In the Heart of a Fool

Also as Lizzie’s eyes began to glow in his sky, Jared let his interest lag in the talk at Casper Herdicker’s shoe shop, though it was tall talk, and Jared sitting on a keg in a corner with little Tom Williams, the stone mason, beside him on a box, and Denny Hogan near him on a vacant work bench and Ira Dooley on the window ledge would wrangle until bed time many a night as Dick Bowman, wagging a warlike head, and Casper pegging away at his shoes, tore society into shreds, smashed idols and overturned civilization. Up to this point there was complete agreement between the iconoclasts. They went so far together that they had no quarrel about the route of the mob down Fifth Avenue in New York–which Dick knew only as a legend but which Casper had seen; and they were one in the belief that Dan Sands’s bank and Wright & Perry’s store should fall early in the sack of Market Street. But when it came to reconstructing society there was a clash that mounted to a cataclysm. For Dick, shaking his head violently, demanded a government that should regulate everything and Casper waving a vicious, flat-nosed hammer, battered down all government and stood for the untrammeled and unhampered liberty of the individual. Night after night they looted civilization and stained the sky with their fires and the ground with the oppressor’s blood, only to sink their claws and tusks into each other’s vitals in mortal combat over the spoil.

About the time that Jared Thurston found the new stars that had ranged across his ken, Tom Van Dorn, the handsome, cheerful, exquisite Tom Van Dorn began to find the debates between Casper and Dick Bowman diverting. So many a night when the society of the softer sex was either cloying or inconvenient, the dapper young fellow would come dragging Henry Fenn with him, to sit on a rickety chair and observe the progress of the revolution and to enjoy the carnage that always followed the downfall of the established order. He used to sit beside Jared Thurston who, being a printer, was supposed to belong to the more intellectual of the crafts and hence more appreciative than Williams or Dooley or Hogan, of his young lordship’s point of view; and as the debate waxed warm, Tom was wont to pinch the lean leg of Mr. Thurston in lieu of the winks Tom dared not venture. But a time came when Jared Thurston sat apart from Van Dorn and stared coldly at him. And as Tom and Henry Fenn walked out of the human slaughter house that Dick and Casper had made after a particularly bloody revolt against the capitalistic system, Henry Fenn walked for a time beside his friend looking silently at the earth while Van Dorn mooned and star-gazed with wordy delight. Henry lifted his face, looked at Tom with great, bright, sympathetic eyes and cut in:

“Tom–why are you playing with Lizzie Coulter? She is not in your class or of your kind. What’s your idea in cutting in between Jared and her; you’ll only make trouble.”

A smile, a gay, happy, and withal a seductive smile lit up the handsome, oval face of young Mr. Van Dorn. The smile became a laugh, a quiet, insinuating, good-natured, light-hearted laugh. As he laughed he replied:

“Lizzie’s all right, Henry–don’t worry about Lizzie.” Again he laughed a gentle, deep-voiced chuckle, and held up his hand in the moonlight. A brown scab was lined across the back of the hand and as Henry saw it Van Dorn spoke: “Present from Lizzie–little pussy.” Again he chuckled and added, “Nearly made the horse run away, too. Anyway,” he laughed pleasantly, “when I left her she promised to go again.”

But Henry Fenn returned to his point: “Tom,” he cried, “don’t play with Lizzie–she’s not your kind, and it’s breaking Jared’s heart. Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’ll go down there a dozen times, make love to her, hold her hand and kiss her and go away and pick up another girl. But she’s the whole world and Heaven to boot for Jared. She’s his one little ewe lamb, Tom. And she’d be happy with Jared if–”

“If she wants Jared she can have him. I’m not holding her,” interrupted the youth. “And anyway,” he exclaimed, “what do I owe to Jared and what do I owe to her or to any one but myself!”

Fenn did not answer at once. At length he broke the silence. “Well, you heard what I said and I didn’t smile when I said it.”

But Tom Van Dorn did smile as he answered, a smile of such sweetness, and of such winning grace that it sugar-coated his words.

“Henry,” he cried in his gay, deep voice with the exuberance of youth ringing in it, “the world is mine. You know what I think about this whole business. If Lizzie doesn’t want me to bother her she mustn’t have such eyes and such hair and such lips. In this life I shall take what I find that I can get. I’m not going to be meek nor humble nor patient, nor forgiving and forbearing and I’m not going to refrain from a mutton roast because some one has a ewe lamb.”

He put a warm, kind, brotherly hand on the shoulder beside him. “Shocked, aren’t you, Henry?” he asked, laughing.

Henry Fenn looked up with a gentle, glowing smile on his rather dull face and returned, “No, Tom. Maybe you can make it go, but I couldn’t.”

“Well, I can. Watch me,” he cried arrogantly. “Henry, I want the advantage of my strength in this world and I’m not going to go puling around, golden-ruling and bending my back to give the weak and worthless a ride. Let ’em walk. Let ’em fall. Let ’em rot for all I care. I’m not afraid of their God. There is no God. There is nature. Up to the place where man puts on trousers it’s a battle of thews and teeth. And nature never intended pants to mark the line where she changes the order of things. And the servile, weakling, groveling, charitable, cowardly philosophy of Christ–it doesn’t fool me, Henry. I’m a pagan and I want the advantage of all the force, all the power, that nature gave me, to live life as a dangerous, exhilarating experience. I shall live life to the full–live it hard–live it beautifully, but live it! live it! Henry, live it like a gentleman and not like an understrapper and bootlicker! I intend to command, not obey! Rule, not serve! I shall take and not give–not give save as it pleases me to have my hand licked now and then! As for Lizzie and Jared,” young Mr. Van Dorn waved a gay hand, “let them look out for themselves. They’re not my worries!”

“But, Tom,” remonstrated Henry as he looked at the ground, “it’s nothing to me of course, but Lizzie–”

“Ah, Henry,” Van Dorn laughed gayly, “I’m not going to hurt Lizzie. She’s good fun: that’s all. And now look here, Mr. Preacher–you come moralizing around me about what I’m doing to some one else, which after all is not my business but hers; and I’m right here to tell you, what you’re doing to yourself, and that’s your business and no one’s else. You’re drinking too much. People are talking about it. Quit it! Whisky never won a jury. In the Morse case you loaded up for your speech and I beat you because in all your agonizing about the wrong to old man Müller and his ‘pretty brown-eyed daughter’ as you called her, you forgot slick and clean the flaw in Morse’s deed.”

“I suppose you’re right, Tom. But I was feeling kind of off that day, mother’d been sick the night before and–”

“And so you filled up with a lot of bad whisky and driveled and wept and stumbled through the case and I beat you. I tell you, Henry, I keep myself fit. I have no time to look after others. My job is myself and you’ll find that unless you look after yourself no one else will, at least whisky won’t. If I find girling is beating me in my law cases I quit girling. But it doesn’t. Lord, man, the more I know of human nature, the more I pick over the souls of these country girls and blow open the petals of their pretty hearts, the wiser I am.”

“But the girls, Tom–the girls–” protested the somber-eyed Mr. Fenn.

“Ah, I don’t hurt ’em and they like it. And so long as your whisky hamestrings you and my girls give me what I need in my business–don’t talk to me.”

Tom Van Dorn left Fenn at his mother’s door and as Fenn saw his friend turn toward the south he called, “Aren’t you going to your room?”

“Why, it’s only eleven o’clock,” answered Van Dorn. To the inquiring silence Van Dorn called, “I’m going down to see Lizzie.”

Henry Fenn stood looking at his friend, who explained: “That’s all right. I said I’d be down to-night and she’ll wait.”

“Well–” said Fenn. But Van Dorn cut him short with “Now, Henry, I can take care of myself. Lizzie can take care of herself–and you’re the only one of us who, as I see it, needs careful nursing!” And with that he went striding away.

And three hours later when the moon was waning in the west a girl sitting by her window gazed at the red orb and dreamed beautiful dreams, such as a girl may dream but once, of the prince who had come to her so gloriously. While the prince strolled up the street with his coat over his arm, his hat in his hand, letting the night wind flutter the raven’s wing of hair on his brow, and as he went he laughed to himself softly and laughed and laughed. For are we not told of old to put not our trust in princes!

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH WE CONSIDER THE LADIES–GOD BLESS ’EM!

During those years in the late seventies and the early eighties, the genii on the Harvey job grunted and grumbled as they worked, for the hours were long and tedious and the material was difficult to handle. Kyle Perry’s wife died, and it was all the genii could do to find him a cook who would stay with him and his lank, slab-sided son, and when the genii did produce a cook–the famous Katrina, they wished her on Kyle and the boy for life, and she ruled them with an iron rod. And to even things up, they let Kyle stutter himself into a partnership with Ahab Wright–though Kyle was trying to tell Ahab that they should have a partition in their stable. But partition was too much of a mouthful and poor Kyle fell to stuttering on it and found himself sold into bondage for life by the genii, dispensing nails and cod-fish and calico as Ahab’s partner, before Kyle could get rid of the word partition.

The genii also had to break poor Casper Herdicker’s heart–and he had one, and a big one, despite his desire for blood and plunder; and they broke it when his wife Brunhilde deserted the hearthstone back of the shoe-shop, rented a vacant store room on Market Street and went into the millinery way of life. And it wasn’t enough that the tired genii had to gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel, witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn’t enough that they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn’t enough that the overworked genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with the railroad–and he was load enough for any engine; his heart itself weighed ten stone; it wasn’t enough that they had to find various and innumerable contraptions for Captain Morton to peddle, but there was Tom Van Dorn’s new black silk mustache to grow, and to be oiled and curled daily; so he had to go to the Palace Hotel barber shop at least once every day, and passing the cigar counter, he had to pass by Violet Mauling–pretty, empty-faced, doll-eyed Violet Mauling at the cigar stand. And all the long night and all the long day, the genii, working on the Harvey job, cast spells, put on charms, and did their deepest sorcery to take off the power of the magic runes that young Tom’s black art were putting upon her; and day after day the genii felt their highest potencies fail. So no wonder they mumbled and grumbled as they bent over their chores. For a time, the genii had tried to work on Tom Van Dorn’s heart after he dropped Lizzie Coulter and sent her away on a weary life pilgrimage with Jared Thurston, as the wife of an itinerant editor; but they found nothing to work on under Tom’s cigar holder–that is, nothing in the way of a heart. There was only a kind of public policy. So the genii made the public policy as broad and generous as they could and let it go at that.

Tom Van Dorn and Henry Fenn rioted in their twenties. John Hollander saved a bleeding country, pervaded the courthouse and did the housework at home while Rhoda, his wife, who couldn’t cook hard boiled eggs, organized the French Cooking Club. Captain Ezra Morton spent his mental energy upon the invention of a self-heating molasses spigot, which he hoped would revolutionize the grocery business while his physical energy was devoted to introducing a burglar proof window fastener into the proud homes that were dotting the tall grass environs of Harvey. Amos Adams was hearing rappings and holding-high communion with great spirits in the vasty deep. Daniel Sands, having buried his second wife, was making eyes at a third and spinning his financial web over the town. Dr. and Mrs. Nesbit were marvelling at the mystery of a child’s soul, a maiden’s soul, reaching out tendril after tendril as the days made years. The Dick Bowman’s were holding biennial receptions to the little angels who came to the house in the Doctor’s valise–and welcomed, hilariously welcomed babies they were–welcomed with cigars and free drinks at Riley’s saloon by Dick, and in awed silence by Lida, his wife–welcomed even though the parents never knew exactly how the celestial guests were to be robed and harped; while the Joe Calvins of proud Elm Street, opulent in an eight room house, with the town’s one bath tub, scowled at the angels who kept on coming nevertheless–for such is the careless and often captious way of angels that come to the world in the doctor’s black bag–kept on coming to the frowning house of Calvin as frequently and as idly as they came to the gay Bowmans. Looking back on those days a generation later, it would seem as if the whole town were a wilderness of babies. They came on the hill in Elm Street, a star-eyed baby named Ann even came to the Daniel Sandses, and a third baby to the Ezra Mortons and another to the Kollanders (which gave Rhoda an excuse for forming a lifelong habit of making John serve her breakfast in bed to the scorn of Mrs. Nesbit and Mrs. Herdicker who for thirty years sniffed audibly about Rhoda’s amiable laziness) and the John Dexters had one that came and went in the night. But down by the river–there they came in flocks. The Dooleys, the McPhersons, the Williamses and the hordes of unidentified men and women who came to saw boards, mix mortar, make bricks and dig–to them the kingdom of Heaven was very near, for they suffered little children and forbade them not. And also, because the kingdom was so near–so near even to homes without sewers, homes where dirt and cold and often hunger came–the children were prone to hurry back to the Kingdom discouraged with their little earthly pilgrimages. For those who had dragged chains and hewed wood and drawn water in the town’s first days seemed by some specific gravity of the social system to be holding their places at those lower levels–always reaching vainly and eagerly, but always reaching a little higher and a little further from them for that equality of opportunity which seemed to lie about them that first day when the town was born.

In the upper reaches of the town Henry Fenn’s bibulous habits became accepted matters to a wider and wider circle and Tom Van Dorn still had his way with the girls while the town grinned at the two young men in gay reproval. But Amos Adams through his familiar spirits got solemn, cryptic messages for the young men–from Tom’s mother and Henry’s father. Amos, abashed, but never afraid, used to deliver these messages with incidental admonitions of his own–kind, gentle and gorgeously ineffective. Then he would return to his office with a serene sense of a duty well done, and meet and feast upon the eyes of Mary, his wife, keen, hungry eyes, filled with more or less sinful pride in his strength.

No defeat that ever came to Amos Adams, and because he was born out of his time, defeat was his common portion, and no contumely ever was his in a time when men scorned the evidence of things not seen, no failure, no apparent weakness in her husband’s nature, ever put a tremor in her faith in him. For she knew his heart. She could hear his armor clank and see it shine; she could feel the force and the precision of his lance when all the world of Harvey saw only a dreamer in rusty clothes, fumbling with some stupid and ponderous folly that the world did not understand. The printing office that Mary and Amos thought so grand was really a little pine shack, set on wooden piers on a side street. Inside in the single room, with the rough-coated walls above the press and type-cases covered with inky old sale bills, and specimens of the Tribune’s printing–inside the office which seemed to Mary and Amos the palace of a race of giants, others saw only a shabby, inky, little room, with an old fashioned press and a jobber among the type racks in the gloom to the rear. Through the front window that looked into a street filled with loads of hay and wood, and with broken wagons, and scrap iron from a wheelwright’s shop, Amos Adams looked for the everlasting sunrise, and Mary saw it always in his face.

But this is idling; it is not getting on with the Book. A score of men and women are crowding up to these pages waiting to get into the story. And the town of Harvey, how it is bursting its bounds, how it is sprawling out over the white paper, tumbling its new stores and houses and gas mains and water pipes all over the table; with what a clatter and clamor and with what vain pride! Now the pride of those years in Harvey came with the railroad, and here, pulling at the paper, stands big George Brotherton with his ten stone heart. He has been sputtering and nagging for a dozen pages to swing off the front platform of the first passenger car that came to town. He was a fat, overgrown youth in his late teens, but he wore the uniform of a train newsboy, and any uniform is a uniform. His laugh was like the crash of worlds–and it is to-day after thirty years. When the road pushed on westward Brotherton remained in Harvey and even though the railroad roundhouse employed five hundred men and even though the town’s population doubled and then trebled, still George Brotherton was better than everything else that the railroad brought. He found work in a pool and billiard hall; but that was a pent-up Utica for him and his contracted powers sent him to Daniel Sands for a loan of twenty-five dollars. The unruffled exterior, the calm impudence with which the boy waived aside the banker’s request for a second name on George’s note, and the boy’s obvious eagerness to be selling something, secured the money and established him in a cigar store and news stand. Within a year the store became a social center that rivaled Riley’s saloon and being near the midst of things in business, attracted people of a different sort from those who frequented Casper Herdicker’s debating school in the shoe shop. To the cigar stand by day came Dr. Nesbit with his festive but guileful politics, Joe Calvin, Amos Adams, stuttering Kyle Perry, deaf John Kollander, occasionally Dick Bowman, Ahab Wright in his white necktie and formal garden whiskers, Rev. John Dexter and Captain Morton; while by night the little store was a forum for young Mortimer Sands, for Tom Van Dorn, for Henry Fenn, for the clerks of Market Street and for such gay young blades as were either unmarried or being married were brave enough to break the apron string. For thirty years, nearly a generation, they have been meeting there night after night and on rainy days, taking the world apart and putting it together again to suit themselves. And though strangers have come into the council at Brotherton’s, Captain Morton remains dean. And though the Captain does not know it, being corroded with pride, there still clings about the place a tradition of the day when Captain Morton rode his high wheeled bicycle, the first the town ever had seen, in the procession to his wife’s funeral. They say it was the Captain’s serene conviction that his agency for the bicycle–exclusive for five counties–would make him rich, and that it was no lack of love and respect for his wife but rather an artist’s pride in his work as the distributor of a long-felt want which perched Ezra Morton on that high wheel in the funeral procession. For Mary Adams who knew, who was with the stricken family when death came, who was in the lonely house when the family came home from the cemetery, says that Ezra’s grief was real. Surely thirty years of singlehearted devotion to the three motherless girls should prove his love.

Those were gala days for Captain Morton; the whole universe was flowering in his mind in schemes and plans and devices which he hoped to harness for his power and glory. And the forensic group at Mr. Brotherton’s had much first hand information from the Captain as to the nature of his proposed activities and his prospective conquests. And while the Captain in his prime was surveying the world that was about to come under his domain the house of Adams, little and bleak and poor, down near the Wahoo on the homestead which the Adamses had taken in the sixties became in spite of itself, a gay and festive habitation. Childhood always should make a home bright and there came a time when the little house by the creek fairly blossomed with young faces. The children of the Kollanders, the Perrys, the Calvins, the Nesbits, and the Bowmans–girls and boys were everywhere and they knew all times and seasons. But the red poll and freckled face of Grant Adams was the center of this posy bed of youth.

Grant was a shrill-voiced boy, impulsive and passionately generous and all but obsessed with a desire to protect the weak. Whether it was bug, worm or dog, or hunted animal or bullied child or drunken man, fly-swarmed and bedeviled of boys in the alley, or a little girl teased by her playmates, Grant–fighting mad, came rushing in to do battle for the victim. Yet he was no anemic child of ragged nerves. His fist went straight when he fought, and landed with force. His eyes saw accurately and his voice carried terror in it.

He was a vivid youth, and without him the place down by the river would have been bleak and dreary. But because Grant was in the world, the rusty old phaëton in which Amos and Mary rode daily from the farm to their work, gradually bedecked itself with budding childhood blooming into youth, and it was no longer drab and dusty, but a veritable chariot of life. When Grant was a sturdy boy of eight, little Jasper Adams came into this big bewildering world. And after Grant and his gardenful of youth were gone, Jasper’s garden followed. And there was a short season when the two gardens were growing together. It was in that season while Grant was just coming into shoeblacking and paper collars, that in some indefinite way, Laura Nesbit, daughter of the Doctor and Bedelia Satterthwaite, his blue blooded Maryland wife, separated herself from the general beauty of the universe and for Grant, Laura became a particular person. In Mary Adams’s note book she writes with maternal pride of his fancy for Laura: “It is the only time in Grant’s life when he has looked up instead of down for something to love.” And the mother sets down a communication from Socrates through the planchette to Amos, declaring that “Love is a sphere center”–a message which doubtless the fond parents worked into tremendous import for their child. Though a communication from some anonymous sage called the Peach Blow Philosopher, who began haunting Amos as a familiar spirit about this time recorded the oracle, also carefully preserved by Mary in her book among the prophecies for Grant that, “Carrots, while less fragrant than roses, are better for the blood.” And while the cosmic forces were wrestling with these problems for Grant and Laura, the children were tripping down their early teens all innocent of the uproar they were making among the sages and statesmen and conquerors who flocked about the planchette board for Amos every night. For Laura, Grant carved tiny baskets from peach-pits and coffee beans; for her he saved red apples and candy globes that held in their precious insides gorgeous pictures; for her he combed his hair and washed his neck; for her he scribbled verses wherein eyes met skies, and arts met hearts, and beams met dreams and loves the doves.

The joy of first love that comes in early youth–and always it does come then, though it is not always confessed–is a gawky and somewhat guilty joy that spends itself in sighs and blushes and Heaven knows what of self-discovery. Thus Grant in Laura’s autograph album after all his versifying on the kitchen table could only write “Truly Yours” and leave her to define the deep significance of the phrase so obviously inverted. And she in his autograph album could only trust herself–though naturally being female she was bolder–to the placid depths of “As ever your friend.” Though in lean, hungry-eyed Nathan Perry’s book she burst into glowing words of deathless remembrance and Grant wrote in Emma Morton’s album fervid stanzas wherein “you” rimed with “the wandering Jew” and “me” with “eternity.” At school where the subtle wisdom of childhood reads many things not writ in books, the names of Grant and Laura were linked together, in the innocent gossip of that world.

They say that modern thought deems these youthful experiences dangerous and superfluous; and so probably they will end, and the joy of this earliest mating season will be bottled up and stored for a later maturity. God is wise and good. Doubtless some new and better thing will take the place of this first moving of the waters of life in the heart; but for us of the older generation that is beginning to fade, we are glad that untaught and innocent, our lips tasted from that spring when in the heart was no knowledge of the poison that might come with the draft.

A tall, shy, vivid girl, but above everything else, friendly, was Laura Nesbit in her middle teens; and though Grant in later years remembered her as having wonderful gray eyes, the elder town of Harvey for the most part recollects her only as a gay and kindly spirit looking out into the world through a happy, inquiring face. But the elder town could not in the nature of things know Laura Nesbit as the children knew her. For the democracy of childhood has its own estimates of its own citizens and the children of Harvey–the Dooleys and the Williamses and the Bowmans as well as the Calvins, the Mortons, the Sandses and the Kollanders, remember Laura Nesbit for something more than her rather gawky body. To the children, she was a bright soul. They remember–and the Bowmans better than any one else–that Laura Nesbit shared what she had with every one. She never ate a whole stick of candy in her life. From her school lunch-basket, the Dooleys had their first oranges and the Williamses their first bananas. Apples for the Bowmans and maple sugar–a rare delicacy on the prairies in those days–for every one came from her wonderful basket. And though her mother kept Laura in white aprons when the other girls were in ginghams and in little red and black woolen, though the child’s wonderful yellow hair, soft and wavy like her father’s plumey roach, was curled with great care and much pride, it was her mother’s pride–the grim Satterthwaite demand for caste in any democracy. But even with those caste distinctions there was the face that smiled, the lips that trembled in sympathy, the heart that felt the truth.

“Jim,” quoth the mother on a day when the yard was full of Dooleys and Bowmans and Calvins–Calvins, whom Mrs. Nesbit regarded as inferior even to the Dooleys because of the vast Calvin pretense–“Jim, Laura has inherited that common Indiana streak of yours. I can’t make her a Satterthwaite–she’s Indiana to the bone. Why, when I go to town with her, every drayman and ditch digger and stableman calls to her, and the yard is always full of their towheaded children. I’ll give her up.”

And the Doctor gurgled a chuckle and gave her up also.

She always came with her father to the Adamses on Sunday afternoons, and while the Doctor and Amos Adams on the porch went into the matter of the universe as either a phantasm superinduced by the notion of time, or the notion of time as an hallucination of those who believed in space, down by the creek Grant and Laura sitting under the oak near the silent, green pool were feeling their way around the universe, touching shyly and with great abasement the cords that lead from the body to the soul, from material to the spiritual, from dust to God.

It is a queer world, a world that is past finding out. Here are two children, touching souls in the fleetest, lightest way in the world, and the touch welds them together forever. And along come two others, and even as the old song has it, “after touch of wedded hands,” they are strangers yet. No one knows what makes happiness in love. Certainly marriage is no part of it. Certainly it is not first love, for first lovers often quarrel like cats. Certainly it is not separation, for absence, alas, does not make the heart grow fonder; nor is it children–though the good God knows that should help; for they are love incarnate. Certainly it is not respect, for respect is a stale, cold comforter, and love is deeper than respect, and often lives without it–let us whisper the truth in shame. What, then, is this irrational current of the stuff of life, that carries us all in its sway, that brings us to earth, that guides our destiny here–makes so vastly for our happiness or woe, gives us strength or makes us weak, teaches us wisdom or leads us into folly unspeakable, and all unseen, unmeasured and infinitely mysterious?

There was young Tom Van Dorn. Love was a pleasurable emotion, and because it put a joyous fever in his blood, it enhanced his life. But he never defined love; he merely lived on it. Then there was Ahab Wright who regarded love as a kind of sin and when he married the pale, bloodless, shadowy bookkeeper in Wright & Perry’s store, he regarded the charivari prepared by Morty Sands and George Brotherton as a shameful rite and tried for an hour to lecture the crowd in his front yard on the evils of unseemly conduct before he gave them an order on the store for a bucket of mixed candy. If Ahab had defined love he would have put cupid in side whiskers and a white necktie and set the fat little god to measuring shingle nails, cod-fish and calico on week days and sitting around in a tail coat and mouse-colored trousers on Sunday, reading the Christian Evangel and the Price Current. And again there was Daniel Sands who married five women in a long and more or less useful life. He would have defined love as the apotheosis of comfort. Finally there was Henry Fenn to whom love became the compelling force of his being. Love is many things: indeed only this seems sure. Love is the current of our lives, and like minnows we run in schools through it, guided by instinct and by herd suggestions; and some of us are washed ashore; some of us are caught and devoured, and others fare forth in joy and reach the deep.

One rainy day when the conclave in Brotherton’s cigar store was weary of discussing the quarrel of Mr. Conklin and Mr. Blaine and the eccentricities of the old German Kaiser, the subject of love came before the house for discussion. Dr. Nesbit, who dropped in incidentally to buy a cigar, but primarily to see George Brotherton about some matters of state in the Third ward, found young Tom Van Dorn stroking his new silky mustache, squinting his eyes and considering himself generally in the attitude of little Jack Horner after the plum episode.

“Speaking broadly,” squeaked the Doctor, breaking irritably into the talk, “touching the ladies, God bless ’em–from young Tom’s angle, there’s nothing to ’em. Broad is the petticoat that leadeth to destruction.” The Doctor turned from young Van Dorn, and looked critically at some obvious subject of Van Dorn’s remarks as she picked her way across the muddy street, showing something more than a wink of striped stockings, “Tom, there’s nothing in it–not a thing in the world.”

“Oh,–I don’t know,” returned the youth, wagging an impudent, though good-natured head at the Doctor; “what else is there in the world if not in that? The world’s full of it–flowers, trees, birds, beasts, men and women–the whole damn universe is afire with it. It’s God; there is no other God–just nature building and propagating and perpetuating herself.”

“I suppose,” squeaked the Doctor with a sigh, as he reached for his morning paper, “that if I had nothing else to do for a living except practice law with Joe Calvin on the side and just be twenty-five years old three hundred days in the year, and no other chores except to help old man Sands rib up his waterworks deal, I would hold some such general views myself. But when I was twenty-five, young man, Bedelia and I were running a race with the meal ticket, and our notions as to the moral government of the universe came hard and were deepset, and we can’t change them now.”

George Brotherton, Henry Fenn, Captain Morton and Amos Adams came in with a kind of Greek chorus of general agreement with the Doctor. Van Dorn cocked his hat over his eyes and laughed, and then the Doctor went on in his high falsetto:

“It’s all right, Tom; go it while you’re young. But that kind of love’s young dream generally ends in a nightmare.” He hesitated a minute, and then said: “Well, so long as we’re all here in the family, I’ll tell you about a case I had last night. There’s an old fellow–old Dutchman to be exact, down in Spring township; he came here with us when we founded the town; husky old boy, that is, he used to be fifteen years ago. And he had Tom’s notion about the ladies, God bless ’em, when he was Tom’s age. When I first knew him his notion was causing him trouble, and had settled in one leg, and last night he died of the ladies, God bless ’em.”

The Doctor’s face flinched with pain, and his treble voice winced as he spoke: “Lord, but he suffered, and to add to his physical torment, he knew that he had to leave his daughter all alone in the world–and without a mother and without a dollar; but that isn’t the worst, and he knew it–at the last. This being twenty-five for a living is the hardest job on earth–when you’re sixty, and the old man knew that. The girl has missed his blood taint; she’s not scarred nor disfigured. It would be better if she were; but he gave her something worse–she’s his child!” For a moment the Doctor was silent, then he sighed deeply and shut his eyes as he said: “Boys, for a year and more he’s been seeing all that he was, bud like a glorious poison in his daughter.”