"Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses,
sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into

disorder, and disorder into new order--how many times?"
"But better each time."

"How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?"
"I know we have a higher ideal."

"Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave
his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross."

Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. "I can't
answer you, but I don't believe it."

This brought me to gayety. "That's unanswerable, anyhow!"
He still stared at the graves. "Those people in there didn't think all

these uncomfortable things."
"Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national

soul, before the bloom was off us."
"That's an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?"

"Only the second."
"Since when?"

"Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!"
"I don't see how that took the bloom off us."

"It didn't. It merely waked Europe up to the facts."
"Our battleships, you mean?"

"Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence."
"And our very accurate shooting!" he insisted; for he was a Southerner,

and man's gallantry appealed to him more than man's industry.
I laughed. "Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our first

volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin
wilderness, for it's explored; to the Indian, for he's conquered; to the

pioneer, for he's dead; we've finished our wild, romantic adolescence and
we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and

of general commercial endlessness, and playtime over."
I think, John Mayrant now asserted, "that it is going too far to say the

bloom is off us."
"Oh, you'll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The

freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the
far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over

freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time
because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their

pavements. And when he doesn't go to them, they come to him. The Wall
Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles

long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One
for Volume Two's electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched to

the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor
union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill

prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a 'scab.' Don't let
us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on. We're all

thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal vigilance
cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

"Well," said John Mayrant, "we're not thinking about our pockets in Kings
Port, because" (and here there came into his voice and face that sudden

humor which made him so delightful)--"because we haven't got any pockets
to think of!"

This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold
clouds.

He continued: "Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?"
"Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant--but never mind! I could

lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption
that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American

man himself--the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and
to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and

colder shores--my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately
with these political diseases. For stronger even than his kindness, his

ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He's going to stand
up for the 'open shop' and sit down on the 'trust'; and I assure you that

I don't in the least resemble the Evening Post."
A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant's features.

"The New York Evening Post," I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry
of his face remained.

"Oh, fortunate youth!" I cried. "To have escaped the New York Evening Post!"
"Is it so heinous?"

"Well! ... well! ... how exactly describe it? ... make you see it? ...
It's partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses. Habitual

over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting
praise; it's the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious; it's the

after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it's our Republic's
common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a country."

"The paper without a country! That's very good!"
"Oh, no! I'll tell you something much better, but it is not mine. A

clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun--"
"I know that paper."

"--what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the
Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man

to be good in New York."
"I fear I should subscribe to The Sun," said John Mayrant. He took his

hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down
Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.

For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown
aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian of

the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant
corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in

some trifling activity among the flowers--perhaps picking off the faded
blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really

been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for
something--either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or

his own delayed decision to utter it at all.
"Mas' John!" he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with

caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot a swift
look at the bruise on Mayrant's forehead, and another look, equally

swift, at me
"Well, Daddy Ben, what is it?"

The custodian shunted close to the gate which separated him from us.
"Mas' John, I speck de President he dun' know de cullud people like we

knows 'um, else he nebber bin 'pint dat ar boss in de Cussum House, no,
sah."

After this effort he wiped his forehead and breathed hard.
To my astonishment, the effort brought immediately a stern change over

John Mayrant's face; then he answered in the kindest tones, "Thank you,
Daddy Ben."

This answer interpreted for me the whole thing, which otherwise would
have been obscure enough: the old man held it to be an indignity that his

young "Mas' John" should, by the President's act, find himself the
subordinate of a member of the black race, and he had just now, in his

perspiring effort, expressed his sympathy! Why he had chosen this
particular moment (after quite obviousdebate with himself) I did not see

until somewhat later.
He now left us standing at the gate; and it was not for some moments that

John Mayrant spoke again, evidently" target="_blank" title="ad.明显地">evidently closing, for our two selves, this
delicate subject.

"I wish we had not got into that second volume of yours."
"That's not progressive."

"I hate progress."
"What's the use? Better grow old gracefully!

"'Qui no pas I'esprif de son age
De son age a tout le malheur.'"

"Well, I'm personally not growing old, just yet."
"Neither is the United States."

"Well, I don't know. It's too easy for sick or worthless people to
survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast.

Philanthropists don't seem to remember that you can beget children a