urn full of white ashes which some one may care for, to go out
+and mingle with the pure air, and there to be one of earth's good
+things, and to be breathed in again and make part of the life of the
+maple leaf, or the young girl going to school in the morning, or the
+old-fashioned pinks in the front yard of the old-fashioned people, or
+the red roses in the florist's hot-houses.  I have that fancy.
+
+I am worried because I, clumsy, dull-thinking man, cannot tell what I
+wish to tell of a life I saw.  I am worried because I cannot make
+others understand it as it was.  It seems to me it would do some good
+in the world.  It seems to me that many a man and woman, if they could
+know about Grant and Jean, who really lived,--for this is but a tale of
+fact,--would be now more loving and better men and women because of it.
+But I do not know how to tell of what I saw and what I knew.
+
+Grant was over sixty years old at this time of which I write, and I am
+coming very near the end, and Jean was past forty, and the two were not
+much different from what they were when I first saw them together.  I
+suppose it was partly because I had been with them so much that I did
+not note the changes nature wrought in this pair of her children, but
+certainly they were far younger than their years.  They had found
+together the only fountain of eternal youth which exists or ever will
+exist upon this planet which threw off a barren moon and bred monsters
+and, later, mastodons and apes, and finally made a specialty of men and
+women.  They laughed at time, and hoped for a future of souls after
+this trial.  I saw it with my eyes, I heard it with my ears, when they
+spoke together.  They were blended, and it made life worth the living.
+What I learned conveyed to me new things.  It taught me that all there
+is in novels is not romance nor untrue.  It taught me that a male and
+female of this species of ours may meet, and from the two may come an
+entity which is something very near divine.  Why is it, I wonder, that
+the right man and the right woman out of the hundreds of millions meet
+so seldom at the fitting time, and that life is either so barren or so
+jagged and hurtful because of the non-meeting of those who should be
+mated?  What a world this might be!  Of course, though, there is some
+higher thought, and it is all right in some way.
+
+They were what you would call religious, Grant and Jean.  They liked
+the same church--it doesn't matter which it was--and attended
+regularly, and worshiped without much regard for its more narrow
+legends.  They did not trouble themselves with the idea of the
+everlasting punishment of babes, nor the fate of the untutored heathen.
+They had, somehow, a simple idea that the human being who tried to do
+right according to his or her views was all right as to the future.
+They were not much in sympathy with what is called heretic-hunting.
+They had each read the story of the gentle Nazarene, and had failed to
+learn that there was more than one church--a church without either
+spectacular effects or creed bickerings.  A church of the group who, at
+one time, clung to Him and His teachings, and so had shaped their
+course.  To them a narrow, grim old Presbyterian--were he but honest
+and earnest according to his inherited brain and intelligence--might,
+some time, a year or ten million years from now, be walking arm and arm
+along the sidewalks of some glorious street of some New Jerusalem with
+the Jesuit of to-day, honest and earnest according to his brain and his
+intelligence.  This is not reasoning.  Was it a bad creed?
+
+They were not afraid of old age as it came nearer, hour by hour and day
+by day, these friends of mine.  They had pondered of it much, of
+course, for they were thoughtful people, and they had talked of it
+doubtless many times, for there was little of which they thought that
+the two did not reveal to each other in plain words; but they were not
+troubled over the outlook.  They seemed to realize that the flower is
+no greater than what follows, that fruit is the sequel of all
+fragrance, and that to those who reason rightly there is no difference
+in the income of what is good in all the seasons of human being.  I
+remember well an incident of one evening.
+
+We had been playing billiards, Grant and I.  He had a table in his
+house and had taught Jean how to play until she had become a terror,
+though the Ape had nearly caught up with her in skill, and there was,
+at this time, a great pretended struggle between them, and we had come
+up into the library after a hard after-dinner game.  Jean came in, and
+we talked of various things, and looked at some old books, and,
+somehow--I forget the connection--began talking of old age.  It was in
+the midst of our debate that Grant, after his insane way, suddenly
+leaped up and, standing beside me as I sat, proceeded to make me an
+oration.  He talked of the friction of things and of the future of this
+soul or mind of ours, concerning the luck of which we know so little.
+And, while I may or may not have agreed with his general theories, I
+did not disagree with the one that the autumn is as much a part of what
+there is as is the spring, and that all trends toward a common end,
+which must be for the best in some way we do not comprehend, because we
+see, at least, enough to know that nature, wiser than we, makes no
+mistakes.  "The fruitage 'goes'!" Grant exclaimed larkingly, and then,
+forgetting me for the moment, he caught up Jean, and, carrying her
+gravely about, repeated to her these lines:
+
+  "Grow old, along with me;
+  The best is yet to be,
+  The last of life, for which the first was made!"
+
+And they were at least exponents of the belief they had, and it was to
+me an education and a comfort.  I learned, what I could not profit by,
+that a man and woman together are more than twice one man or twice one
+woman, when the man and woman are the right two.  It was like an
+astronomer studying the sun.  And what warmth and light there was to
+look upon!
+
+I have tried in these rambling words to tell how these two people faced
+the autumn and found it spring, since they were still together.  I
+wonder why I made the attempt?  It is but a simple relation of certain
+things which happened, yet I do not, somehow, get the pulse of it.  It
+must be because I have known the people all too well.  My heart is so
+much in what I try to say that I am not clear.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+THE LAW OF NATURE.
+
+Of what was the result of finally owning the Ninth Ward and the
+district I have only to say that it, of course, added to the reputation
+of one man--and of one woman as well, it may be added, for Jean in her
+necessary social functions grew in her way with Grant; but otherwise it
+made little difference.  There was the family hegira to the capital,
+and much enjoyment of the limited attractions of the semi-Ethiopian and
+shabby but semi-magnificent city in a miasmatic valley, and it was, no
+doubt, some education for the children.  To Grant it was a fray, of
+course, and to Jean it was enjoyment of his successes, and probably
+more sorrow than he felt at his failures.  The successes were the more
+numerous.  Jean herself never failed.  She was an envied woman in the
+social world.  She was a strong man's wife, and possessed of all tact
+and gentle wisdom in aiding him, but she was not a rival of the mere
+self-advertisers among the queens of a shifting society.  She could not
+afford it, even had her inclination bent that way.  She had absorbing
+riches.  They were a man and her children.
+
+When I brightened up, because my friends were coming back to me, was
+the great season of the year to me, as to them.  When the family
+returned from the capital and reoccupied the home there was rejoicing.
+And what rioters we were!  But once more, each time, it was said by
+Grant, and by me as well, the battle must be fought, and so came
+re-elections and the flittings.  And, after all, it was good.  It was
+not the rusting in the sheath.
+
+And it came that there was another gallant fight on.  The city
+Congressional district is not like the country one, where a man once
+firmly in the saddle may stay there for a quarter of a century.  The
+city constituencies have the fault in make-up that their Congressmen
+are not selected as those who will do best for the districts, but
+because they have hands on the lever of some machine.  Of course, there
+are always exceptions, as in Grant's case, but the rule prevails.  And
+now there had been flung down the gauntlet of a clever adversary, and
+the battle was a warm one.
+
+We both enjoyed this contest, for, though the struggle was likely to be
+sharp, we knew the issue was ours, from the beginning, and the whole
+thing, as Grant said, was like a hunting trip.  But how it ended!
+
+He had been out much at night, for it was a large district and there
+were many meetings, and had been as tireless as was usual with him.
+His thought was never given much to the care of himself, and in this
+campaign he appeared more than ordinarily reckless.  Jean, watchful
+ever, reproached him and made him change his ways a little.  Perhaps it
+was not all his fault that one day he felt ill.  It was on the eve of
+the election.
+
+We carried the day as we had hoped, and easily, and there was a demand
+for Harlson that night which could not be refused with grace.  He was
+compelled to speak, and in the open air of a chill November evening.
+He told me he felt ill.  When, late at night, we reached his home and
+he found Jean awaiting him, he turned to me and said:
+
+"It's all right, Alf.  I'll be myself again by morning.  I'm where all
+that is good for me is, and should be well in no time.  She will but
+pass her hands above my head, and--there you are!"
+
+And we parted, as carelessly as usual, and as I went home I was
+speculating on what the revised returns would show the majority to be,
+not as to the outcome of Grant Harlson's indisposition.
+
+Jean sent for me the next morning.  I found a look upon her face which
+troubled me.
+
+"Grant is not well," she said.  "He came home late and spoke of an odd
+feeling.  We cared for him, but this morning he was listless and did
+not want to dress and come to breakfast.  He is in bed still.  Please
+go up and see him, and then come down to the library and tell me what
+you think the matter is."
+
+I went upstairs and found Grant lying in his bed and breathing heavily.
+I shook him by the shoulder.
+
+"What's the matter, old man?"
+
+He turned over with an effort, though laughing.  "I don't know," he
+answered.  "I only know I haven't been well since last night, and that
+there is a queer feeling about my throat and chest.  I ought to be up,
+of course, but I'm listless and careless, somehow.  By the way, what
+were the totals?"
+
+I gave him the figures, and he smiled, and then with an "Excuse me, old
+man," turned his face to the wall.  A moment later, as I sat watching
+him, alarmed, he roused himself and turned toward me again.  "Won't you
+send Jean to me?" he asked.
+
+I saw Jean, and she went upstairs, and when she came down her face was
+white.  The Ape, rugged young man as he was, had tears in his eyes, and
+his brothers and sisters were crying quietly.  I left the house, and an
+hour later a physician, one of the most famous on the continent, was by
+Grant Harlson's bedside.  He was a personal friend of both of us.  When
+he came down his face was grave.
+
+"What is it, Doctor?"
+
+"It's pneumonia, and a bad case."
+
+"What can we do?"
+
+"Nothing, but to care for him and aid him with all hopefulness and
+strength.  He has vitality beyond one man in a thousand.  He may throw
+off all the incubus of it.  But it has come suddenly and is growing."
+Then he got mad in all his friendship, and blurted out: "Why didn't the
+great blundering brute send for me when first he felt something he
+couldn't meet nor understand?"  And there were almost tears in his eyes.
+
+The doctors have much to say about pneumonia.  Doubtless they know of
+what they talk, but pneumonia comes nevertheless, and defeats the
+strong man and the doctors.  The strong man it strangles.  The doctors
+it laughs at.
+
+All that medical science could command was brought to the bedside of
+Grant Harlson.  The doctor, his friend, called in the wisest of
+associates in consultation, and as for care--there was Jean!  He was
+cared for as the angels might care for a wandering soul.  But the big
+man in the bed tossed and muttered, and looked at Jean appealingly, and
+grew worse.  The strength seemed going from him at last--from him, the
+bulwark of us all.
+
+All that science could do was done.  All that care could do was done,
+but our giant weakened.  The doctors talk of the croupous form of
+pneumonia, and of some other form--I do not know the difference--but I
+do know that this man had a great pain in his chest, and that his head
+ached, and that he had alternate arctic chills and flames of fever.
+His pulse was rapid, and he gasped as he breathed.  Sometimes he would
+become delirious, then weaker in the sane intervals.  He would send us
+from the room then, and call for Jean alone, and, when she
+emerged--well--God help me!--I never want to see that awful look of
+suspense and agony upon a human face again.  It will stay with me until
+I follow the roadway leading to my friends.
+
+The doctor gave the sick man opiates or stimulants, as the case might
+at any moment seem to need, and they had some slight effect; but there
+came a shallower breathing, and the quilts tossed under the heaving of
+the broad chest, fitfully.  It reminded me in some strange way of the
+imitation sea scenes at the theater, where a great cloth of some sort
+is rocked and lifted to represent the waves.  Only one lung was
+congested in the beginning, but, later, the thing extended to each, and
+the air-cells began filling, and the man suffered more and more.  He
+fought against it fiercely.
+
+"Grant," said the doctor, after the administration of some strong
+stimulant, "help us all you can.  Cough!  Force the air through those
+huge lungs of yours, and see if you can't tear away that tissue which
+is forming to throttle you!"
+
+And Grant would summon all his strength, by no means yet exhausted, and
+exert his will, and cough, despite the fearful pain of it; but the
+human form held not the machinery to dislodge that growing web which
+was filling the lung-chambers and cutting off, hour by hour, the oxygen
+which makes pure blood and makes the being.
+
+And the man who laughed at things grew weaker and weaker, and, though
+he laughed still and was his old self and made us happy for a brief
+interval, when he had not the fever and was clear-headed, and said that
+it was nothing and that he would throw it off, we knew that there was
+deadly peril.  And one evening, when Grant was again delirious, the
+doctor came to me and said there was very little hope.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+WHITEST ASHES.
+
+What is the mood of fate?  Must strong men die illogically?  What does
+it all mean, anyhow?  About this I am but blind and reasonless.  I wish
+I knew!  The world is more than hollow to me, yet I have a hope, I'll
+say that.  There was some one very like Jean, one whom I loved and who
+loved me, thirty years ago.  Will she and I meet some day, I wonder?
+And what will she be to me then?  I suppose I have the philosophy and
+endurance of the average man; but this is, with any doubt, a black
+world at times, and one in which there is no good.  The breaking of
+heart-strings mars all music.  I am alone and dull and wondering, and
+in a blind revolt.  Why should all things change so, and what is this
+death which comes?  There must be some future world.  If there be not,
+what a failure is all the brutal material scheme.
+
+One day Grant was clear of head, but weaker, and talked with me long of
+his affairs.
+
+"I'm afraid I can't fight it out after all," he said, "though you
+mustn't let Jean and the children know that yet."
+
+We talked more of what I should do if the worst came, and then he sent
+for the children.  He addressed himself to the Ape first, the brave
+boy's eyes full of tears and his whole body trembling as he listened:
+
+"My boy, you are hardly a man yet, but I know your manliness.  If I
+cannot stay with you, you will become the practical head of the family.
+Make them all proud of you.  And care for your mother always as you
+would for your own life or whatever is greatest."  Then he called the
+others to him:
+
+"You heard what I just said.  I spoke to the Ape only because he is
+oldest.  Remember that I have said this thing to all of you.  I needn't
+say it, I know--my blessed boys and girls--you understand.  But live
+for your little mother always."
+
+I cannot describe what those young people said or did.  It was most
+pitiful.  It was brave and sweet, too.  But they would not let their
+father die.  He must not!  They could not face the fact.
+
+Jean came then, and we three were left alone for a time.  She sat
+beside the bed, for he wanted his hand in hers when possible, and he
+spoke slowly:
+
+"Jean, I don't know.  There must be another world, as we have trusted.
+The great Power that fitted us to each other so will surely bring us
+together again.  Let us look at it that way.  We'll imagine that I'm
+only going to the country, and that you are to join me.  That is all.
+I know it.  God knows.  He will adjust it somehow."
+
+Jean did not answer.  She but clasped his hand and looked into his
+face.  I feared she would die of a bursting heart.  From that time till
+the end she never left his bedside.
+
+Murderous Death has certain kindnesses in his killings.  Just before
+the end is peace.  The struggles of this strong man became something
+fearful as the lungs congested, and the most powerful of anti-pyretics
+ceased to have effect, and then came the peace which follows nature's
+virtual surrender, the armistice of the moment.  What trick of
+reversion to first impressions comes, and what causes it, none have yet
+explained, but long before the time of Falstaff men, dying, had babbled
+o' green fields.  Grant Harlson, now, was surely dying.  The physicians
+had warned us all, and we were all about his bedside.  As for me, thank
+God, the tears could come as they did to the children.  But there were
+none upon the cheeks of Jean.  Her sweet face was as if of stone;
+whiter than that of the man in the bed.
+
+The convulsions had ceased, but his mind was wandering and his speech
+was rambling.  It was easy to tell of what he was thinking.  He was a
+little boy in the woodland home with his mother again, and was telling
+her delightedly of what he had seen and found, and of the yellow
+mandrake apples he had stored in a hollow log.  She should help him eat
+them.  And then the scene would shift, and he was older, and we were
+together in the fields.  He called to me excitedly to take the dog to
+the other side of the brush-heap, for the woodchuck was slipping
+through that way!  There was the old merry ring in his voice, and I
+knew where he was and how there came to him, in fancy, the sweet
+perfumes of the fields, and how his eyes, which were opened wide but
+saw us not, were blessed with all the greenness and the glory of the
+summer of long ago.  Then his manner changed, and the word "Jean" came
+softly to his lips, and again I knew they were camping out together,
+and he was teaching to his wife the pleasant mysteries of the forest,
+and all woodcraft.  There was love in his tones and in his features.
+The breast of the woman holding his hand heaved, and the pallor on her
+face grew more.
+
+There was another struggle for breath, then a desperate one, and with
+its end came consciousness.  Grant smiled and spoke faintly:
+
+"It must he pretty near the end.  I am very tired.  Jean, darling, get
+closer to me.  Kiss me."
+
+She leaned over and kissed him passionately.  He smiled again, then
+feebly took one of her little hands in each of his and lifted them to
+his face and kissed them; then held them down upon his eyes.  There was
+a single heave of his great chest, and he was dead.
+
+And the woman who fell to the floor was, apparently, as lifeless as the
+silent figure on the bed.
+
+She was not dead.  We carried her to her own room--hers and his, with
+the dressing-rooms attached--and she woke at last to a consciousness of
+her world bereft of one human being who had been to her nearly all
+there was.  She was not as we had imagined she would be when she
+recovered.  She was not hysterical, nor did she weep.  She was
+singularly quiet.  But that set, thoughtful look had never left her
+face.  She seemed some other person.  I talked to her of what was to be
+done.  What a task that was, for I could scarcely utter words myself.
+She suddenly brightened when I spoke of the crematory and what Grant's
+wishes were.
+
+"It must be as he wished," she said--"as he wished, in each small
+detail."  Then she said no more, and all the rest was left to me.
+
+She was quiet and grave at the funeral of her husband and my friend.
+She shed no tears; she uttered not a word.  She listened quietly while
+I told her how I had arranged to carry out all his wishes about
+himself, or, rather, about his tenement.  She did not accompany me.
+There came with me on that journey only the Ape, who was red of eye and
+vainly trying to conceal it all.  How the youth was suffering!
+
+I came to the home one day with an urn of bronze.  There were only
+ashes in it, clean and white.  Jean looked at them and asked me to go
+away.  The urn was put, at her request, in her own apartments.  It was
+sealed and stood upon a mantel of the room in which she slept.  I do
+not believe she thought much of the ashes as representing the man who
+had gone away from her.  She may have thought of them as precious, just
+as she did of a pair of gloves she had mended for him just before his
+illness, and which she kept always with her, but I believe that of the
+ashes, as of the gloves, she thought only of what her love had used in
+life and left behind.  That was the total of it.  It was the heart, the
+soul, the knowing of her that was gone.
+
+How the Ape, how all the children cared for the small mother now!
+Never was woman more watched, and guarded and waited upon.  She
+recognized it all, too, but said very little.  Her soft hands would
+stroke the forehead of her first-born, or of her eldest daughter, or of
+any of the offspring of the two, the product of their love, and she
+would tell them that she was glad they were so good, but, gentle and
+thoughtful as she was, there was something lacking.  She seemed in
+another world.
+
+I talked to Jean.  I tried to be a philosopher, to tell her of the
+children and of the broadness of life, and that she must drift into it
+again.  She was kind and courteous as of old with me, but it was
+somehow not the same.  And she grew weaker day by day, and would lie
+for hours, the children told me, in the room where Grant and she had
+been together all those years.
+
+How can I tell of it!  Jean, who had become my sister, who was part of
+Grant Harlson, drifted away before my eyes!  It was harder, almost, for
+us than the fierce fight with death of the one who had been the
+mainstay of us all.  Somehow, we knew she was going to leave us, and
+the grief of the children was something terrible.  She listened to them
+and was kind to them, wildly affectionate at times, but she lapsed ever
+into the same strange apathy.  We had the best physicians again.  I
+talked with one of them.  "What shall we do?" I asked.
+
+He was a great man, a successful one, a man above the rut, and he
+answered simply:
+
+"I cannot advise.  The mind governs the body beyond us sometimes,--very
+often, I imagine.  She does not want to live.  That is all I can say.
+Drugs are not in the treatment of the case."
+
+She grew thinner and thinner and more listless, and finally, one day,
+the Ape came to my office and said his mother had not left her room for
+a day or two.  I went with him to the home which had been almost as my
+own.
+
+I was admitted to Jean's room as a matter of course.  I was one of the
+household.  She was lying upon a great sofa, one Grant had liked.  I
+asked her to tell me what to do.
+
+She was calm and quiet as she answered.  "There is nothing," she said.
+Then suddenly she seemed to be the Jean I had known one time.  She
+raised herself up: "Alf, you were very close to us.  Cannot you see?"
+She began another sentence, then stopped suddenly, and only smiled at
+me and said I was the nest friend ever two people had in all this
+world.  She still spoke of two people.  As if Grant were with us still!
+
+How can one tell of the fading of a lily.  No one ever told of it all.
+One day they sent for me, and when I came the sweetest woman lay upon
+her couch!  She had talked with her children much that day, and told
+them many things--of plannings for their futures.  She had, for the
+first time, told them of all their father had designed, or hoped, or
+guessed for each of them.  And they had been very happy, and thought
+she would recover.  And she had slept peacefully, and had not awakened.
+
+I looked upon her face, and the smile upon it was something wonderful.
+It was one of the things which makes me believe there is some great
+story to it.  There was none with her but her youngest daughter when
+she left us, and the child could not tell when worlds were touching.
+But upon that face was the expression which tells of what is all
+beyond.  I do believe that, even before she quitted her earthly frame,
+dear Jean knew that she had found Grant again.
+
+Why have I told this story of two people, which is no story at all, but
+only what I know of what has happened to those closest to me?  There is
+no more of it.  It ends with the deaths of them, and yet I do not know
+that it is sad.  They lived and loved and died.  They had more
+happiness than comes to one-half humanity.  Their life was of the gold
+of what is the inner life of the better ones of this great new nation
+of a new continent.  They lived and loved, and their children live, and
+will be good men and women.
+
+     *     *     *     *     *     *
+
+I cannot understand the problem.  No learning clears it.  I only know
+that there were Grant and I, that there were bees and perfumes, and
+wild, boyish delights, and the older life, and the feverish life of a
+city, and the rare, great love I looked upon.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of A Man and a Woman, by Stanley Waterloo
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