"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!"