1MNSTON CHURCmiiL
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES 
 
 GIFT OF 
 
 Mrs. Helen A. Dillon
 
 A FAR COUNTRY
 
 
 "WHY HAVEN'T YOU BEEN TO SEE ME SINCE I CAME HOME?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 BY 
 
 WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 THE INSIDE OF THE CUP, 
 THE CRISIS, ETC. 
 
 ILLUSTRATED BY 
 
 HERMAN PFEIFER 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
 Published by Arrangement with The Macmillan Company 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915, 
 BY INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1915, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1915. Reprinted 
 June, twice, July, August, September, October, November, 
 December, 1915; January, 1916. 
 
 COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1915, 
 BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD.
 
 College 
 Library 
 
 PS 
 12,97 
 
 F3A 
 
 " And took Ms journey into a far country n 
 
 4 f ' f^f~*-t*~^ "~i> r~ 
 
 1U60335
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 MY name is Hugh Paret. I was a corporation lawyer, 
 but by no means a typical one, the choice of my profession 
 being merely incidental, and due, as will be seen, to the acci 
 dent of environment. The book I am about to write might 
 aptly be called The Autobiography of a Romanticist. In that 
 sense, if in no other, I have been a typical American, regarding 
 my country as the happy hunting-ground of enlightened- 
 self-interest, as a function of my desires. Whether or not I 
 have completely got rid of this romantic virus I must leave 
 to those the aim of whose existence is to eradicate it from our 
 literature and our life. An Augean task ! 
 
 I have been impelled therefore to make an attempt at 
 setting forth, with what frankness and sincerity I may, with 
 those powers of selection of which I am capable, the life I 
 have lived in this modern America, the passions I have 
 known, the evils I have done. I endeavour to write a biog 
 raphy of the inner life ; but in order to do this I shall have 
 to relate those causal experiences of the outer existence that 
 take place in the world of space and time, in the four walls of 
 the home, in the school and university, in the noisy streets, 
 in the realm of business and politics. I shall try to set 
 down, impartially, the motives that have impelled my actions, 
 to reveal in some degree the amazing mixture of good and evil 
 which has made me what I am to-day : to avoid the tricks 
 of memory and resist the inherent desire to present myself 
 other and better than I am. Your American romanticist 
 is a sentimental spoiled child who believes in miracles, 
 
 B 1
 
 2 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 whose needs are mostly baubles, whose desires are dreams 
 Expediency is his motto. Innocent of a knowledge of the 
 principles of the universe, he lives in a state of ceaseless 
 activity, admitting no limitations, impatient of all restric 
 tions. What he wants, he wants very badly indeed. This 
 wanting things was the corner-stone of my character, and I 
 believe that the science of the future will bear me out when I 
 say that it might have been differently built upon. Certain 
 it is that the system of education in vogue in the 70's and 
 80 's never contemplated the search for natural corner-stones. 
 At all events, when I look back upon the boy I was, I see 
 the beginnings of a real person who fades little by little as 
 manhood arrives and advances, until suddenly I am aware 
 that a stranger has taken his place. . . . 
 
 I lived in a city which is now some twelve hours distant 
 from the Atlantic seaboard. A very different city, too, it 
 was in youth, in my grandfather's day and my father's, even 
 in my own boyhood, from what it has since become in this 
 most material of ages. 
 
 There is a book of my photographs, preserved by my 
 mother, which I have been looking over lately. First is 
 presented a plump child of two, gazing in smiling trustfulness 
 upon a world of sunshine; later on a lean boy in plaided 
 kilts, whose wavy, chestnut-brown hair has been most care 
 fully parted on the side by Norah, his nurse. The face is 
 still childish. Then appears a youth of fourteen or there 
 about in long trousers and the queerest of short jackets, 
 standing beside a marble table against a classic background ; 
 he is smiling still in undiminished hope and trust, despite in 
 creasing vexations and crossings, meaningless lessons which 
 had to be learned, disciplines to rack an aspiring soul, and 
 long, uncomfortable hours in the stiff pew of the First 
 Presbyterian Church. Associated with this torture is a 
 peculiar Sunday smell and the faint rustling of silk dresses.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 3 
 
 I can see the stern black figure of Dr. Pound, who made in 
 terminable statements to the Lord. 
 
 "Oh, Lord," I can hear him say, "thou knowest . . ." 
 
 These pictures, though yellowed and faded, suggest vividly 
 the being I once was, the feelings that possessed and animated 
 me, love for my playmates, vague impulses struggling for 
 expression in a world forever thwarting them. I recall, too, 
 innocent dreams of a future unidentified, dreams from which 
 I emerged vibrating with an energy that was lost for lack of a 
 definite objective : yet it was constantly being renewed. I 
 often wonder what I might have become if it could have 
 been harnessed, directed! Speculations are vain. Calvin 
 ism, though it had begun to make compromises, was still a 
 force in those days, inimical to spontaneity and human in 
 stincts. And when I think of Calvinism I see, not Dr. Pound, 
 who preached it, but my father, who practised and embodied 
 it. I loved him, but he made of righteousness a stern and 
 terrible thing implying not joy, but punishment, the suppres 
 sion rather than the expansion of aspirations. His religion 
 seemed woven all of austerity, contained no shining threads 
 to catch my eye. Dreams, to him, were matters for suspicion 
 and distrust. 
 
 I sometimes ask myself, as I gaze upon his portrait now, 
 the duplicate of the one painted for the Bar Association, 
 whether he ever could have felt the secret, hot thrills I knew 
 and did not identify with religion. His religion was real to 
 him, though he failed utterly to make it comprehensible to 
 me. The apparent calmness, evenness of his life awed me. 
 A successful lawyer, a respected and trusted citizen, was he 
 lacking somewhat in virility, vitality ? I cannot judge him, 
 even to-day. I never knew him. There were times in my 
 youth when the curtain of his unfamiliar spirit was with 
 drawn a little : and once, after I had passed the crisis of some 
 childhood disease, I awoke to find him bending over my bed 
 with a tender expression that surprised and puzzled me. 
 
 He was well educated, and from his portrait a shrewd ob 
 server might divine in him a genteel taste for literature. The
 
 4 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 fine features bear witness to the influence of an American 
 environment, yet suggest the intellectual Englishman of 
 Matthew Arnold's time. The face is distinguished, ascetic, 
 the chestnut hair lighter and thinner than my own ; the side 
 whiskers are not too obtrusive, the eyes blue-grey. There is a 
 large black cravat crossed and held by a cameo pin, and the 
 coat has odd, narrow lapels. His habits of mind were English, 
 although he harmonized well enough with the manners and 
 traditions of a city whose inheritance was Scotch-Irish ; and 
 he invariably drank tea for breakfast. One of my earliest 
 recollections is of the silver breakfast service and egg-cups 
 which my great-grandfather brought with him from Sheffield 
 to Philadelphia shortly after the Revolution. His son, Dr. 
 Hugh Moreton Paret, after whom I was named, was the best- 
 known physician of the city in the decorous, Second Bank 
 days. 
 
 My mother was Sarah Breck. Hers was my Scotch-Irish 
 side. Old Benjamin Breck, her grandfather, undaunted by 
 sea or wilderness, had come straight from Belfast to the little 
 log settlement by the great river that mirrored then the 
 mantle of primeval forest on the hills. So much for chance. 
 He kept a store with a side porch and square-paned windows, 
 where hams and sides of bacon and sugar loaves in blue glazed 
 paper hung beside ploughs and calico prints, barrels of flour, 
 of molasses and rum, all of which had been somehow marvel 
 lously transported over the passes of those forbidding 
 mountains, passes we blithely thread to-day in dining cars 
 and compartment sleepers. Behind the store were moored 
 the barges that floated down on the swift current to the 
 Ohio, carrying goods to even remoter settlements in the 
 western wilderness. 
 
 Benjamin, in addition to his emigrant's leather box, 
 brought with him some of that pigment that was to dye the 
 locality for generations a deep blue. I refer, of course, to 
 his Presbyterianism. And in order the better to ensure to 
 his progeny the fastness of this dye, he married the grand 
 daughter of a famous divine, celebrated in the annals of New
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 5 
 
 England, no doubt with some injustice, as a staunch 
 advocate of the doctrine of infant damnation. My cousin 
 Robert Breck had old Benjamin's portrait, which has since 
 gone to the Kinley's. Heaven knows who painted it, though 
 no great art were needed to suggest on canvas the tough 
 fabric of that sitter, who was more Irish than Scotch. The 
 ffeavy stick he holds might, with a slight stretch of the im 
 agination, be a blackthorn ; his head looks capable of with 
 standing many blows ; his hand of giving many. And, as I 
 gazed the other day at this picture hanging in the shabby 
 suburban parlour, I could only contrast him with his anaemic 
 descendants who possessed the likeness. Between the chil 
 dren of poor Mary Kinley, Cousin Robert's daughter, 
 and the hardy stock of the old country there is a gap in 
 deed! 
 
 Benjamin Breck made the foundation of a fortune. It 
 was his son who built on the Second Bank the wide, cor 
 niced mansion in which to house comfortably his eight chil- 
 ren. . There, two tiers above the river, lived my paternal 
 grandfather, Dr. Paret, the Breck's physician and friend; 
 the Durretts and the Hambletons, iron-masters ; the Hollis- 
 ters, Sherwins, the McAlerys and Ewanses, Breck connec 
 tions, the Willetts and Ogilvys ; in short, everyone of im 
 portance in the days between the 'thirties and the Civil War. 
 Theirs were generous houses surrounded by shade trees, with 
 glorious back yards I have been told where apricots 
 and pears and peaches and even nectarines grew. . . . 
 
 The business of Breck and Company, wholesale grocers, 
 descended to my mother's first cousin, Robert Breck, who 
 lived at Claremore. The very sound of that word once 
 sufficed to give me a shiver of delight ; but the Claremore I 
 knew has disappeared as completely as Atlantis, and the place 
 is now a suburb (hateful word !) cut up into building lots 
 and connected with Boyne Street and the business section
 
 6 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 of the city by trolley lines. Then it was "the country," 
 and fairly saturated with romance. Cousin Robert, when he 
 came into town to spend his days at the store, brought with 
 him some of this romance, I had almost said of this aroma. 
 He was no suburbanite, but rural to the backbone, professing 
 a most proper contempt for dwellers in towns. 
 
 Every summer day that dawned held Claremore as a 
 possibility. And such was my capacity for joy that my 
 appetite would depart completely when I heard my mother 
 say, questioningly and with proper wifely respect : 
 
 "If you're really going off on a business trip for a day or 
 two, Mr. Paret " (she generally addressed my father thus 
 formally), "I think I'll go to Robert's and take Hugh." 
 
 "Shall I tell Norah to pack, mother?" I would exclaim, 
 starting up. 
 
 "We'll see what your father thinks, my dear." 
 
 "Remain at the table until you are excused, Hugh," he 
 would say. 
 
 Released at length, I would rush to Norah, who always 
 rejoiced with me, and then to the wire fence which marked 
 the boundary of the Peters domain next door, eager, with 
 the refreshing lack of consideration characteristic of youth, 
 to announce to the Peterses who were to remain at home 
 the news of my good fortune. There would be Tom and 
 Alfred and Russell and Julia and little Myra with her grass- 
 stained knees, faring forth to seek the adventures of a new 
 day in the shady western yard. Myra was too young not 
 to look wistful at my news, but the others pretended indiffer 
 ence, seeking to lessen my triumph. And it was Julia who 
 invariably retorted : 
 
 "We can go out to Uncle Jake's farm whenever we want 
 to. Can't we, Tom?" . . . 
 
 No journey ever taken since has equalled in ecstasy that 
 leisurely trip of thirteen miles in the narrow-gauge railroad 
 that wound through hot fields of nodding corn tassels and 
 between delicious, acrid-smelling woods to Claremore. No 
 silent palace "sleeping in the sun," no edifice decreed by
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 7 
 
 Kubla Khan could have worn more glamour than the house 
 of Cousin Robert Breck. 
 
 It stood half a mile from the drowsy village, deep in its 
 own grounds amidst lawns splashed with shadows, with 
 gravel paths edged in barbarous fashion, if you please 
 with shells. There were flower beds of equally barbarous 
 design ; and two iron deer, which, like the figures on Keats's 
 Grecian urn, were ever ready poised to flee, and yet never 
 fled. For Cousin Robert was rich, as riches went in those 
 days: not only rich, but comfortable. Stretching behind 
 the house were sweet meadows of hay and red clover basking 
 in the heat, orchards where the cows cropped beneath the 
 trees, arbours where purple clusters of Concords hung be 
 neath warm leaves : there were woods beyond, into which, 
 under the guidance of Willie Breck, I made adventurous ex 
 cursions, and in the autumn gathered hickories and walnuts. 
 The house was a rambling, wooden mansion painted grey, 
 with red scroll-work on its porches and horsehair furniture 
 inside. Oh, the smell of its darkened interior on a mid 
 summer day ! Like the flavour of that choicest of tropical 
 fruits, the mangosteen, it baffles analysis, and the nearest 
 I can come to it is a mixture of matting and corn-bread, 
 with another element too subtle to define. 
 
 The hospitality of that house ! One would have thought 
 we had arrived, my mother and I, from the ends of the earth, 
 such was the welcome we got from Cousin Jenny, Cousin 
 Robert's wife, from Mary and Helen with the flaxen pig-tails, 
 from Willie, whom I recall as permanently without shoes 
 or stockings. Met and embraced by Cousin Jenny at the 
 station and driven to the house in the squeaky surrey, the 
 moment we arrived she and my mother would put on 
 the dressing-sacks I associated with hot weather, and sit 
 sewing all day long in rocking-chairs at the coolest end of the 
 piazza. The women of that day scorned lying down, except 
 at night, and as evening came on they donned starched 
 dresses; I recall in particular one my mother wore, with 
 little vertical stripes of black and white, and a full skirt.
 
 8 
 
 And how they talked, from the beginning of the visit until 
 the end ! I have often since wondered where the topics came 
 from. 
 
 It was not until nearly seven o'clock that the train arrived 
 which brought home my Cousin Robert. He was a big 
 man ; his features and even his ample moustache gave a 
 disconcerting impression of rugged integrity, and I remember 
 him chiefly in an alpaca or seersucker coat. Though much 
 less formal, more democratic in a word than my father, 
 I stood in awe of him for a different reason, and this I know 
 now was because he possessed the penetration to discern the 
 flaws in my youthful character, flaws that persisted in 
 manhood. None so quick as Cousin Robert to detect decep 
 tions which were hidden from my mother. 
 
 His hobby was carpentering, and he had a little shop be 
 side the stable filled with shining tools which Willie and I, 
 in spite of their attractions, were forbidden to touch. Willie, 
 by dire experience, had learned to keep the law ; but on one 
 occasion I stole in alone, and promptly cut my finger with a 
 chisel. My mother and Cousin Jenny accepted the fiction 
 that the injury had been done with a flint arrowhead that 
 Willie had given me, but when Cousin Robert came home and 
 saw my bound hand and heard the story, he gave me a 
 certain look which sticks in my mind. 
 
 " Wonderful people, those Indians were ! " he observed. 
 "They could make arrowheads as sharp as chisels." 
 
 I was most uncomfortable. . . . 
 
 He had a strong voice, and spoke with a rising inflection 
 and a marked accent that still remains peculiar to our 
 locality, although it was much modified in my mother and 
 not at all noticeable in my father ; with an odd nasal altera 
 tion of the burr our Scotch-Irish ancestors had brought with 
 them across the seas. For instance, he always called my 
 father Mr. Par-r-ret. He had an admiration and respect for 
 him that seemed to forbid the informality of "Matthew." 
 It was shared by others of my father's friends and rela 
 tions.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 9 
 
 "Sarah," Cousin Robert would say to my mother, " you're 
 coddling that boy, you ought to lam him oftener. Hand 
 him over to me for a couple of months I'll put him through 
 his paces. ... So you're going to send him to college, are 
 you? He's too good for old Benjamin's grocery business." 
 
 He was very fond of my mother, though he lectured her 
 soundly for her weakness in indulging me. I can see him as 
 he sat at the head of the supper table, carving liberal helpings 
 which Mary and Helen and Willie devoured with country 
 appetites, watching our plates. 
 
 "What's the matter, Hugh? You haven't eaten all 
 your lamb." 
 
 "He doesn't like fat, Robert," my mother explained. 
 
 "I'd teach him to like it if he were my boy." 
 
 "Well, Robert, he isn't your boy," Cousin Jenny would 
 remind him. . . . 
 
 His bark was worse than his bite. Like many kind people 
 he made use of brusqueness to hide an inner tenderness, and 
 on the train he was hail fellow well met with every Tom, Dick 
 and Harry that commuted, although the word was not 
 invented in those days, and the conductor and brakeman 
 too. But he had his standards, and held to them. . . . 
 
 Mine was not a questioning childhood, and I was willing 
 to accept the scheme of things as presented to me entire. 
 In my tenderer years, when I had broken one of the command 
 ments on my father's tablet (there were more than ten), 
 and had, on his home-coming, been sent to bed, my mother 
 would come softly upstairs after supper with a book in her 
 hand ; a book of selected Bible stories on which Dr. Pound 
 had set the seal of his approval, with a glazed picture cover 
 representing Daniel in the lions' den and an angel standing 
 beside him. On the somewhat specious plea that Holy 
 Writ might have a chastening effect, she was permitted to 
 minister to me in my shame. The amazing adventure of
 
 10 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego particularly appealed to 
 an imagination needing little stimulation. It never occurred 
 to me to doubt that these gentlemen had triumphed over 
 caloric laws. But out of my window, at the back of the 
 second storey, I often saw a sudden, crimson glow in the sky 
 to the southward, as though that part of the city had caught 
 fire. There were the big steel-works, my mother told me, 
 belonging to Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, the father of 
 Ralph Hambleton and the grandfather of Hambleton 
 Durrett, my schoolmates at Miss Caroline's. I invariably 
 connected the glow, not with Hambleton and Ralph, but with 
 Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego ! Later on, when my 
 father took me to the steel-works, and I beheld with awe a 
 huge pot filled with molten metal that ran out of it like 
 water, I asked him if I leaped into that stream, could 
 God save me? He was shocked. Miracles, he told me, 
 didn't happen any more. 
 
 "When did they stop?" I demanded. 
 
 "About two thousand years ago, my son," he replied 
 gravely. 
 
 "Then," said I, "no matter how much I believed in God, 
 he wouldn't save me if I jumped into the big kettle for his 
 sake?" 
 
 For this I was properly rebuked and silenced. 
 
 My boyhood was filled with obsessing desires. If God, 
 for example, had cast down, out of his abundant store, manna 
 and quail in the desert, why couldn't he fling me a little 
 pocket money? A paltry quarter of a dollar, let us say, 
 which to me represented wealth. To avoid the reproach of 
 the Pharisees, I went into the closet of my bed-chamber to 
 pray, requesting that the quarter should be dropped on the 
 north side of Lyme Street, between Stamford and Tryon; 
 in short, as conveniently near home as possible. Then I 
 issued forth, not feeling overconfident, but hoping. Tom 
 Peters, leaning over the ornamental cast-iron fence which 
 separated his front yard from the street, presently spied me 
 scanning the sidewalk.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 11 
 
 "What are you looking for, Hugh?" he demanded with 
 interest. 
 
 "Oh, something I dropped," I answered uneasily. 
 
 "What?" 
 
 Naturally, I refused to tell. It was a broiling, mid 
 summer day; Julia and Russell, who had been warned to 
 stay in the shade, but who were engaged in the experiment 
 of throwing the yellow cat from the top of the lattice fence 
 to see if she would alight on her feet, were presently attracted, 
 and joined in the search. The mystery which I threw around 
 it added to its interest, and I was not inconsiderably annoyed. 
 Suppose one of them were to find the quarter which God had 
 intended for me ? Would that be justice ? 
 
 "It's nothing," I said, and pretended to abandon the quest 
 to be renewed later. But this ruse failed ; they continued 
 obstinately to search ; and after a few minutes Tom, with a 
 shout, picked out of a hot crevice between the bricks a 
 nickel ! 
 
 "It's mine!" I cried fiercely. 
 
 "Did you lose it?" demanded Julia, the canny one, as 
 Tom was about to give it up. 
 
 My lying was generally reserved for my elders. 
 
 "N-no," I said hesitatingly, "but it's mine all the same. 
 It was sent to me." 
 
 "Sent to you!" they exclaimed, in a chorus of protest 
 and derision. And how, indeed, was I to make good my 
 claim ? The Peterses, when assembled, were a clan, led by 
 Julia and in matters of controversy moved as one. How 
 was I to tell them that in answer to my prayers for twenty- 
 five cents, God had deemed five all that was good for me ? 
 
 "Some somebody dropped it there for me." 
 
 "Who?" demanded the chorus. "Say, that's a good 
 one!" 
 
 Tears suddenly blinded me. Overcome by chagrin, I 
 turned and flew into the house and upstairs into my room, 
 locking the door behind me. An interval ensued, during 
 which I nursed my sense of wrong, and it pleased me to think
 
 14 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 vicious. Ideas bubbled up within me continually from an 
 apparently inexhaustible spring, and the very strength of 
 the longings they set in motion puzzled and troubled my 
 parents : what I seem to see most distinctly now is a young 
 mind engaged in a ceaseless struggle for self-expression, for 
 self-development, against the inertia of a tradition of which 
 my father was the embodiment. He was an enigma to me 
 then. He sincerely loved me, he cherished ambitions con 
 cerning me, yet thwarted every natural, budding growth, 
 until I grew unconsciously to regard him as my enemy, al 
 though I had an affection for him and a pride in him that 
 flared up at times. Instead of confiding to him my aspira 
 tions, vague though they were, I became more and more 
 secretive as I grew older. I knew instinctively that he re 
 garded these aspirations as evidences in my character of 
 serious moral flaws. And I would sooner have suffered many 
 afternoons of his favourite punishment solitary confinement 
 in my room than reveal to him those occasional fits of 
 creative fancy which caused me to neglect my lessons in order 
 to put them on paper. Loving literature, in his way, he 
 was characteristically incapable of recognizing the literary 
 instinct, and the symptoms of its early stages he mistook 
 for inherent frivolity, for lack of respect for the truth; in 
 brief, for original sin. At the age of fourteen I had begun 
 secretly (alas, how many things I did secretly !) to write 
 stories of a sort, stories that never were finished. 
 
 He regarded reading as duty, not pleasure. He laid out 
 books for me, which I neglected. He was part and parcel 
 of that American environment in which literary ambition 
 was regarded as sheer madness. And no one who has not 
 experienced that environment can have any conception of 
 the pressure it exerted to stifle originality, to thrust the new 
 generation into its religious and commercial moulds. Shall 
 we ever, I wonder, develop the enlightened education that 
 will know how to take advantage of such initiative as was 
 mine? that will be on the watch for it, sympathize with it 
 and guide it to fruition ?
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 15 
 
 I was conscious of still another creative need, that of 
 dramatizing my ideas, of converting them into action. And 
 this need was to lead me farther than ever afield from the 
 path of righteousness. The concrete realization of ideas, 
 as many geniuses will testify, is an expensive undertaking, 
 requiring a little pocket money ; and I have already touched 
 upon that subject. My father did not believe in pocket 
 money. A sea story that my Cousin Donald Ewan gave 
 me at Christmas inspired me to compose one of a somewhat 
 different nature ; incidentally, I deemed it a vast improve 
 ment on Cousin Donald's book. Now, if I only had a boat, 
 with the assistance of Ham Durrett and Tom Peters, Gene 
 Hollister and Perry Blackwood and other friends, this story 
 of mine might be staged. There were, however, as usual, 
 certain seemingly insuperable difficulties : in the first place, 
 it was winter time ; in the second, no facilities existed in 
 the city for operations of a nautical character ; and, lastly, 
 my Christmas money amounted only to five dollars. 
 
 It was my father who pointed out these and other objec 
 tions. For, after a careful perusal of the price lists I had sent 
 for, I had been forced to appeal to him to supply additional 
 funds with which to purchase a row-boat. Incidentally, 
 he read me a lecture on extravagance, referred to my last 
 month's report at the Academy, and finished by declaring 
 that he would not permit me to have a boat even in the 
 highly improbable case of somebody's presenting me with one. 
 Let it not be imagined that my ardour or my determination 
 were extinguished. Shortly after I had retired from his 
 presence it occurred to me that he had said nothing to forbid 
 my making a boat, and the first thing I did after school that 
 day was to procure, for twenty-five cents, a second-hand book 
 on boat construction. The woodshed was chosen as a ship 
 building establishment. It was convenient and my father 
 never went into the back yard in cold weather. Inquiries 
 of lumber-yards developing the disconcerting fact that four 
 dollars and seventy-five cents was inadequate to buy the 
 material itself, to say nothing of the cost of steaming and
 
 16 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 bending the ribs, I reluctantly abandoned the ideal of the grace 
 ful craft I had sketched, and compromised on a flat bottom. 
 Observe how the ways of deception lead to transgression : 
 I recalled the cast-off lumber pile of Jarvis, the carpenter, a 
 good-natured Englishman, coarse and fat : in our neighbour 
 hood his reputation for obscenity was so well known to 
 mothers that I had been forbidden to go near him or his 
 shop Grits Jarvis, his son, who had inherited the talent, 
 was also contraband. I can see now the huge bulk of the 
 elder Jarvis as he stood in the melting, soot-powdered snow 
 in front of his shop, and hear his comments on my perti 
 nacity. 
 
 " If you ever wants another man's missus when you grows 
 up, my lad, Gawd 'elp 'im !" 
 
 "Why should I want another man's wife when I don't 
 want one of my own?" I demanded, indignant. 
 
 He laughed with his customary lack of moderation. 
 
 "You mind what old Jarvis says," he cried. "What you 
 wants, you gets." 
 
 I did get his boards, by sheer insistence. No doubt they 
 were not very valuable, and without question he more than 
 made up for them in my mother's bill. I also got some 
 thing else of equal value to me at the moment, the assist 
 ance of Grits, the contraband ; daily, after school, I smuggled 
 him into the shed through the alley, acquiring likewise the 
 services of Tom Peters, which was more of a triumph than 
 it would seem. Tom always had to be "worked up" to 
 participation in my ideas, but in the end he almost invariably 
 succumbed. The notion of building a boat in the dead of 
 winter, and so far from her native element, naturally struck 
 him at first as ridiculous. Where in Jehoshaphat was I going 
 to sail it if I ever got it made ? He much preferred to throw 
 snowballs at innocent wagon drivers. 
 
 All that Tom saw, at first, was a dirty, coal-spattered shed 
 with dim recesses, for it was lighted on one side only, and its 
 temperature was somewhere below freezing. Surely he 
 could not be blamed for a tempered enthusiasm ! But for
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 17 
 
 me, all the dirt and cold and discomfort were blotted out, 
 and I beheld a gallant craft manned by sturdy seamen forging 
 her way across blue water in the South Seas. Treasure 
 Island, alas, was as yet unwritten; but among my father's 
 books were two old volumes in which I had hitherto taken 
 no interest, with crude engravings of palms and coral reefs, 
 of naked savages and tropical mountains covered with jungle, 
 the adventures, in brief, of one Captain Cook. I also dis 
 covered a book by a later traveller. Spurred on by a myste 
 rious motive power, and to the great neglect of the pons 
 asinorum and the staple products of the Southern States, I 
 gathered an amazing amount of information concerning a 
 remote portion of the globe, of head-hunters and poisoned 
 stakes, of typhoons, of queer war-craft that crept up on 
 you while you were dismantling galleons, when desperate 
 hand-to-hand encounters ensued. Little by little as I wove 
 all this into personal adventures soon to be realized, Tom 
 forgot the snowballs and the maddened grocerymen who 
 chased him around the block ; while Grits would occasion 
 ally stop sawing and cry out : 
 
 "Ah, s'y !" frequently adding that he would be G d d. 
 
 The cold woodshed became a chantry on the New England 
 coast, the alley the wintry sea soon to embrace our ship, 
 the saw-horses which stood between a coal-bin on one 
 side and unused stalls filled with rubbish and kindling on 
 the other the ways ; the yard behind the lattice fence 
 became a backwater, the flapping clothes the sails of ships 
 that took refuge there on Mondays and Tuesdays. 
 Even my father was symbolized with unparalleled audacity 
 as a watchful government which had, up to the present, no 
 inkling of our semi-piratical intentions ! The cook and the 
 housemaid, though remonstrating against the presence of 
 Grits, were friendly confederates; likewise old Cephas, the 
 darkey who, from my earliest memory, carried coal and wood 
 and blacked the shoes, washed the windows and scrubbed 
 the steps. 
 
 One afternoon Tom went to work.
 
 18 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 The history of the building of the good ship Petrel is 
 similar to that of all created things, a story of trial and error 
 and waste. At last, one March day she stood ready for 
 launching. She had even been caulked ; for Grits, from an 
 unknown and unquestionably dubious source, had procured 
 a bucket of tar, which we heated over a fire in the alley and 
 smeared into every crack. It was natural that the news of 
 such a feat as we were accomplishing should have leaked out, 
 that the "yard" should have been visited from time to time 
 by interested friends, some of whom came to admire, some to 
 scoff, and all to speculate. Among the scoffers, of course, was 
 Ralph Hambleton, who stood with his hands in his pockets 
 and cheerfully predicted all sorts of dire calamities. Ralph 
 was always a superior boy, tall and a trifle saturnine and 
 cynical, with an amazing self-confidence not wholly due to 
 the wealth of his father, the iron-master. He was older 
 than I. 
 
 "She won't float five minutes, if you ever get her to the 
 water," was his comment, and in this he was supported on 
 general principles by Julia and Russell Peters. Ralph would 
 have none of the Petrel, or of the South Seas either ; but he 
 wanted, so he said, "to be in at the death." The 
 Hambletons were one of the few families who at that time 
 went to the sea for the summer, and from a practical knowl 
 edge of craft in general Ralph was not slow to point out the 
 defects of ours. Tom and I defended her passionately. 
 
 Ralph was not a romanticist. He was a born leader, 
 excelling at organized games, exercising over boys the sort 
 of fascination that comes from doing everything better and 
 more easily than others. It was only during the progress of 
 such enterprises as this affair of the Petrel that I succeeded 
 in winning their allegiance; bit by bit, as Tom's had been 
 won, fanning their enthusiasm by impersonating at once 
 Achilles and Homer, recruiting while relating the Odyssey of 
 the expedition in glpwing colours. Ralph always scoffed, and 
 when I had no scheme on foot they went back to him. Hav 
 ing surveyed the boat and predicted calamity, he departed,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 19 
 
 leaving a circle of quaint and youthful figures around the 
 Petrel in the shed : Gene Hollister, romantically inclined, 
 yet somewhat hampered by a strict parental supervision; 
 Ralph's cousin Ham Durrett, who was even then a rather 
 fat boy, good-natured but selfish ; Don and Harry Ewan, my 
 second cousins ; Mac and Nancy Willett and Sam and Sophy 
 McAlery. Nancy was a tomboy, not to be denied, and Sophy 
 her shadow. We held a council, the all-important question 
 of which was how to get the Petrel to the water, and what 
 water to get her to. The river was not to be thought of, and 
 Blackstone Lake some six miles from town. Finally, Logan's 
 mill-pond was decided on, a muddy sheet on the outskirts 
 of the city. But how to get her to Logan's mill-pond? 
 Cephas was at length consulted. It turned out that he had 
 a coloured friend who went by the impressive name of 
 Thomas Jefferson Taliaferro (pronounced Tolliver), who was 
 in the express business; and who, after surveying the boat 
 with some misgivings, for she was ten feet long, finally 
 consented to transport her to "tide-water" for the sum of 
 two dollars. But it proved that our combined resources 
 only amounted to a dollar and seventy-five cents. Ham 
 Durrett never contributed to anything. On this sum Thomas 
 Jefferson compromised. 
 
 Saturday dawned clear, with a stiff March wind catching 
 up the dust into eddies and whirling it down the street. 
 No sooner was my father safely on his way to his office than 
 Thomas Jefferson was reported to be in the alley, where we 
 assembled, surveying with some misgivings Thomas Jeffer 
 son's steed, whose ability to haul the Petrel two miles seemed 
 somewhat doubtful. Other difficulties developed ; the door 
 in the back of the shed proved to be too narrow for our 
 ship's beam. But men embarked on a desperate enterprise 
 are not to be stopped by such trifles, and the problem was 
 solved by sawing out two adjoining boards. These were 
 afterwards replaced with skill by the ship's carpenter, Able 
 Seaman Grits Jarvis. Then the Petrel by heroic efforts 
 was got into the wagon, the seat of which had been removed,
 
 20 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 old Thomas Jefferson perched himself precariously in the 
 bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched reins. 
 
 "Folks'll 'low I'se plum crazy, driviri dis yere boat," he 
 declared, observing with concern that some four feet of the 
 stern projected over the tail-board. "Ef she topples, I'll 
 git to heaven quicker'n a bullet." 
 
 When one is shanghaied, however, in the hands of 
 buccaneers, it is too late to withdraw. Six shoulders 
 upheld the rear end of the Petrel, others shoved, and Thomas 
 Jefferson's rickety horse began to move forward in spite of 
 himself. An expression of sheer terror might have been 
 observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice 
 was drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had 
 we travelled a block before we began to be joined by all the 
 boys along the line of march ; marbles, tops, and even incip 
 ient baseball games were abandoned that Saturday morning ; 
 people ran out of their houses, teamsters halted their carts. 
 The breathless excitement, the exaltation I had felt on leaving 
 the alley were now tinged with other feelings, unanticipated, 
 but not wholly lacking in delectable quality, concern and 
 awe at these unforeseen forces I had raised, at this ever 
 growing and enthusiastic body of volunteers springing up 
 like dragon's teeth in our path. After all, was not I the hero 
 of this triumphal procession? The thought was consoling, 
 exhilarating. And here was Nancy marching at my side, 
 a little subdued, perhaps, but unquestionably admiring and 
 realizing that it was I who had created all this. Nancy, 
 who was the aptest of pupils, the most loyal of followers, 
 though I did not yet value her devotion at its real worth, 
 because she was a girl. Her imagination kindled at my 
 touch. And on this eventful occasion she carried in her 
 arms a parcel, the contents of which were unknown to all 
 but ourselves. At length we reached the muddy shores of 
 Logan's pond, where two score eager hands volunteered to 
 assist the Petrel into her native element. 
 
 Alas ! that the reality never attains to the vision. I had 
 beheld, in my dreams, the Petrel about to take the water,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 21 
 
 and Nancy Willett standing very straight making a little 
 speech and crashing a bottle of wine across the bows. This 
 was the content of the mysterious parcel; she had stolen 
 it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited 
 spectators, which had not been foreseen, considerably modi 
 fied the programme, as the newspapers would have said. 
 They pushed and crowded around the ship, and made frank 
 and even brutal remarks as to her seaworthiness; even 
 Nancy, inured though she was to the masculine sex, had 
 fled to the heights, and it looked at this supreme moment as 
 though we should have to fight for the Petrel. An attempt 
 to muster her doughty buccaneers failed; the gunner too 
 had fled, Gene Hollister ; Ham Durrett and the Ewanses 
 were nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom, 
 the fidus Achates, and Grits Jarvis. 
 
 "Ah, s'y!" he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing 
 hordes. "Stand back, carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, 
 Johnny. Whose boat is this?" 
 
 Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? 
 Here, in truth, was the drama staged, my drama, had I 
 only been able to realize it. The good ship beached, the head- 
 hunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene prepared for 
 one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so 
 graphically related as an essential part of our adventures. 
 
 "Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar," proposed one of 
 the head-hunters, meaning me. 
 
 " I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him," said Grits, and then 
 resorted to appeal. "I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let 
 a chap 'ave a charnst?" 
 
 The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of 
 the Captain in this moment of peril ? Shall it be told that 
 his heart was beating wildly ? bumping were a better 
 word. He was trying to remember that he was the Captain. 
 Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too, should 
 have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will 
 he remain to fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he 
 glanced up at the hill, where, instead of the porch of the
 
 20 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 old Thomas Jefferson perched himself precariously in the 
 bow and protestingly gathered up his rope-patched reins. 
 
 "Folks'll 'low I'se plum crazy, drivin' dis yere boat," he 
 declared, observing with concern that some four feet of the 
 stern projected over the tail-board. "Ef she topples, I'll 
 git to heaven quicker'n a bullet." 
 
 When one is shanghaied, however, in the hands of 
 buccaneers, it is too late to withdraw. Six shoulders 
 upheld the rear end of the Petrel, others shoved, and Thomas 
 Jefferson's rickety horse began to move forward in spite of 
 himself. An expression of sheer terror might have been 
 observed on the old negro's crinkled face, but his voice 
 was drowned, and we swept out of the alley. Scarcely had 
 we travelled a block before we began to be joined by all the 
 boys along the line of march ; marbles, tops, and even incip 
 ient baseball games were abandoned that Saturday morning ; 
 people ran out of their houses, teamsters halted their carts. 
 The breathless excitement, the exaltation I had felt on leaving 
 the alley were now tinged with other feelings, unanticipated, 
 but not wholly lacking in delectable quality, concern and 
 awe at these unforeseen forces I had raised, at this ever 
 growing and enthusiastic body of volunteers springing up 
 like dragon's teeth in our path. After all, was not I the hero 
 of this triumphal procession? The thought was consoling, 
 exhilarating. And here was Nancy marching at my side, 
 a little subdued, perhaps, but unquestionably admiring and 
 realizing that it was I who had created all this. Nancy, 
 who was the aptest of pupils, the most loyal of followers, 
 though I did not yet value her devotion at its real worth, 
 because she was a girl. Her imagination kindled at my 
 touch. And on this eventful occasion she carried in her 
 arms a parcel, the contents of which were unknown to all 
 but ourselves. At length we reached the muddy shores of 
 Logan's pond, where two score eager hands volunteered to 
 assist the Petrel into her native element. 
 
 Alas ! that the reality never attains to the vision. I had 
 beheld, in my dreams, the Petrel about to take the water,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 21 
 
 and Nancy Willett standing very straight making a little 
 speech and crashing a bottle of wine across the bows. This 
 was the content of the mysterious parcel; she had stolen 
 it from her father's cellar. But the number of uninvited 
 spectators, which had not been foreseen, considerably modi 
 fied the programme, as the newspapers would have said. 
 They pushed and crowded around the ship, and made frank 
 and even brutal remarks as to her seaworthiness; even 
 Nancy, inured though she was to the masculine sex, had 
 fled to the heights, and it looked at this supreme moment as 
 though we should have to fight for the Petrel. An attempt 
 to muster her doughty buccaneers failed; the gunner too 
 had fled, Gene Hollister ; Ham Durrett and the Ewanses 
 were nowhere to be seen, and a muster revealed only Tom, 
 the fidus Achates, and Grits Jarvis. 
 
 "Ah, s'y!" he exclaimed in the teeth of the menacing 
 hordes. "Stand back, carn't yer? I'll bash yer face in, 
 Johnny. Whose boat is this?" 
 
 Shall it be whispered that I regretted his belligerency? 
 Here, in truth, was the drama staged, my drama, had I 
 only been able to realize it. The good ship beached, the head- 
 hunters hemming us in on all sides, the scene prepared for 
 one of those struggles against frightful odds which I had so 
 graphically related as an essential part of our adventures. 
 
 "Let's roll the cuss in the fancy collar," proposed one of 
 the head-hunters, meaning me. 
 
 " I'll stove yer slats if yer touch him," said Grits, and then 
 resorted to appeal. "I s'y, carn't yer stand back and let 
 a chap 'ave a charnst?" 
 
 The head-hunters only jeered. And what shall be said of 
 the Captain in this moment of peril ? Shall it be told that 
 his heart was beating wildly ? bumping were a better 
 word. He was trying to remember that he was the Captain. 
 Otherwise, he must admit with shame that he, too, should 
 have fled. So much for romance when the test comes. Will 
 he remain to fall fighting for his ship? Like Horatius, he 
 glanced up at the hill, where, instead of the porch of the
 
 22 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 home where he would fain have been, he beheld a wisp of a 
 girl standing alone, her hat on the back of her head, her 
 hair flying in the wind, gazing intently down at him in his 
 danger. The renegade crew was nowhere to be seen. There 
 are those who demand the presence of a woman in order to 
 be heroes. . . . 
 
 " Give us a chance, can't you ? " he cried, repeating Grits's 
 appeal in not quite such a stentorian tone as he would have 
 liked, while his hand trembled on the gunwale. Tom 
 Peters, it must be acknowledged, was much more of a bucca 
 neer when it was a question of deeds, for he planted himself 
 in the way of the belligerent chief of the head-hunters (who 
 spoke with a decided brogue). 
 
 "Get out of the way!" said Tom, with a little squeak in 
 his voice. Yet there he was, and he deserves a tribute. 
 
 An unlooked-for diversion saved us from annihilation, 
 in the shape of one who had a talent for creating them. We 
 were bewilderingly aware of a girlish figure amongst us. 
 
 "You cowards!" she cried. "You cowards!" 
 
 Lithe, and fairly quivering with passion, it was Nancy who 
 showed us how to face the head-hunters. They gave back. 
 They would have been brave indeed if they had not retreated 
 before such an intense little nucleus of energy and indigna 
 tion ! . . . 
 
 "Ah, give 'em a chanst," said their chief, after a moment. 
 . . . He even helped to push the boat towards the water. 
 But he did not volunteer to be one of those to man the 
 Petrel on her maiden voyage. Nor did Logan's pond, that 
 wild March day, greatly resemble the South Seas, Neverthe 
 less, my eye on Nancy, I stepped proudly aboard and seized 
 an "oar." Grits and Tom followed, when suddenly the 
 Petrel sank considerably below the water-line as her builders 
 had estimated it. Ere we fully realized this, the now friendly 
 head-hunters had given us a shove, and we were off ! The 
 Captain, who should have been waving good-bye to his lady 
 love from the poop, sat down abruptly, the crew likewise ; 
 not, however, before she had heeled to the scuppers, and a
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 23 
 
 half-bucket of iced water had run it. Head-hunters were 
 mere daily episodes in Grits's existence, but water . . . He 
 muttered something in cockney that sounded like a prayer. 
 . . . The wind was rapidly driving us toward the middle 
 of the pond, and something cold and ticklish was seeping 
 through the seats of our trousers. We sat like statues. . . . 
 
 The bright scene etched itself in my memory the bare 
 brown slopes with which the pond was bordered, the Irish 
 shanties, the clothes-lines with red flannel shirts snapping 
 in the biting wind ; Nancy motionless on the bank ; the 
 group behind her, silent now, impressed in spite of itself at 
 the sight of our intrepidity. 
 
 The Petrel was sailing stern first. . . . Would any of us, 
 indeed, ever see home again? I thought of my father's 
 wrath turned to sorrow because he had refused to gratify a 
 son's natural wish and present him with a real rowboat. 
 . . . Out of the corners of our eyes we watched the water 
 creeping around the gunwale, and the very muddiness of 
 it seemed to enhance its coldness, to make the horrors 
 of its depths more mysterious and hideous. The voice of 
 Grits startled us. 
 
 "O Gawd," he was saying, "we're a-going to sink, and I 
 carn't swim ! The blarsted tar's give way back here." 
 
 "Is she leaking?" I cried. 
 
 "She's a-filling up like a barth tub," he lamented. 
 
 Slowly but perceptibly, in truth, the bow was rising, and 
 above the whistling of the wind I could hear his chattering 
 as she settled. . . . Then several things happened simul 
 taneously : an agonized cry behind me, distant shouts from 
 the shore, a sudden upward lunge of the bow, and the 
 torture of being submerged, inch by inch, in the icy, yellow 
 water. Despite the splashing behind me, I sat as though 
 paralyzed until I was waist deep and the boards turned 
 under me, and then, with a spasmodic contraction of my 
 whole being I struck out only to find my feet on the 
 muddy bottom. Such was the inglorious end of the good 
 ship Petrel! For she went down, with all hands, in little
 
 24 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 more than half a fathom of water. ... It was not until 
 then I realized that we had been blown clear across the pond ! 
 
 Figures were running along the shore. And as Tom and 
 I emerged dragging Grits between us, for he might have 
 been drowned there abjectly in the shallows, we were 
 met by a stout and bare-armed Irishwoman whose scanty 
 hair, I remember, was drawn into a tight knot behind her 
 head; and who seized us, all three, as though we were a 
 bunch of carrots. 
 
 " Come along wid ye ! " she cried. 
 
 Shivering, we followed her up the hill, the spectators of 
 the tragedy, who by this time had come around the pond, 
 trailing after. Nancy was not among them. Inside the 
 shanty into which we were thrust were two small children 
 crawling about the floor, and the place was filled with 
 steam from a wash-tub against the wall and a boiler on the 
 stove. With a vigorous injunction to make themselves 
 scarce, the Irishwoman slammed the door in the faces of the 
 curious and ordered us to remove our clothes. Grits was put 
 to bed in a corner, while Tom and I, provided with various 
 garments, huddled over the stove. There fell to my lot the 
 red flannel shirt which I had seen on the clothes-line. She 
 gave us hot coffee, and was back at her wash-tub in no time 
 at all, her entire comment on a proceeding that seemed to 
 Tom and me to 'have certain elements of gravity being, 
 "By's will be by's I" The final ironical touch was given the 
 anti-climax when our rescuer turned out to be the mother of 
 the chief of the head-hunters himself ! He had lingered per 
 force with his brothers and sister outside the cabin until 
 dinner time, and when he came in he was meek as Moses. 
 
 Thus the ready hospitality of the poor, which passed over the 
 heads of Tom and me as we ate bread and onions and potatoes 
 with a ravenous hunger. It must have been about two 
 o'clock in the afternoon when we bade good-bye to our pre 
 server and departed for home. . . . 
 
 At first we went at a dog-trot, but presently slowed 
 down to discuss the future looming portentously ahead
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 25 
 
 of us. Since entire concealment was now impossible, the 
 question was, how complete a confession would be necessary ? 
 Our cases, indeed, were dissimilar, and Tom's incentive to 
 hold back the facts was not nearly so great as mine. It some 
 times seemed to me in those days unjust that the Peterses 
 were able on the whole to keep out of criminal difficulties, in 
 which I was more or less continuously involved : for it did not 
 ' strike me that their sins were not those of the imagination. 
 The method of Tom's father was the slipper. He and Tom 
 understood each other, while between my father and myself 
 was a great gulf fixed. Not that Tom yearned for the slipper ; 
 but he regarded its occasional applications as being as inevi 
 table as changes in the weather ; lying did not come easily to 
 huii, and left to himself he much preferred to confess and 
 have the matter over with. I have already suggested that 
 I had cultivated lying, that weapon of the weaker party, 
 in some degree, at least, in self-defence. 
 
 Tom was loyal. Moreover, my conviction would prob 
 ably deprive him for six whole afternoons of my company, 
 on which he was more or less dependent. But the defence 
 of this case presented unusual difficulties, and we stopped 
 several times to thrash them out. We had been absent 
 from dinner, and doubtless by this time Julia had informed 
 Tom's mother of the expedition, and anyone could see that 
 our clothing had been wet. So I lingered in no little anx 
 iety behind the Peters stable while he made the investi 
 gation. Our spirits rose considerably when he returned 
 to report that Julia had unexpectedly been a trump, having 
 quieted his mother by the surmise that he was spending 
 the day with his Aunt Fanny. So far, so good. The prob 
 lem now was to decide upon what to admit. For we must 
 both tell the same story. 
 
 It was agreed that we had fallen into Logan's Pond from 
 a raft: my suggestion. Well, said Tom, the Petrel hadn't 
 proved much better than a raft, after all. I was in no mood 
 to defend her. 
 
 This designation of the Petrel as a "raft" was my first
 
 26 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 legal quibble. The question to be decided by the court 
 was, What is a raft? just as the supreme tribunal of the 
 land has been required, in later years, to decide, What is 
 whiskey? The thing to be concealed if possible was the 
 building of the "raft," although this information was 
 already in the possession of a number of persons, whose 
 fathers might at any moment see fit to congratulate my 
 own on being the parent of a genius. It was a risk, how 
 ever, that had to be run. And, secondly, since Grits Jarvis 
 was contraband, nothing was to be said about him. 
 
 I have not said much about my mother, who might have 
 been likened on such occasions to a grand jury compelled 
 to indict, yet torn between loyalty to an oath and sym 
 pathy with the defendant. I went through the Peters yard, 
 climbed the wire fence, my object being to discover first 
 from Ella, the housemaid, or Hannah, the cook, how much 
 was known in high quarters. It was Hannah who, as I 
 opened the kitchen door, turned at the sound, and set down 
 the saucepan she was scouring. 
 
 "Is it home ye are? Mercy to goodness!" (this on be 
 holding my shrunken costume) "Glory be to God you're 
 not drownded ! and your mother worritin ' her heart out ! 
 So it's into the wather ye were ? " 
 
 I admitted it. 
 
 "Hannah?" I said softly. 
 
 "What then?" 
 
 " Does mother know about the boat ? " 
 
 "Now don't ye be wheedlinV 
 
 I managed to discover, however, that my mother did not 
 know, and surmised that the best reason why she had not 
 been told had to do with Hannah's criminal acquiescence 
 concerning the operations in the shed. I ran into the 
 front hall and up the stairs, and my mother heard me 
 coming and met me on the landing.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 27 
 
 "Hugh, where have you been ?" 
 
 As I emerged from the semi-darkness of the stairway 
 she caught sight of my dwindled garments, of the trousers 
 well above my ankles. Suddenly she had me in her arms 
 and was kissing me passionately. As she stood before me 
 in her grey, belled skirt, the familar red-and-white cameo at 
 her throat, her heavy hair parted in the middle, in her eyes 
 was an odd, appealing look which I know now was a sign of 
 mother love struggling with a Presbyterian conscience. 
 Though she inherited that conscience, I have often thought 
 she might have succeeded in casting it off or at least some of 
 it had it not been for the fact that in spite of herself she 
 worshipped its incarnation in the shape of my father. Her 
 voice trembled a little as she drew me to the sofa beside 
 the window. 
 
 "Tell me about what happened, my son," she said. 
 
 It was a terrible moment for me. For my affections 
 were still quiveringly alive in those days, and I loved her. 
 I had for an instant an instinctive impulse to tell her the 
 whole story, South Sea Islands and all ! And I could 
 have done it had I not beheld looming behind her another 
 figure which represented a stern and unsympathetic Author 
 ity, and somehow made her, suddenly, of small account. 
 Not that she would have understood the romance, but she 
 would have comprehended me. I knew that she was power 
 less to save me from the wrath to come. I wept. It was- 
 because I hated to lie to her, yet I did so. Fear gripped 
 me, and like some respectable criminals I have since 
 known I understood that any confession I made would 
 inexorably be used against me. ... I wonder whether 
 she knew I was lying? At any rate, the case appeared to 
 be a grave one, and I was presently remanded to my room 
 to be held over for trial. . . . 
 
 Vividly, as I write, I recall the misery of the hours I have 
 spent, while awaiting sentence, in the little chamber with 
 the honeysuckle wall-paper and steel engravings of happy 
 but dumpy children romping in the fields and groves. Oa
 
 28 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 this particular March afternoon the weather had become 
 morne, as the French say; and I looked down sadly into 
 the grey back yard which the wind of the morning had 
 strewn with chips from the Petrel. At last, when shadows 
 were gathering in the corners of the room, I heard footsteps. 
 Ella appeared, prim and virtuous, yet a little commiser 
 ating. My father wished to see me, downstairs. It was 
 not the first time she had brought that summons, and always 
 her manner was the same ! 
 
 The scene of my trials was always the sitting room, lined 
 with grim books in their walnut cases. And my father sat, 
 like a judge, behind the big desk where he did his work when 
 at home. Oh, the distance between us at such an hour! 
 I entered as delicately as Agag, and the expression in his 
 eye seemed to convict me before I could open my mouth. 
 
 "Hugh," he said, "your mother tells me that you have 
 confessed to going, without permission, to Logan's Pond, 
 where you embarked on a raft and fell into the water." 
 
 The slight emphasis he contrived to put on the word raft 
 sent a colder shiver down my spine than the iced water had 
 done. What did he know? or was this mere suspicion? 
 Too late, now, at any rate, to plead guilty. 
 
 "It was a sort of a raft, sir," I stammered. 
 
 "A sort of a raft," repeated my father. "Where, may I 
 ask, did you find it?" 
 
 "I I didn't exactly find it, sir." 
 
 "Ah!" said my father. (It was the moment to glance 
 meaningly at the jury.) The prisoner gulped. "You didn't 
 exactly find it, then. Will you kindly explain how you 
 came by it?" 
 
 "Well, sir, we I put it together." 
 
 "Have you any objection to stating, Hugh, in plain Eng 
 lish, that you made it?" 
 
 "No, sir, I suppose you might say that I made it." 
 
 "Or that it was intended for a row-boat?" 
 
 Here was the tune to appeal, to force a decision as to what 
 constituted a row-boat.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 29 
 
 "Perhaps it might be called a row-boat, sir," I said ab 
 jectly. 
 
 "Or that, in direct opposition to my wishes and commands 
 in forbidding you to have a boat, to spend your money fool 
 ishly and wickedly on a whim, you constructed one secretly 
 in the woodshed, took out a part of the back partition, thus 
 destroying property that did not belong to you, and had 
 the boat carted this morning to Logan's Pond?" 
 
 I was silent, utterly undone. Evidently he had specific 
 information. . . . There are certain expressions that are, 
 at times, more than mere figures of speech, and now my 
 father's wrath seemed literally towering. It added visibly 
 to his stature. 
 
 "Hugh," he said, in a voice that penetrated to the very 
 corners of my soul, "I utterly fail to understand you. I 
 cannot imagine how a son of mine, a son of your mother 
 who is the very soul of truthfulness and honour can be a 
 liar." (Oh, the terrible emphasis he put on that word !) 
 " Nor is it as if this were a new tendency I have punished 
 you for it before. Your mother and I have tried to do our 
 duty by you, to instil into you Christian teaching. But it 
 seems wholly useless. I confess that I am at a loss how to 
 proceed. You seem to have no conscience whatever, no 
 conception of what you owe to your parents and your God. 
 You not only persistently disregard my wishes and com 
 mands, but you have, for many months, been leading a 
 double life, facing me every day, while you were secretly 
 and continually disobeying me. I shudder to think w r here 
 this determination of yours to have what you desire at any 
 price will lead you in the future. It is just such a desire 
 that distinguishes wicked men from good." 
 
 I will not linger upon a scene the very remembrance of 
 which is painful to this day. ... I went from my father's 
 presence in disgrace, in an agony of spirit that was over 
 whelming, to lock the door of my room and drop face down 
 ward on the bed, to sob until my muscles twitched. For he 
 had, indeed, put into me an awful fear. The greatest horror
 
 30 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 of my boyish imagination was a wicked man. Was I, as he 
 had declared, utterly depraved and doomed in spite of myself 
 to be one ? 
 
 There came a knock at my door Ella with my supper. 
 I refused to open, and sent her away, to fall on my knees in 
 the darkness and pray wildly to a God whose attributes 
 and character were sufficiently confused in my mind. On 
 the one hand was the stern, despotic Monarch of the West 
 minster Catechism, whom I addressed out of habit, the 
 Father who condemned a portion of his children from the 
 cradle. Was I one of those who he had decreed before 
 I was born must suffer the tortures of the flames of hell? 
 Putting two and two together, what I had learned in Sunday 
 school and gathered from parts of Dr. Pound's sermons, 
 and the intimation of my father that wickedness was within 
 me, like an incurable disease, was not mine the logical 
 conclusion ? What, then, was the use of praying ? . . . My 
 supplications ceased abruptly. And my ever ready imagi 
 nation, stirred to its depths, beheld that awful scene of the 
 last day : the darkness, such as sometimes creeps over the 
 city in winter, when the jaundiced smoke falls down and we 
 read at noonday by gas-light. I beheld the tortured faces 
 of the wicked gathered on the one side, and my mother on 
 the other amongst the blessed, gazing across the gulf at me 
 with yearning and compassion. Strange that it did not 
 strike me that the sight of the condemned whom they had 
 loved in life would have marred if not destroyed the happiness 
 of the chosen, about to receive their crowns and harps ! 
 What a theology that made the Creator and Preserver 
 of all mankind thus illogical I
 
 Ill 
 
 ALTHOUGH I was imaginative, I was not morbidly intro 
 spective, and by the end of the first day of my incarceration 
 my interest in that solution had waned. At times, however, 
 I actually yearned for someone in whom I could confide, 
 who could suggest a solution. I repeat, I would not for 
 worlds have asked my father or my mother or Dr. Pound, 
 of whom I had a wholesome fear, or perhaps an unwhole 
 some one. Except at morning Bible reading and at church 
 my parents never mentioned the name of the Deity, save 
 to instruct me formally. Intended or no, the effect of my 
 religious training was to make me ashamed of discussing 
 spiritual matters, and naturally I failed to perceive that this 
 was because it laid its emphasis on personal salvation. . . . 
 I did not, however, become an unbeliever, for I was not of a na 
 ture to contemplate with equanimity a godless universe. . . . 
 
 My sufferings during these series of afternoon confine 
 ments did not come from remorse, but were the result of a 
 vague sense of injury ; and their effect was to generate within 
 me a strange motive power, a desire to do something that 
 would astound my father and eventually wring from him 
 the confession that he had misjudged me. To be sure, I 
 should have to wait until early manhood, at least, for the 
 accomplishment of such a coup. Might it not be that I 
 was an embryonic literary genius? Many were the books 
 I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication, only to abandon 
 them when my confinement came to an end. 
 
 It was about this time, I think, that I experienced one of 
 those shocks which have a permanent effect upon character. 
 
 31
 
 32 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 It was then the custom for ladies to spend the day with one 
 another, bringing their sewing; and sometimes, when I 
 unexpectedly entered the sitting-room, the voices of my 
 mother's visitors would drop to a whisper. One afternoon I 
 returned from school to pause at the head of the stairs. 
 Cousin Bertha Ewan and Mrs. McAlery were discussing 
 with my mother an affair that I judged from the awed 
 tone in which they spoke might prove interesting. 
 
 " Poor Grace," Mrs. McAlery was saying, " I imagine she's 
 paid a heavy penalty. No man alive will be faithful under 
 those circumstances." 
 
 I stopped at the head of the stairs, with a delicious, guilty 
 feeling. 
 
 "Have they ever heard of her?" Cousin Bertha asked. 
 
 "It is thought they went to Spain," replied Mrs. McAlery, 
 solemnly, yet not without a certain zest. "Mr. Jules 
 Hollister will not have her name mentioned in his presence, 
 you know. And Whitcomb chased them as far as New York 
 with a horse-pistol in his pocket. The report is that he 
 got to the dock just as the ship sailed. And then, you 
 know, he went to live somewhere out West, in Iowa, 
 I believe.'* 
 
 "Did he ever get a divorce?" Cousin Bertha inquired. 
 
 " He was too good a church member, my dear," my mother 
 reminded her. 
 
 "Well, I'd have got one quick enough, church member or 
 no church member," declared Cousin Bertha, who had in 
 her elements of daring. 
 
 "Not that I mean for a moment to excuse her," Mrs. 
 McAlery put in, " but Edward Whitcomb did have a frightful 
 temper, and he was awfully strict with her, and he was old 
 enough, anyhow, to be her father. Grace Hollister was the 
 last woman in the world I should have suspected of doing so 
 hideous a thing. She was so sweet and simple." 
 
 "Jennings was very attractive," said my Cousin Bertha. 
 "I don't think I ever saw a handsomer man. Now, if he 
 had looked at me "
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 33 
 
 The sentence was never finished, for at this crucial moment 
 I dropped a grammar. . . . 
 
 I had heard enough, however, to excite my curiosity to 
 the highest pitch. And that evening, when I came in at 
 five o'clock to study, I asked my mother what had become of 
 Gene Hollister's aunt. 
 
 "She went away, Hugh," replied my mother, looking 
 greatly troubled. 
 
 "Why?" I persisted. 
 
 "It is something you are too young to understand." 
 
 Of course I started an investigation, and the next day at 
 school I asked the question of Gene Hollister himself, 
 only to discover that he believed his aunt to be dead ! And 
 that night he asked his mother if his Aunt Grace were really 
 alive, after all ? Whereupon complications and explanations 
 ensued between our parents, of which we saw only the surface 
 signs. . . . My father accused me of eavesdropping (which 
 I denied), and sentenced me to an afternoon of solitary con 
 finement for repeating something which I had heard in 
 private. I have reason to believe that my mother was also 
 reprimanded. 
 
 It must not be supposed that I permitted the matter to 
 rest. In addition to Grits Jarvis, there was another contra 
 band among my acquaintances, namely, Alec Pound, the 
 scrapegrace son of the Reverend Doctor Pound. Alec had 
 an encyclopaedic mind, especially well stocked with the kind 
 of knowledge I now desired; first and last he taught me 
 much, which I would better have got in another way. To 
 him I appealed and got the story, my worst suspicions being 
 confirmed. Mrs. Whitcomb's house had been across the 
 alley from that of Mr. Jennings, but no one knew that 
 anything was "going on," though there had been sig 
 nals from the windows the neighbours afterwards re 
 membered. . . . 
 
 I listened shudderingly. 
 
 "But," I cried, "they were both married!" 
 
 "What difference does that make when you love a
 
 34 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 woman?" Alec replied grandly. "I could tell you much 
 worse things than that." 
 
 This he proceeded to do. Fascinated, I listened with a 
 sickening sensation. It was a mild afternoon in spring, and 
 we stood in the deep limestone gutter in front of the parson 
 age, a little Gothic wooden house set in a gloomy yard. 
 
 "/ thought," said I, "that people couldn't love any more 
 after they were married, except each other." 
 
 Alec looked at me pityingly. 
 
 "You'll get over that notion," he assured me. 
 
 Thus another ingredient entered my character. Denied 
 its food at home, good food, my soul eagerly consumed and 
 made part of itself the fermenting stuff that Alec Pound 
 so willing distributed. And it was fermenting stuff. Let 
 us see what it did to me. Working slowly but surely, it 
 changed for me the dawning mystery of sex into an evil 
 instead of a holy one. The knowledge of the tragedy of 
 Grace Hollister started me to seeking restlessly, on book 
 shelves and elsewhere, for a secret that forever eluded me, 
 and forever led me on. The word fermenting aptly describes 
 the process begun, suggesting as it does something closed up, 
 away from air and sunlight, continually working in secret, 
 engendering forces that fascinated, yet inspired me with 
 fear. Undoubtedly this secretiveness of our elders was 
 due to the pernicious dualism of their orthodox Chris 
 tianity, in which love was carnal and therefore evil, and the 
 flesh not the gracious soil of the spirit, but something to be 
 deplored and condemned, exorcised and transformed by the 
 miracle of grace. Now love had become a terrible power 
 (gripping me) whose enchantment drove men and women 
 from home and friends and kindred to the uttermost parts 
 of the earth. . . . 
 
 It was long before I got to sleep that night after my talk 
 with Alec Pound. I alternated between the horror and the 
 romance of the story I had heard, supplying for myself the 
 details he had omitted : I beheld the signals from the win-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 35 
 
 dows, the clandestine meetings, the sudden and desperate 
 flight. And to think that all this could have happened in 
 our city not five blocks from where I lay I 
 
 My consternation and horror were concentrated on the 
 man, and yet I recall a curious bifurcation. Instead of 
 experiencing that automatic righteous indignation which 
 my father and mother had felt, which had animated old Mr. 
 Jules Hollister when he had sternly forbidden his daughter's 
 name to be mentioned in his presence, which had made 
 these people outcasts, there welled up within me an intense 
 sympathy and pity. By an instinctive process somehow 
 linked with other experiences, I seemed to be able to enter 
 into the feelings of these two outcasts, to understand the 
 fearful yet fascinating nature of the impulse that had led 
 them to elude the vigilance and probity of a world with 
 which I myself was at odds. I pictured them in a remote 
 land, shunned by mankind. Was there something within 
 me that might eventually draw me to do likewise? The 
 desire in me to which my father had referred, which would 
 brook no opposition, which twisted and squirmed until it 
 found its way to its object ? I recalled the words of Jarvis, 
 the carpenter, that if I ever set my heart on another man's 
 wife, God help him. God help me ! 
 
 A wicked man ! I had never beheld the handsome and 
 fascinating Mr. Jennings, but I visualised him now; dark, 
 like all villains, with a black moustache and snapping black 
 eyes. He carried a cane. I always associated canes with 
 villains. Whereupon I arose, groped for the matches, lighted 
 the gas, and gazing at myself in the mirror was a little re 
 assured to find nothing sinister in my countenance. . . . 
 
 Next to my father's faith in a Moral Governor of the 
 Universe was his belief in the Tariff and the Republican 
 Party. And this belief, among others, he handed on to me. 
 On the cinder playground of the Academy we Republicans
 
 36 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 used to wage, during campaigns, pitched battles for the Tariff. 
 It did not take a great deal of courage to be a Republican 
 in our city, and I was brought up to believe that Democrats 
 were irrational, inferior, and with certain exceptions like 
 the Hollisters dirty beings. There was only one degree 
 lower, and that was to be a mugwump. It was no wonder 
 that the Hollisters were Democrats, for they had a queer 
 streak in them ; owing, no doubt, to the fact that old Mr. Jules 
 Hollister's mother had been a Frenchwoman. He looked like 
 a Frenchman, by the way, and always wore a skullcap. 
 
 I remember one autumn afternoon having a violent 
 quarrel with Gene Hollister that bade fair to end in blows, 
 when he suddenly demanded : 
 
 "I'll bet you anything you don't know why you're a 
 Republican." 
 
 "It's because I'm for the Tariff," I replied triumphantly. 
 
 But his next question floored me. What, for example, 
 was the Tariff ? I tried to bluster it out, but with no success. 
 
 " Do you know ? " I cried finally, with sudden inspiration. 
 
 It turned out that he did not. 
 
 "Aren't we darned idiots," he asked, "to get fighting over 
 something we don't know anything about?" 
 
 That was Gene's French blood, of course. But his ques 
 tion rankled. And how was I to know that he would have 
 got as little satisfaction if he had hurled it into the marching 
 ranks of those imposing torch-light processions which some 
 times passed our house at night, with drums beating and 
 fifes screaming and torches waving, thousands of citizens 
 who were for the Tariff for the same reason as I : to wit, 
 because they were Republicans. 
 
 Yet my father lived and died in the firm belief that the 
 United States of America was a democracy ! 
 
 Resolved not to be caught a second time in such a humiliat 
 ing position by a Democrat, I asked my father that night 
 what the Tariff was. But I was too young to understand it, 
 he said. I was to take his word for it that the country would 
 go to the dogs if the Democrats got in and the Tariff were
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 37 
 
 taken away. Here, in a nutshell, though neither he nor I 
 realized it, was the political instruction of the marching 
 hordes. Theirs not to reason why. I was too young, they 
 too ignorant. Such is the method of Authority ! 
 
 The steel-mills of Mr. Durrett and Mr. Hambleton, he 
 continued, would be forced to shut down, and thousands of 
 workmen would starve. This was just a sample of what 
 would happen. Prosperity would cease, he declared. That 
 word, Prosperity, made a deep impression on me, and I 
 recall the certain reverential emphasis he laid on it. And 
 while my solicitude for the workmen was not so great as his 
 and Mr. Durrett's, I was concerned as to what would happen 
 to us if those twin gods, the Tariff and Prosperity, should 
 take their departure from the land. Knowing my love for 
 the good things of the table, my father intimated, with a 
 rare humour I failed to appreciate, that we should have to 
 live henceforth in spartan simplicity. After that, like the 
 intelligent workman, I was firmer than ever for the Tariff. 
 Such was the idealistic plane on which and from a good 
 man I received my first political instruction ! And for a 
 long time I connected the dominance of the Republican 
 Party with the continuation of manna and quails, in other 
 words, with nothing that had to do with the spiritual wel 
 fare of any citizen, but with clothing and food and material 
 comforts. My education was progressing. . . . 
 
 Though my father revered Plato and Aristotle, he did not, 
 apparently, take very seriously the contention that that 
 government alone is good " which seeks to attain the perma 
 nent interests of the governed by evolving the character of 
 its citizens." To put the matter brutally, politics, despite 
 the lofty sentiments on the transparencies in torchlight 
 processions, had only to do with the belly, not the soul. 
 
 Politics and government, one perceives, had nothing to 
 do with religion, nor education with any of these. A
 
 38 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 secularized and disjointed world! Our leading citizens, 
 learned in the classics though some of them might be, paid 
 no heed to the dictum of the Greek idealist, who was more 
 practical than they would have supposed. "The man who 
 does not carry his city within his heart is a spiritual starve 
 ling." 
 
 One evening, a year or two after that tariff campaign, I 
 was pretending to study my lessons under the student lamp 
 in the sitting-room while my mother sewed and my father 
 wrote at his desk, when there was a ring at the door-bell. 
 I welcomed any interruption, even though the visitor proved 
 to be only the druggist's boy ; and there was always the 
 possibility of a telegram announcing, for instance, the death 
 of a relative. Such had once been the case when my Uncle 
 Avery Paret had died in New York, and I was taken out of 
 school for a blissful four days for the funeral. 
 
 I went tiptoeing into the hall and peeped over the banisters 
 while Ella opened the door. I heard a voice which I recog 
 nized as that of Perry Blackwood's father asking for Mr. 
 Paret; and then to my astonishment, I saw filing after 
 him into the parlour some ten or twelve persons. With the 
 exception of Mr. Ogilvy, who belonged to one of our old 
 families, and Mr. Watling, a lawyer who had married the 
 youngest of Gene Hollister's aunts, the visitors entered 
 stealthily, after the manner of burglars ; some of these were 
 heavy-jowled, and all had an air of mystery that raised my 
 curiosity and excitement to the highest pitch. I caught hold 
 of Ella as she came up the stairs, but she tore herself free, 
 and announced to my father that Mr. Josiah Blackwood and 
 other gentlemen had asked to see him. My father seemed 
 puzzled as he went downstairs. ... A long interval elapsed, 
 during which I did not make even a pretence of looking at my 
 arithmetic. At times the low hum of voices rose to what was 
 almost an uproar, and on occasions I distinguished a marked 
 Irish brogue. 
 
 " I wonder what they want ? " said my mother, nervously. 
 
 At last we heard the front door shut behind them, and my
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 39 
 
 father came upstairs, his usually serene face wearing a dis 
 turbed expression. 
 
 " Who in the world was it, Mr. Paret ? " asked my mother. 
 
 My father sat down in the arm-chair. He was clearly 
 making an effort for self-control. 
 
 "Blackwood and Ogilvy and Watling and some city 
 politicians," he exclaimed. 
 
 "Politicians!" she repeated. "What did they want? 
 That is, if it's anything you can tell me," she added apologet 
 ically. 
 
 "They wished me to be the Republican candidate for the 
 mayor of this city." 
 
 This tremendous news took me off my feet. My father 
 
 mayor 
 
 "Of course you didn't consider it, Mr. Paret," my mother 
 was saying. 
 
 " Consider it ! " he echoed reprovingly. " I can't imagine 
 what Ogilvy and Watling and Josiah Blackwood were think 
 ing of! They are out of their heads. I as much as told 
 them so." 
 
 This was more than I could bear, for I had already pictured 
 myself telling the news to envious schoolmates. 
 
 "Oh, father, why didn't you take it?" I cried. 
 
 By this time, when he turned to me, he had regained his 
 usual expression. 
 
 "You don't know what you're talking about, Hugh," he 
 said. "Accept a political office! That sort of thing is 
 left to politicians." 
 
 The tone in which he spoke warned me that a continuation 
 of the conversation would be unwise, and my mother also 
 understood that the discussion was closed. He went back 
 to his desk, and began writing again as though nothing had 
 happened. 
 
 As for me, I was left in a palpitating state of excitement 
 which my father's self-control or sang-froid only served to 
 irritate and enhance, and my head was fairly spinning as, 
 covertly, I watched his pen steadily covering the paper.
 
 40 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 How could he how could any man of flesh and blood sit 
 down calmly after having been offered the highest honour 
 in the gift of his community ! And he had spurned it as if 
 Mr. Blackwood and the others had gratuitously insulted 
 him ! And how was it, if my father so revered the Republican 
 Party that he would not suffer it to be mentioned slightingly 
 in his presence, that he had refused contemptuously to be 
 its mayor? . . . 
 
 The next day at school, however, I managed to let it be 
 known that the offer had been made and declined. After all, 
 this seemed to make my father a bigger man than if he had 
 accepted it. Naturally I was asked why he had declined it. 
 
 "He wouldn't take it," I replied scornfully. "Office- 
 holding should be left to politicians." 
 
 Ralph Hambleton, with his precocious and cynical knowl 
 edge of the world, minimized my triumph by declaring that 
 he would rather be his grandfather, Nathaniel Durrett, than 
 the mayor of the biggest city in the country. Politicians, 
 he said, were bloodsuckers and thieves, and the only reason 
 for holding office was that it enabled one to steal the tax 
 payers' money. . . . 
 
 As I have intimated, my vision of a future literary career 
 waxed and waned, but a belief that I was going to be Some 
 body rarely deserted me. If not a literary lion, what was 
 that Somebody to be? Such an environment as mine was 
 wofully lacking in heroic figures to satisfy the romantic 
 soul. In view of the experience I have just related, it is 
 not surprising that the notion of becoming a statesman did 
 not appeal to me; nor is it to be wondered at, despite the 
 somewhat exaggerated respect and awe in which Ralph's 
 grandfather was held by my father and other influential 
 persons, that I failed to be stirred by the elements of great 
 ness in the grim personality of our first citizen, the iron 
 master. For he possessed such elements. He lived alone 
 in Ingram Street in an uncompromising mansion I always 
 associated with the Sabbath, not only because I used to be 
 taken there on decorous Sunday visits by my father, but be-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 41 
 
 cause it was the very quintessence of Presbyterianism. The 
 moment I entered its "portals" as Mr. Hawthorne appro 
 priately would have called them my spirit was overwhelmed 
 and suffocated by its formality and orderliness. Within its 
 stern walls Nathaniel Durrett had made a model universe 
 of his own, such as the Deity of the Westminster Confession 
 had no doubt meant his greater one to be if man had not 
 rebelled and foiled him. ... It was a world from which 
 I was determined to escape at any cost. 
 
 My father and I were always ushered into the gloomy 
 library, with its high ceiling, with its long windows that 
 reached almost to the rococo cornice, with its cold marble 
 mantelpiece that reminded me of a tombstone, with its in 
 terminable book shelves filled with yellow bindings. On 
 the centre table, in addition to a ponderous Bible, was one 
 of those old-fashioned carafes of red glass tipped with blue 
 surmounted by a tumbler of blue tipped with red. Behind 
 this table Mr. Durrett sat reading a volume of sermons, 
 a really handsome old man in his black tie and pleated 
 shirt; tall and spare, straight as a ramrod, with a finely 
 moulded head and straight nose and sinewy hands the colour 
 of mulberry stain. He called my father by his first name, 
 an immense compliment, considering how few dared to do so. 
 
 "Well, Matthew," the old man would remark, after they 
 had discussed Dr. Pound's latest flight on the nature of the 
 Trinity or the depravity of man, or horticulture, or the 
 Republican Party, "do you have any better news of Hugh 
 at school?" 
 
 "I regret to say, Mr. Durrett," my father would reply, 
 "that he does not yet seem to be aroused to a sense of his 
 opportunities." 
 
 Whereupon Mr. Durrett would gimble me with a blue 
 eye that lurked beneath grizzled brows, quite as painful 
 a proceeding as if he used an iron tool. I almost pity my 
 self when I think of what a forlorn stranger I was in their 
 company. They two, indeed, were of one kind, and I of 
 another sort who could never understand them, nor
 
 42 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 they me. To what depths of despair they reduced me they 
 never knew, and yet they were doing it all for my good! 
 They only managed to convince me that my love of folly 
 was ineradicable, and that I was on my way head first for 
 perdition. I always looked, during these excruciating and 
 personal moments, at the coloured glass bottle. 
 
 " It grieves me to hear it, Hugh," Mr. Durrett invariably 
 declared. "You'll never come to any good without study. 
 Now when I was your age ..." 
 
 I knew his history by heart, a common one in this country, 
 although he made an honourable name instead of a dis 
 honourable one. And when I contrast him with those of 
 his successors whom I was to know later . . . ! But I shall 
 not anticipate. American genius had not then evolved 
 the false entry method of overcapitalization. A thrilling 
 history, Mr. Durrett's, could I but have entered into it. I 
 did not reflect then that this stern old man must have 
 throbbed once; nay, fire and energy still remained in his 
 bowels, else he could not have continued to dominate a city. 
 Nor did it occur to me that the great steel-works that 
 lighted the southern sky were the result of a passion, of 
 dreams similar to those possessing me, but which I could 
 not express. He had founded a family whose position 
 was virtually hereditary, gained riches which for those days 
 were great, compelled men to speak his name with a certain 
 awe. But of what use were such riches as his when his 
 religion and morality compelled him to banish from him all 
 the joys in the power of riches to bring ? 
 
 No, I didn't want to be an iron-master. But it may have 
 been about this time that I began to be impressed with the 
 power of wealth, the adulation and reverence it commanded, 
 the importance in which it clothed all who shared in it. . . . 
 
 The private school I attended in the company of other boys 
 with whom I was brought up was called Densmore Academy,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 43 
 
 a large, square building of a then hideous modernity, built 
 of smooth, orange-red bricks with threads of black mortar 
 between them. One reads of happy school days, yet I 
 fail to recall any really happy hours spent there, even in 
 the yard, which was covered with black cinders that cut you 
 when you fell. I think of it as a penitentiary, and the 
 memory of the barred lower windows gives substance to 
 this impression. 
 
 I suppose I learned something during the seven years of 
 my incarceration. All of value, had its teachers known any 
 thing of youthful psychology, of natural bent, could have 
 been put into me in three. At least four criminally wasted 
 years, to say nothing of the benumbing and desiccating 
 effect of that old system of education ! Chalk and chalk- 
 dust ! The Mediterranean a tinted portion of the map, Italy 
 a man's boot which I drew painfully, with many yawns; 
 history no glorious epic revealing as it unrolls the Meaning 
 of Things, no revelation of that wondrous distillation of the 
 Spirit of man, but an endless marching and counter-marching 
 up and down the map, weary columns of figures to be learned 
 by rote instantly to be forgotten again. " On June the 7th 
 General So-and-so proceeded with his whole army " 
 where? What does it matter? One little chapter of 
 Carlyle, illuminated by a teacher of understanding, were 
 . worth a million such text-books. Alas, for the hatred of 
 Virgil! "Paret" (a shiver), "begin at the one hundred and 
 thirtieth line and translate ! " I can hear myself droning out 
 in detestable English a meaningless portion of that endless 
 journey of the pious ^Eneas; can see Gene Hollister, with 
 heart-rending glances of despair, stumbling through Cornelius 
 Nepos in an unventilated room with chalk-rubbed black 
 boards and heavy odours of ink and stale lunch. And I 
 graduated from Densmore Academy, the best school in our 
 city, in the 80's, without having been taught even the rudi 
 ments of citizenship. 
 
 Knowledge was presented to us as a corpse, which bit by 
 bit we painfully dissected. We never glimpsed the living,
 
 44 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 growing thing, never experienced the Spirit, the same spirit 
 that was able magically to waft me from a wintry Lyme 
 Street to the South Seas, the energizing, electrifying Spirit 
 of true achievement, of life, of God himself. Little by little 
 its flames were smothered until in manhood there seemed no 
 spark of it left alive. Many years were to pass ere it was 
 to revive again, as by a miracle. I travelled. Awakening 
 at dawn, I saw, framed in a port-hole, rose-red Seriphos set 
 in a living blue that paled the sapphire ; the seas Ulysses had 
 sailed, and the company of the Argonauts. My soul was 
 steeped in unimagined colour, and in the memory of one 
 rapturous instant is gathered what I was soon to see of 
 Greece, is focussed the meaning of history, poetry and art. 
 I was to stand one evening in spring on the mound where 
 heroes sleep and gaze upon the plain of Marathon between 
 darkening mountains and the blue thread of the strait : 
 peaceful now, flushed with pink and white blossoms of fruit 
 and almond trees ; to sit on the cliff-throne whence a Persian 
 King had looked down upon a Salamis fought and lost. . . . 
 In that port-hole glimpse a Themistocles was revealed, a 
 Socrates, a Homer and a Phidias, an ^Eschylus, and a Per 
 icles; yes, and a John brooding Revelations on his sea-girt 
 rock as twilight falls over the waters. . . . 
 
 I saw the Roman Empire, that Scarlet Woman whose 
 sands were dyed crimson with blood to appease her harlotry, 
 whose ships were laden with treasures from the immutable 
 East, grain from the valley of the Nile, spices from Arabia, 
 precious purple stuffs from Tyre, tribute and spoil, slaves and 
 jewels from conquered nations she absorbed ; and yet whose 
 very emperors were the unconscious instruments of a Progress 
 they wot not of, preserved to the West by Marathon and 
 Salamis. With Csesar's legions its message went forth across 
 Hispania to the cliffs of the wild western ocean, through 
 Hercynian forests to tribes that dwelt where great rivers 
 roll up their bars by misty, northern seas, and even to 
 Celtic fastnesses beyond the Wall. . . .
 
 IV 
 
 IN and out of my early memories like a dancing ray of 
 sunlight flits the spirit of Nancy. I was always fond of her, 
 but in extreme youth I accepted her incense with masculine 
 complacency and took her allegiance for granted, never 
 seeking to fathom the nature of the spell I exercised over 
 her. Naturally other children teased me about her; but 
 what was worse, with that charming lack of self-conscious 
 ness and consideration for what in after life are called the 
 finer feelings, they teased her about me before me, my 
 presence deterring them not at all. I can see them hop 
 ping around her in the Peters yard crying out : 
 
 "Nancy's in love with Hugh! Nancy's in love with 
 Hugh!" 
 
 A sufficiently thrilling pastime, this, for Nancy could take 
 care of herself. I was a bungler beside her when it came to 
 retaliation, and not the least of her attractions for me was 
 her capacity for anger : fury would be a better term. She 
 would fly at them even as she flew at the head-hunters 
 when the Petrel was menaced; and she could run like a 
 deer. Woe to the unfortunate victim she overtook ! Mas 
 culine strength, exercised apologetically, availed but little, 
 and I have seen Russell Peters and Gene Hollister retire 
 from such encounters humiliated and weeping. She never 
 caught Ralph ; his methods of torture were more intelligent 
 and subtle than Gene's and Russell's, but she was his equal 
 when it came to a question of tongues. 
 
 "I know what's the matter with you, Ralph Hambleton," 
 she would say. "You're jealous." An accusation that 
 invariably put him on the defensive. "You think all the 
 girls are in love with you, don't you?" 
 
 45
 
 46 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 These scenes I found somewhat embarrassing. Not so 
 Nancy. After discomfiting her tormenters, or wounding 
 and scattering them, she would return to my side. ... In 
 spite of her frankly expressed preference for me she had an 
 elusiveness that made a continual appeal to my imagination. 
 She was never obvious or commonplace, and long before I 
 began to experience the discomforts and sufferings of youthful 
 love I was fascinated by a nature eloquent with contradic 
 tions and inconsistencies. She was a tomboy, yet her own 
 sex was enhanced rather than overwhelmed by contact with 
 the other : and no matter how many trees she climbed she 
 never seemed to lose her daintiness. It was innate. 
 
 She could, at times, be surprisingly demure. These im 
 pressions of her daintiness and demureness are particularly 
 vivid in a picture my memory has retained of our walking 
 together, unattended, to Susan Blackwood's birthday party. 
 She must have been about twelve years old. It was the first 
 time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party; Mrs. 
 Willett had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy and I 
 took it most seriously, as symbolic of things to come. I can 
 see Powell Street, where Nancy lived, at four o'clock on a 
 mild and cloudy December afternoon, the decorous, retiring 
 houses, Nancy on one side of the pavement by the iron 
 fences and I on the other by the tree boxes. I can't remem 
 ber her dress, only the exquisite sense of her slimness and 
 daintiness comes back to me, of her dark hair in a long braid 
 tied with a red ribbon, of her slender legs clad in black 
 stockings of shining silk. We felt the occasion to be some 
 how too significant, too eloquent for words. . . . 
 
 In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that led up 
 to the Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the door was 
 opened, letting out sounds of music and revelry. Mr. 
 Blackwood's coloured butler, Ned, beamed at us hospitably, 
 inviting us to enter the brightness within. The shades were 
 drawn, the carpets were covered with festal canvas, the 
 folding doors between the square rooms were flung back, 
 the prisms of the big chandeliers flung their light over ani-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 47 
 
 mated groups of matrons and children. Mrs. Watling, the 
 mother of the Watling twins too young to be present 
 was directing with vivacity the game of "King William 
 was King James's son," and Mrs. McAlery was playing 
 
 ^t-**4 "Vt O T f\ 
 
 the piano 
 
 " Now choose you East, now choose you West, 
 Now choose the one you love the best 1 " 
 
 Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very miser 
 able, refused to embrace Ethel Hollister ; while the scornful 
 Julia lurked in a corner : nothing would induce her to enter 
 such a foolish game. I experienced a novel discomfiture 
 when Ralph kissed Nancy. . . . Afterwards came the feast, 
 from which Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, 
 was at length forcibly removed by his mother. Thus early 
 did he betray his love for the flesh pots. . . . 
 
 It was not until I was sixteen that a player came and 
 touched the keys of my soul, and it awoke, bewildered, at 
 these first tender notes. The music quickened, tripping 
 in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into themes of ex 
 quisite suffering hitherto unexperienced. I knew that I 
 loved Nancy. 
 
 With the advent of longer dresses that reached to her shoe 
 tops a change had come over her. The tomboy, the willing 
 camp-follower who loved me and was unashamed, were 
 gone forever, and a mysterious, transfigured being, neither 
 girl nor woman, had magically been evolved. Could it 
 be possible that she loved me still? My complacency had 
 vanished ; suddenly I had become the aggressor, if only I 
 had known how to "aggress"; but in her presence I was 
 seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my tongue, 
 and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered. 
 It was something though I did not realize it to be able 
 to feel like that.
 
 48 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 The time came when I could no longer keep this thing to 
 myself. The need of an outlet, of a confidant, became im 
 perative, and I sought out Tom Peters. It was in February ; 
 I remember because I had ventured with incredible dar 
 ing to send Nancy an elaborate, rosy Valentine ; written 
 on the back of it in a handwriting all too thinly disguised 
 was the following verse, the triumphant result of much 
 hard thinking in school hours : 
 
 Should you of this the sender guess 
 Without another sign, 
 Would you repent, and rest content 
 To be his Valentine? 
 
 I grew hot and cold by turns when I thought of its pos 
 sible effects on my chances. 
 
 One of those useless, slushy afternoons, I took Tom for 
 a walk that led us, as dusk came on, past Nancy's house. 
 Only by painful degrees did I succeed in overcoming my 
 bashfulness; but Tom, when at last I had blurted out the 
 secret, was most sympathetic, although the ailment from 
 which I suffered was as yet outside of the realm of his ex 
 perience. I have used the word "ailment" advisedly, since 
 he evidently put my trouble in the same category with 
 diphtheria or scarlet fever, remarking that it was "darned 
 hard luck." In vain I sought to explain that I did not 
 regard it as such in the least ; there was suffering, I admitted,' 
 but a degree of bliss none could comprehend who had not* 
 felt it. He refused to be envious, or at least to betray envy ; 
 yet he was curious, asking many questions, and I had reason 
 to think before we parted that his admiration for me was 
 increased. Was it possible that he, too, didn't love Nancy ? 
 No, it was funny, but he didn't. He failed to see much in 
 girls : his tone remained commiserating, yet he began to 
 take an interest in the progress of my suit. 
 
 For a time I had no progress to report. Out of considera 
 tion for those members of our weekly dancing class whose 
 parents were Episcopalians the meetings were discontinued
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 49 
 
 during Lent, and to call would have demanded a courage 
 not in me ; I should have become an object of ridicule among 
 my friends and I would have died rather than face Nancy's 
 mother and the members of her household. I set about mak 
 ing ingenious plans with a view to encounters that might 
 appear casual. Nancy's school was dismissed at two, so 
 was mine. By walking fast I could reach Salisbury Street, 
 near St. Mary's Seminary for Young Ladies, in time to 
 catch her, but even then for many days I was doomed to 
 disappointment. She was either in company with other 
 girls, or else she had taken another route; this I surmised 
 led past Sophy McAlery's house, and I enlisted Tom as a 
 confederate. He was to make straight for the McAlery's 
 on Elm while I followed Powell, two short blocks away, and 
 if Nancy went to Sophy's and left there alone he was to an 
 nounce the fact by a preconcerted signal. Through long 
 and persistent practice he had acquired a whistle shrill 
 enough to wake the dead, accomplished by placing a finger 
 of each hand between his teeth ; a gift that was the envy 
 of his acquaintances, and the subject of much discussion as 
 to whether his teeth were peculiar. Tom insisted that they 
 were; it was an added distinction. 
 
 On this occasion he came up behind Nancy as she was 
 leaving Sophy's gate and immediately sounded the alarm. 
 She leaped in the air, dropped her school-books and whirled 
 on him. 
 
 " Tom Peters ! How dare you frighten me so I " she cried. 
 
 Tom regarded her in sudden dismay. 
 
 "I I didn't mean to," he said. " I didn't think you 
 were so near." 
 
 "But you must have seen me." 
 
 " I wasn't paying much attention," he equivocated, a 
 remark not calculated to appease her anger. 
 
 "Why were you doing it?" 
 
 " I was just practising," said Tom. 
 
 " Practising ! " exclaimed Nancy, scornfully. " I shouldn't 
 think you needed to practise that any more."
 
 50 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, I've done it louder," he declared, "Listen!" 
 
 She seized his hands, snatching them away from his lips. 
 At this critical moment I appeared around the corner con 
 siderably out of breath, my heart beating like a watchman's 
 rattle. I tried to feign nonchalance. 
 
 "Hello, Tom," I said. "Hello, Nancy. What's the 
 matter?" 
 
 "It's Tom he frightened me out of my senses." Drop 
 ping his wrists, she gave me a most disconcerting look; 
 there was in it the suspicion of a smile. "What are you 
 doing here, Hugh?" 
 
 "I heard Tom," I explained. 
 
 "I should think you might have. Where were you?" 
 
 "Over in another street," I answered, with deliberate 
 vagueness. Nancy had suddenly become demure. I did 
 not dare look at her, but I had a most uncomfortable notion 
 that she suspected the plot. Meanwhile we had begun to 
 walk along, all three of us, Tom, obviously ill at ease and 
 discomfited, lagging a little behind. Just before we reached 
 the corner I managed to kick him. His departure was by 
 no means graceful. 
 
 "I've got to go," he announced abruptly, and turned 
 down the side street. We watched his sturdy figure as it 
 receded. 
 
 "Well, of all queer boys!" said Nancy, and we walked on 
 again. 
 
 "He's my best friend," I replied warmly. 
 
 "He doesn't seem to care much for your company," said 
 Nancy. 
 
 "Oh, they have dinner at half past two," I explained. 
 
 "Aren't you afraid of missing yours, Hugh?" she asked 
 wickedly. 
 
 "I've got tune. I'd I'd rather be with you." After 
 making which audacious remark I was seized by a spasm of 
 apprehension. But nothing happened. Nancy remained 
 demure. She didn't remind me that I had reflected upon 
 Tom.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 51 
 
 "That's nice of you, Hugh." 
 
 " Oh, I'm not saying it because it's nice," I faltered. " I'd 
 rather be with you than with anybody." 
 
 This was indeed the acme of daring. I couldn't believe 
 I had actually said it. But again I received no rebuke; 
 instead came a remark that set me palpitating, that I treas 
 ured for many weeks to come. 
 
 "I got a very nice valentine," she informed me. 
 
 "What was it like?" I asked thickly. 
 
 "Oh, beautiful! All pink lace and and Cupids, and 
 the picture of a young man and a young woman in a garden." 
 
 "Was that all?" 
 
 " Oh, no, there was a verse, in the oddest handwriting. I 
 wonder who sent it?" 
 
 "Perhaps Ralph," I hazarded ecstatically. 
 
 "Ralph couldn't write poetry," she replied disdainfully. 
 "Besides, it was very good poetry." 
 
 I suggested other possible authors and admirers. She 
 rejected them all. We reached her gate, and I lingered. As 
 she looked down at me from the stone steps her eyes shone 
 with a soft light that filled me with radiance, and into her 
 voice had come a questioning, shy note that thrilled the more 
 because it revealed a new Nancy of whom I had not dreamed. 
 
 " Perhaps I'll meet you again coming from school," I said. 
 
 "Perhaps," she answered. "You'll be late to dinner, 
 Hugh, if you don't go. ..." 
 
 I was late, and unable to eat much dinner, somewhat to 
 my mother's alarm. Love had taken away my appetite. 
 . . . After dinner, when I was wandering aimlessly about 
 the yard, Tom appeared on the other side of the fence. 
 
 "Don't ever ask me to do that again," he said gloomily. 
 
 I did meet Nancy again coming from school, not every 
 day, but nearly every day. At first we pretended that there 
 was no arrangement in this, and we both feigned surprise
 
 52 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 when we encountered one another. It was Nancy who 
 possessed the courage that I lacked. One afternoon she 
 said: 
 
 " I think I'd better walk with the girls to-morrow, Hugh." 
 
 I protested, but she was firm. And after that it was an 
 understood thing that on certain days I should go directly 
 home, feeling like an exile. Sophy McAlery had begun to 
 complain : and I gathered that Sophy was Nancy's confi 
 dante. The other girls had begun to gossip. It was Nancy 
 who conceived the brilliant idea the more delightful be 
 cause she said nothing about it to me of making use of 
 Sophy. She would leave school with Sophy, and I waited 
 on the corner near the McAlery house. Poor Sophy ! She 
 was always of those who piped while others danced. In 
 those days she had two straw-coloured pigtails, and her plain, 
 faithful face is before me as I write. She never betrayed to 
 me the excitement that filled her at being the accomplice 
 of our romance. 
 
 Gossip raged, of course. Far from being disturbed, we 
 used it, so to speak, as a handle for our love-making, which 
 was carried on in an inferential rather than a direct fashion. 
 Were they saying that we were lovers ? Delightful ! We 
 laughed at one another in the sunshine. ... At last we 
 achieved the great adventure of a clandestine meeting and 
 went for a walk in the afternoon, avoiding the houses of our 
 friends. I've forgotten which of us had the boldness to 
 propose it. The crocuses and tulips had broken the black 
 mould, the flower beds in the front yards were beginning 
 to blaze with scarlet and yellow, the lawns had turned a 
 living green. What did we talk about? The substance 
 has vanished, only the flavour remains. 
 
 One awoke of a morning to the twittering of birds, to 
 walk to school amidst delicate, lace-like shadows of great 
 trees acloud with old gold : the buds lay curled like tiny 
 feathers on the pavements. Suddenly the shade was dense, 
 the sunlight white and glaring, the odour of lilacs heavy in 
 the air, spring in all its fulness had come, spring and
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 53 
 
 Nancy. Just so subtly, yet with the same seeming sudden 
 ness had budded and come to leaf and flower a perfect under 
 standing which nevertheless remained undefined. This, I 
 had no doubt, was my fault, and due to the incomprehensi 
 ble shyness her presence continued to inspire. Although we 
 did not altogether abandon our secret trysts, we began to 
 meet in more natural ways; there were garden parties and 
 picnics where we strayed together through the woods and 
 fields, pausing to tear off, one by one, the petals of 
 a daisy, " She loves me, she loves me not." I never 
 ventured to kiss her; I always thought afterwards I might 
 have done so, she had seemed so willing, her eyes had shone 
 so expectantly as I sat beside her on the grass; nor can I 
 tell why I desired to kiss her save that this was the traditional 
 thing to do to the lady one loved. To be sure, the very 
 touch of her hand was galvanic. Paradoxically, I saw the 
 human side of her, the yielding gentleness that always amazed 
 me, yet I never overcame my awe of the divine ; she was a 
 being sacrosanct. Whether this idealism were innate or the 
 result of such romances as I had read I cannot say. ... I 
 got, indeed, an avowal of a sort. The weekly dancing 
 classes having begun again, on one occasion when she had 
 waltzed twice with Gene Hollister I protested. 
 
 "Don't be silly, Hugh," she whispered. "Of course I 
 like you better than anyone else you ought to know that." 
 
 We never got to the word " love," but we knew the feeling. 
 
 One cloud alone flung its shadow across these idyllic days. 
 Before I was fully aware of it I had drawn very near to the 
 first great junction-point of my life, my graduation from 
 Densmore Academy. We were to "change cars," in the 
 language of Principal Haime. Well enough for the fortunate 
 ones who were to continue the academic journey, which 
 implied a postponement of the serious business of life ; but 
 month after month of the last term had passed without a
 
 54 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 hint from my father that I was to change cars. Again and 
 again I almost succeeded in screwing up my courage to the 
 point of mentioning college to him, never quite ; his 
 manner, though kind and calm, somehow strengthened my 
 suspicion that I had been judged and found wanting, and 
 doomed to "business": galley slavery, I deemed it, humdrum, 
 prosaic, degrading 1 When I thought of it at night I expe 
 rienced almost a frenzy of self-pity. My father couldn't 
 intend to do that, just because my monthly reports hadn't 
 always been what he thought they ought to be! Gene 
 Hollister's were no better, if as good, and he was going to 
 Princeton. Was I, Hugh Paret, to be denied the distinction 
 of being a college man, the delights of university existence, 
 cruelly separated and set apart from my friends whom I 
 loved ! held up to the world and especially to Nancy Willett 
 as good for nothing else! The thought was unbearable. 
 Characteristically, I hoped against hope. 
 
 I have mentioned garden parties. One of our annual 
 institutions was Mrs. Willett's children's party in May; 
 for the Willett house had a garden that covered almost a 
 quarter of a block. Mrs. Willett loved children, the greatest 
 regret of her life being that providence had denied her a large 
 family. As far back as my memory goes she had been some 
 thing of an invalid ; she had a sweet, sad face, and delicate 
 hands so thin as to seem almost transparent ; and she al 
 ways sat in a chair under the great tree on the lawn, smiling 
 at us as we soared to dizzy heights in the swing, or played 
 croquet, or scurried through the paths, and in and out of 
 the latticed summer-house with shrieks of laughter and 
 terror. It all ended with a feast at a long table made of 
 sawhorses and boards covered with a white cloth, and when 
 the cake was cut there was wild excitement as to who would 
 get the ring and who the thimble. 
 
 We were more decorous, or rather more awkward now, 
 and the party began with a formal period when the boys 
 gathered in a group and pretended indifference to the girls. 
 The girls were cleverer at it, and actually achieved the im-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 55 
 
 pression that they were indifferent. We kept an eye on them, 
 uneasily, while we talked. To be in Nancy's presence and 
 not alone with Nancy was agonizing, and I wondered at a 
 sang-froid beyond my power to achieve, accused her of cold 
 ness, my sufferings being the greater because she seemed 
 more beautiful, daintier, more irreproachable than I had ever 
 seen her. Even at that early age she gave evidence of the 
 social gift, and it was due to her efforts that we forgot our 
 best clothes and our newly born self-consciousness. When 
 I begged her to slip away with me among the currant bushes 
 she whispered : 
 
 "I can't, Hugh. I'm the hostess, you know." 
 
 I had gone there in a flutter of anticipation, but nothing 
 went right that day. There was dancing in the big rooms 
 that looked out on the garden ; the only girl with whom I 
 cared to dance was Nancy, and she was busy finding partners 
 for the backward members of both sexes; though she was 
 my partner, to be sure, when it all wound up with a Virginia 
 reel on the lawn. Then, at supper, to cap the climax of 
 untoward incidents, an animated discussion was begun as to 
 the relative merits of the various colleges, the girls, too, taking 
 sides. Mac Willett, Nancy's cousin, was going to Yale, 
 Gene Hollister to Princeton, the Ewan boys to our State 
 University, while Perry Blackwood and Ralph Hambleton 
 and Ham Durrett were destined for Harvard ; Tom Peters, 
 also, though he was not to graduate from the Academy for 
 another year. I might have known that Ralph would have 
 suspected my misery. He sat triumphantly next to Nancy 
 herself, while I had been told off to entertain the faithful 
 Sophy. Noticing my silence, he demanded wickedly : 
 
 "Where are you going, Hugh?" 
 
 "Harvard, I think," I answered with as bold a front as 
 I could muster. "I haven't talked it over with my father 
 yet." It was intolerable to admit that I of them all was to 
 be left behind. 
 
 Nancy looked at me in surprise. She was always down 
 right.
 
 56 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, doesn't your father mean to put you in busi 
 ness?" she exclaimed. 
 
 A hot flush spread over my face. Even to her I had not 
 betrayed my apprehensions on this painful subject. Per 
 haps it was because of this very reason, knowing me as she 
 did, that she had divined my fate. Could my father have 
 spoken of it to anyone? 
 
 "Not that I know of," I said angrily. I wondered if she 
 knew how deeply she had hurt me. The others laughed. 
 The colour rose in Nancy's cheeks, and she gave me an 
 appealing, almost tearful look, but my heart had hardened. 
 As soon as supper was over I left the table to wander, 
 nursing my wrongs, in a far corner of the garden, 
 gay shouts and laughter still echoing in my ears. I was 
 negligible, even my pathetic subterfuge had been detected 
 and cruelly ridiculed by these friends whom I had always 
 loved and sought out, and who now were so absorbed in their 
 own prospects and happiness that they cared nothing for 
 mine. And Nancy ! I had been betrayed by Nancy ! . . . 
 Twilight was coming on. I remember glancing down miser 
 ably at the new blue suit I had put on so hopefully for the 
 first time that afternoon. 
 
 Separating the garden from the street was a high, smooth 
 board fence with a little gate in it, and I had my hand on 
 the latch when I heard the sound of hurrying steps on the 
 gravel path and a familiar voice calling my name. 
 
 "Hugh! Hugh!" 
 
 I turned. Nancy stood before me. 
 
 "Hugh, you're not going!" 
 
 "Yes, I am." 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "If you don't know, there's no use telling you." 
 
 "Just because I said your father intended to put you in 
 business ! Oh, Hugh, why are you so foolish and so proud ? 
 Do you suppose that anyone that I think any the 
 worse of you?" 
 
 Yes, she had read me, she alone had entered into the source
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 57 
 
 of that prevarication, the complex feelings from which it 
 sprang. But at that moment I could not forgive her for 
 humiliating me. I hugged my grievance. 
 
 " It was true, what I said," I declared hotly. " My father 
 has not spoken. It is true that I'm going to college, because 
 I'll make it true. I may not go this year." 
 
 She stood staring in sheer surprise at sight of my sudden, 
 quivering passion. I think the very intensity of it frightened 
 her. And then, without more ado, I opened the gate and was 
 gone. . . . 
 
 That night, though I did not realize it, my journey into a 
 Far Country was begun. 
 
 The misery that followed this incident had one compen 
 sating factor. Although too late to electrify Densmore and 
 Principal Haime with my scholarship, I was determined to 
 go to college now, somehow, sometime. I would show my 
 father, these companions of mine, and above all Nancy 
 herself the stuff of which I was made, compel them sooner 
 or later to admit that they had misjudged me. I had been 
 possessed by similar resolutions before, though none so 
 strong, and they had a way of sinking below the surface of 
 my consciousness, only to rise again and again until by sheer 
 pressure they achieved realization. 
 
 Yet I might have returned to Nancy if something had not 
 occurred which I would have thought unbelievable : she began 
 to show a marked preference for Ralph Hambleton. At 
 first I regarded this affair as the most obvious of retaliations. 
 She, likewise, had pride. Gradually, however, a feeling of 
 uneasiness crept over me : as pretence, her performance was 
 altogether too realistic; she threw her whole soul into it, 
 danced with Ralph as often as she had ever danced with me, 
 took walks with him, deferred to his opinions until, in spite 
 of myself, I became convinced that the preference was 
 genuine. I was a curious mixture of self-confidence and 
 self-depreciation, and never had his superiority seemed
 
 58 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 more patent than now. His air of satisfaction was mad 
 dening. 
 
 How well I remember his triumph on that hot, June morn 
 ing of our graduation from Densmore, a triumph he had 
 apparently achieved without labour, and which he seemed 
 to despise. A fitful breeze blew through the chapel at the 
 top of the building ; we, the graduates, sat in two rows next 
 to the platform, and behind us the wooden benches 
 nicked by many knives were filled with sisters and mothers 
 and fathers, some anxious, some proud and some sad. So 
 brief a span, like that summer's day, and youth was gone ! 
 Would the time come when we, too, should sit by the 
 waters of Babylon and sigh for it? The world was upside 
 down. 
 
 We read the one hundred and third psalm. Then Principal 
 Haime, in his long "Prince Albert" and a ridiculously in 
 adequate collar that emphasized his scrawny neck, reminded 
 us of the sacred associations we had formed, of the peculiar 
 responsibilities that rested on us, who were the privileged of 
 the city. "We had crossed to-day," he said, "an invisible 
 threshold. Some were to go on to higher institutions of 
 learning. Others ..." I gulped. Quoting the Scrip 
 tures, he complimented those who had made the most of 
 their opportunities. And it was then that he called out, 
 impressively, the name of Ralph Forrester Hambleton. 
 Summa cum laude I Suddenly I was seized with passionate, 
 vehement regrets at the sound of the applause. / might 
 have been the prize scholar, instead of Ralph, if I had only 
 worked, if I had only realized what this focussing day of 
 graduation meant ! / might have been a marked individual, 
 with people murmuring words of admiration, of speculation 
 concerning the brilliancy of my future ! . . . When at last 
 my name was called and I rose to receive my diploma it 
 seemed as though my incompetency had been proclaimed to 
 the world. . . . 
 
 That evening I stood in the narrow gallery [of the flag- 
 decked gymnasium and watched Nancy dancing with Ralph.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 59 
 
 I let her go without protest or reproach. A mysterious 
 lesion seemed to have taken place, I felt astonished and re 
 lieved, yet I was heavy with sadness. My emancipation had 
 been bought at a price. Something hitherto spontaneous, 
 warm and living was withering within me.
 
 IT was true to my father's character that he should have 
 waited until the day after graduation to discuss my future, 
 if discussion be the proper word. The next evening at sup 
 per he informed me that he wished to talk to me in the sit 
 ting-room, whither I followed him with a sinking heart. He 
 seated himself at his desk, and sat for a moment gazing at 
 me with a curious and benumbing expression, and then the 
 blow fell. 
 
 "Hugh, I have spoken to your Cousin Robert Breck about 
 you, and he has kindly consented to give you a trial." 
 
 "To give me a trial, sir !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "To employ you at a small but reasonable salary." 
 
 I could find no words to express my dismay. My dreams 
 had come to this, that I was to be made a clerk in a grocery 
 store ! The fact that it was a wholesale grocery store was 
 little consolation. 
 
 " But father," I faltered, " I don't want to go into business." 
 
 "Ah!" The sharpness of the exclamation might have 
 betrayed to me the pain in which he was, but he recovered 
 himself instantly. And I could see nothing but an inex 
 orable justice closing in on me mechanically; a blind 
 justice, in its inability to read my soul. "The time to have 
 decided that," he declared, "was some years ago, my son. 
 I have given you the best schooling a boy can have, and 
 you have not shown the least appreciation of your advan 
 tages. I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh, but in spite of 
 all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have remained 
 undeveloped and irresponsible. My hope, as you know, 
 was to have made you a professional man, a lawyer, and to 
 
 60
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 61 
 
 take you into my office. My father and grandfather were 
 professional men before me. But you are wholly lacking 
 in ambition." 
 
 And I had burned with it all my life ! 
 
 "I have ambition," I cried, the tears forcing themselves 
 to my eyes. 
 
 " Ambition for what, my son ? " 
 
 I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings to do 
 something, to be somebody in the world were never more 
 keen than at that moment? Matthew Arnold had not 
 then written his definition of God as the stream of tendency 
 by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father, 
 at any rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition. 
 Dimly but passionately I felt then, as I had always felt, 
 that I had a mission to perform, a service to do which ulti 
 mately would be revealed to me. But the hopelessness of 
 explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a tragedy. 
 And I could only gaze at him. 
 
 " What kind of ambition, Hugh ? " he repeated sadly. 
 
 "I I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had 
 a chance. I like it better than anything else. I I have 
 tried it. And if I could only go to college " 
 
 "Literature!" There was in his voice a scandalized 
 note. 
 
 "Why not, father?" I asked weakly. 
 
 And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a 
 loss to express himself. He turned in his chair, and with a 
 sweep of the hand indicated the long rows of musty-backed 
 volumes. "Here," he said, "you have had at your disposal 
 as well-assorted a small library as the city contains, and you 
 have not availed yourself of it. Yet you talk to me of liter 
 ature as a profession. I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely 
 another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I 
 must tell you frankly that I fail to see in you the least qual 
 ification for such a career. You have not even inherited my 
 taste for books. I venture to say, for instance, that you 
 have never even read a paragraph of Plutarch, and yet when
 
 62 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I was your age I was completely familiar with the Lives. 
 You will not read Scott or Dickens." 
 
 The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics 
 were hateful to me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a 
 damning admission. My father had succeeded in presenting 
 my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption, 
 and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner 
 my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, 
 Bohn's Standard Library ! Nor did it occur to him or to me 
 that one might be great in literature without having read so 
 much as a gritty page of them. . . . 
 
 He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless 
 persons sought to enter the arts in the search for a fool's 
 paradise, and in order to satisfy a reprehensible craving for 
 notoriety. The implication was clear, that imaginative 
 production could not be classed as hard work. And he 
 assured me that literature was a profession in which no one 
 could afford to be second class. A Longfellow, a Harriet 
 Beecher Stowe, or nothing. This was a practical age and a 
 practical country. We had indeed produced Irvings and 
 Hawthornes, but the future of American letters was, to 
 say the least, problematical. We were a utilitarian 
 people who would never create a great literature, and he 
 reminded me that the days of the romantic and the 
 picturesque had passed. He gathered that I desired to be 
 a novelist. Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were 
 fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who 
 had no morals. In the face of such a philosophy as his I was 
 I mute. The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices 
 and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour without a 
 spark of inspiration. And that other, the world of my 
 dreams, simply did not exist. 
 
 Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert's 
 wholesale grocery business as a refuge of the lesser of intel 
 lect that could not achieve the professions, an inference 
 not calculated to stir my ambition and liking for it at the 
 start.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 63 
 
 I began my business career on the following Monday 
 morning. At breakfast, held earlier than usual on my ac 
 count, my mother's sympathy was the more eloquent for 
 being unspoken, while my father wore an air of unwonted 
 cheerfulness; charging me, when I departed, to give his 
 kindest remembrances to my Cousin Robert Breck. With 
 a sense of martyrdom somehow deepened by this attitude 
 of my parents I boarded a horse-car and went down town. 
 Early though it was, the narrow streets of the wholesale 
 district reverberated with the rattle of trucks and echoed 
 with the shouts of drivers. The day promised to be scorch 
 ing. At the door of the warehouse of Breck and Company 
 I was greeted by the ineffable smell of groceries in which 
 the suggestion of parched coffee prevailed. This is the sharp 
 est remembrance of all, and even to-day that odour affects 
 me somewhat in the manner that the interior of a ship 
 affects a person prone to seasickness. My Cousin Robert, 
 in his well-worn alpaca coat, was already seated at his desk 
 behind the clouded glass partition next the alley at the 
 back of the store, and as I entered he gazed at me over his 
 steel-rimmed spectacles with that same disturbing look of 
 clairvoyance I have already mentioned as one of his char 
 acteristics. The grey eyes were quizzical, and yet seemed 
 to express a little commiseration. 
 
 "Well, Hugh, you've decided to honour us, have you?" 
 he asked. 
 
 " I'm much obliged for giving me the place, Cousin Robert," 
 I replied. 
 
 But he had no use for that sort of politeness, and he saw 
 through me, as always. 
 
 "So you're not too tony for the grocery business, eh?" 
 
 "Oh, no, sir." 
 
 "It was good enough for old Benjamin Breck," he said. 
 "Well, I'll give you a fair trial, my boy, and no favouritism 
 on account of relationship, any more than to Willie."
 
 64 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 His strong voice resounded through the store, and pres 
 ently my cousin Willie appeared in answer to his summons, 
 the same Willie who used to lead me, on mischief bent, 
 through the barns and woods and fields of Claremore. He 
 was barefoot no longer, though freckled still, grown lanky 
 and tall; he wore a coarse blue apron that fell below his 
 knees, and a pencil was stuck behind his ear. 
 
 " Get an apron for Hugh," said his father. 
 
 Willie's grin grew wider. 
 
 "I'll fit him out," he said. 
 
 "Start him in the shipping department," directed Cousin 
 Robert, and turned to his letters. 
 
 I was forthwith provided with an apron, and introduced 
 to the slim and anaemic but cheerful Johnny Hedges, the ship 
 ping clerk, hard at work in the alley. Secretly I looked 
 down on my fellow-clerks, as one destined for a higher mis 
 sion, made out of better stuff, finer stuff. Despite my 
 attempt to hide this sense of superiority they were swift to 
 discover it ; and perhaps it is to my credit as well as theirs 
 that they did not resent it. Curiously enough, they seemed 
 to acknowledge it. Before the week was out I had earned 
 the nickname of Beau Brummel. 
 
 "Say, Beau," Johnny Hedges would ask, when I appeared 
 of a morning, "what happened in the great world last 
 night?" 
 
 I had an affection for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often 
 wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led, 
 at their self-congratulation for "having a job" at Breck and 
 Company's. 
 
 "You don't mean to say you like this kind of work?" I 
 exclaimed one day to Johnny Hedges, as we sat on barrels of 
 XXXX flour looking out at the hot sunlight in the alley. 
 
 "It ain't a question of liking it, Beau," he rebuked me. 
 " It's all very well for you to talk, since your father's a mil- 
 lionnaire " (a fiction so firmly embedded in their heads that 
 no amount of denial affected it), "but what do you think 
 would happen to me if I was fired ? I couldn't go home and
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 65- 
 
 take it easy you bet not. I, just want to shake hands 
 with myself when I think that I've got a home, and a job 
 like this. I know a feller a hard worker he was, too 
 who walked the pavements for three months when the Col- 
 vers failed, and couldn't get nothing, and took to drink, and 
 the last I heard of him he was sleeping in police stations and 
 walking the ties, and his wife's a waitress at a cheap hotel. 
 Don't you think it's easy to get a job." 
 
 I was momentarily sobered by the earnestness with which 
 he brought home to me the relentlessness of our civilization. 
 It seemed incredible. I should have learned a lesson in 
 that store. Barring a few discordant days when the orders 
 came in too fast or when we were short handed because of 
 sickness, it was a veritable hive of happiness; morning 
 after morning clerks and porters arrived, pale, yet smiling, 
 and laboured with cheerfulness from eight o'clock until six, 
 and departed as cheerfully for modest homes in obscure 
 neighbourhoods that seemed to me areas of exile. They 
 were troubled with no visions of better things. When the 
 travelling men came in from the "road" there was great 
 hilarity. Important personages, these, looked up to by the 
 city clerks; jolly, reckless, Elizabethan-like rovers, who- 
 had tasted of the wine of liberty and of other wines 
 with the ineradicable lust for the road in their blood. No 
 more routine for Jimmy Bowles, who was king of them all. 
 I shudder to think how much of my knowledge of life I 
 owe to this Jimmy, whose stories would have filled a quarto 
 volume, but could on no account have been published ; for 
 a self-respecting post-office would not have allowed them to ; 
 pass through the mails. As it was, Jimmy gave them cir- ; 
 culation enough. I can still see his round face, with the nose 
 just indicated, his wicked, twinkling little eyes, and I can 
 hear his husky voice fall to a whisper when "the boss" passed 
 through the store. Jimmy, when visiting us, always had a 
 group around him. His audacity with women amazed me, 
 for he never passed one of the "lady clerks" without some 
 form of caress, which they resented but invariably laughed
 
 66 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 at. One day he imparted to me his code of morality: he 
 never made love to another man's wife, so he assured me, if 
 he knew the man ! The secret of life he had discovered in 
 laughter, and by laughter he sold quantities of Cousin 
 Robert's groceries. 
 
 Mr. Bowles boasted of a catholic acquaintance in all the 
 cities of his district, but before venturing forth to conquer 
 these he had learned his own city by heart. My Cousin 
 Robert was not aware of the fact that Mr. Bowles "showed" 
 the town to certain customers. He even desired to show it to 
 me, but an epicurean strain in my nature held me back. 
 Johnny Hedges went with him occasionally, and Henry 
 Schneider, the bill clerk, and I listened eagerly to their expe 
 riences, afterwards confiding them to Tom. . . . 
 
 There were times when, driven by an overwhelming curi 
 osity, I ventured into certain strange streets, alone, shiver 
 ing with cold and excitement, gripped by a fascination I did 
 not comprehend, my eyes now averted, now irresistibly 
 raised toward the white streaks of light that outlined the 
 windows of dark houses. . . . 
 
 One winter evening as I was going home, I encountered at 
 the mail-box a young woman who shot at me a queer, twisted 
 smile. I stood still, as though stunned, looking after her, 
 and when halfway across the slushy street she turned and 
 smiled again. Prodigiously excited, I followed her, fearful 
 that I might be seen by someone who knew me, nor was it 
 until she reached an unfamiliar street that I ventured to 
 overtake her. She confounded me by facing me. 
 
 " Get out ! " she cried fiercely. 
 
 I halted in my tracks, overwhelmed with shame. But she 
 continued to regard me by the light of the street lamp. 
 
 "You didn't want to be seen with me on Second Street, 
 did you ? You're one of those sneaking swells." 
 
 The shock of this sudden onslaught was tremendous. I 
 stood frozen to the spot, trembling, convicted, for I knew that 
 her accusation was just ; I had wounded her, and I had a 
 desire to make amends.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 67 
 
 " I'm sorry," I faltered. " I didn't mean to offend you. 
 And you smiled I got no farther. She began to laugh, 
 and so loudly that I glanced anxiously about. I would have 
 fled, but something still held me, something that belied the 
 harshness of her laugh. 
 
 "You're just a kid," she told me. "Say, you get along 
 home, and tell your mam'ma I sent you." 
 
 Whereupon I departed in a state of humiliation and self- 
 reproach I had never before known, wandering about aim 
 lessly for a long time. When at length I arrived at home, 
 late for supper, my mother's solicitude only served to 
 deepen my pain. She went to the kitchen herself to see if 
 my mince-pie were hot, and served me with her own hands. 
 My father remained at his place at the head of the table while 
 I tried to eat, smiling indulgently at her ministrations. 
 
 "Oh, a little hard work won't hurt him, Sarah," he said. 
 "When I was his age I often worked until eleven o'clock and 
 never felt the worse for it. Business must be pretty good, 
 eh, Hugh?" 
 
 I had never seen him in a more relaxing mood, a more 
 approving one. My mother sat down beside me. . . . 
 Words seem useless to express the complicated nature of my 
 suffering at that moment, my remorse, my sense of decep 
 tion, of hypocrisy, yes, and my terror. I tried to talk 
 naturally, to answer my father's questions about affairs at 
 the store, while all the time my eyes rested upon the objects 
 of the room, familiar since childhood. Here were warmth, 
 love, and safety. Why could I not be content with them, 
 thankful for them ? What was it in me that drove me from 
 these sheltering walls out into the dark places? I glanced 
 at my father. Had he ever known these wild, destroying de 
 sires ? Oh, if I only could have confided in him ! The very 
 idea of it was preposterous. Such placidity as theirs would 
 never understand the nature of my temptations, and I 
 pictured to myself their horror and despair at my revelation. 
 In imagination I beheld their figures receding while I drifted 
 out to sea, alone. Would the tide which was somehow
 
 68 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 urithin me carry me out and out, in spite of all I could 
 do? 
 
 " Give me that man 
 
 That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him 
 In my heart's core. . . ." 
 
 I did not shirk my tasks at the store, although I never got 
 over the feeling that a fine instrument was being employed 
 where a coarser one would have done equally well. There 
 were moments when I was almost overcome by surges of 
 self-commiseration and of impotent anger: for instance, I 
 was once driven out of a shop by an incensed German grocer 
 whom I had asked to settle a long-standing account. Yet 
 the days passed, the daily grind absorbed my energies, and 
 when I was not collecting, or tediously going over the stock 
 in the dim recesses of the store, I was running errands in the 
 wholesale district, treading the burning brick of the pave 
 ments, dodging heavy trucks and drays and perspiring clerks 
 who flew about with memorandum pads in their hands, or 
 awaiting the pleasure of bank tellers. Save Harvey, the 
 venerable porter, I was the last to leave the store in the even 
 ing, and I always came away with the taste on my palate of 
 Breck and Company's mail, it being my final duty to "lick" 
 the whole of it and deposit it in the box at the corner. The 
 gum on the envelopes tasted of winter-green. 
 
 My Cousin Robert was somewhat astonished at my appli 
 cation. 
 
 "We'll make a man of you yet, Hugh," he said to me once, 
 when I had performed a commission with unexpected de 
 spatch. . . . 
 
 Business was his all-in-all, and he had an undisguised con 
 tempt for higher education. To send a boy to college was, 
 in his opinion, to run no inconsiderable risk of ruining him. 
 What did they amount to when they came home, strutting 
 like peacocks, full of fads and fancies, and much too good 
 to associate with decent, hard-working citizens ? Neverthe-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 69 
 
 less when autumn came and my friends departed with eclat 
 for the East, I was desperate indeed ! Even the contempla 
 tion of Robert Breck did not console me, and yet here, in 
 truth, was a life which might have served me as a model. 
 His store was his castle; and his reputation for integrity 
 and square dealing as wide as the city. Often I used to 
 watch him with a certain envy as he stood in the doorway, 
 his hands in his pockets, and greeted fellow-merchant and 
 banker with his genuine and dignified directness. This man 
 was his own master. They all called him "Robert," and 
 they made it clear by their manner that they knew they were 
 addressing one who fulfilled his obligations and asked no 
 favours. Crusty old Nathaniel Durrett once declared that 
 when you bought a bill of goods from Robert Breck you did 
 not have to check up the invoice or employ a chemist. Here 
 was a character to mould upon. If my ambition could but 
 have been bounded by Breck and Company, I, too, might have 
 come to stand in that doorway content with a tribute that was 
 greater than Csesar's. 
 
 I had been dreading the Christmas holidays, which were 
 indeed to be no holidays for me. And when at length they 
 arrived they brought with them from the East certain heroes 
 fashionably clad, citizens now of a larger world than mine. 
 These former companions had become superior beings, they 
 could not help showing it, and their presence destroyed the 
 Balance of Things. For alas, I had not wholly abjured the 
 feminine sex after all ! And from being a somewhat impor 
 tant factor in the lives of Ruth Hollister and other young 
 women I suddenly became of no account. New interests, 
 new rivalries and loyalties had arisen in which I had no 
 share; I must perforce busy myself with invoices of flour 
 and coffee and canned fruits while sleigh rides and coasting 
 and skating expeditions to Blackstone Lake followed one 
 another day after day, for the irony of circumstances had
 
 70 /A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 decreed a winter uncommonly cold. There were even 
 ing parties, too, where I felt like an alien, though my 
 friends were guilty of no conscious neglect; and had I 
 been able to accept the situation simply, I should not have 
 suffered. 
 
 The principal event of those holidays was a play given in 
 i the old Hambleton house (which later became the Boyne 
 1 Club), under the direction of the lively and talented Mrs. 
 Watling. I was invited, indeed, to participate ; but even if I 
 had had the desire I could not have done so, since the rehear 
 sals were carried on in the daytime. Nancy was the leading 
 lady. I have neglected to mention that she too had been 
 away almost continuously since our misunderstanding, for 
 the summer in the mountains, a sojourn recommended 
 for her mother's health; and in the autumn she had some 
 what abruptly decided to go East to boarding-school at 
 Farmington. During the brief months of her absence she 
 had marvellously acquired maturity and aplomb, a worldli- 
 ness of manner and a certain frivolity that seemed to put 
 those who surrounded her on a lower plane. She was only 
 seventeen, yet she seemed the woman of thirty whose role 
 she played. First there were murmurs, then sustained 
 applause. I scarcely recognized her : she had taken wings 
 and soared far above me, suggesting a sphere of power and 
 luxury hitherto unimagined and beyond the scope of the 
 world to which I belonged. 
 
 Her triumph was genuine. When the play was over she 
 was immediately surrounded by enthusiastic admirers eager 
 to congratulate her, to dance with her. I too would have 
 gone forward, but a sense of inadequacy, of unimportance, 
 of an inability to cope with her, held me back, and from a 
 corner I watched her sweeping around the room, holding 
 up her train, and leaning on the arm of Bob Lansing, a class 
 mate whom Ralph had brought home from Harvard. Then 
 it was Ralph's turn : that affair seemed still to be going on. 
 My feelings were a strange medley of despondency and stimu 
 lation.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 71 
 
 Our eyes met. Her partner now was Ham Durrett. 
 Capriciously releasing him, she stood before me, 
 
 "Hugh, you haven't asked me to dance, or even told me 
 what you thought of the play." 
 
 " I thought it was splendid," I said lamely. 
 
 Because she refrained from replying I was farther than 
 ever from understanding her. How was I to divine what she 
 felt? or whether any longer she felt at all? Here, in this 
 costume of a woman of the world, with the string of pearls 
 at her neck to give her the final touch of brilliancy, was a 
 strange, new creature who baffled and silenced me. . . . We 
 had not gone halfway, across the room when she halted 
 abruptly. 
 
 "I'm tired," she exclaimed. "I don't feel like dancing 
 just now," and led the way to the big, rose punch-bowl, one 
 of the Durretts' most cherished possessions. Glancing up 
 at me over the glass of lemonade I had given her she went on : 
 " Why haven't you been to see me since I came home ? I've 
 wanted to talk to you, to hear how you are getting along." 
 
 Was she trying to make amends, or reminding me in this 
 subtle way of the cause of our quarrel? What I was 
 aware of as I looked at her was an attitude, a vantage point 
 apparently gained by contact with that mysterious outer 
 world which thus vicariously had laid its spell on me ; I was 
 tremendously struck by the thought that to achieve this 
 attitude meant emancipation, invulnerability against the 
 aches and pains which otherwise our fellow-beings had the 
 power to give us ; mastery over life, the ability to choose 
 calmly, as from a height, what were best for one's self, un- < 
 troubled by loves and hates. Untroubled by loves and hates ! 
 At that very moment, paradoxically, I loved her madly, but 
 with a love not of the old quality, a love that demanded a van 
 tage point of its own. Even though she had made an advance 
 and some elusiveness in her manner led me to doubt it 
 I could not go to her now. I must go as -a conqueror, a 
 conqueror in the lists she herself had chosen, where the 
 prize is power.
 
 72 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, I'm getting along pretty well," I said. "At any 
 rate, they don't complain of me." 
 
 "Somehow," she ventured, "somehow it's hard to think 
 of you as a business man." 
 
 I took this for a reference to the boast I had made that 
 I would go to college. 
 
 "Business isn't so bad as it might be," I assured her. 
 
 " / think a man ought to go away to college," she declared, 
 in what seemed another tone. "He makes friends, learns 
 certain things, it gives him finish. We are very provin 
 cial here." 
 
 Provincial ! I did not stop to reflect how recently she must 
 have acquired the word ; it summed up precisely the self- 
 estimate at which I had arrived. The sting went deep. 
 Before I could think of an effective reply Nancy was being 
 carried off by the young man from the East, who was clearly 
 infatuated. He was not provincial. She smiled back at 
 me brightly over his shoulder. ... In that instant were 
 fused in one resolution all the discordant elements within 
 me of aspiration and discontent. It was not so much that 
 I would show Nancy what I intended to do I would show 
 myself ; and I felt a sudden elation, and accession of power 
 that enabled me momentarily to despise the puppets with 
 whom she danced. . . . From this mood I was awakened 
 with a start to feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to 
 confront her father, McAlery Willett; a gregarious, easy 
 going, pleasure-loving gentleman who made only a pretence 
 of business, having inherited an ample fortune from his 
 , father, unique among his generation in our city in that he 
 paid some attention to fashion in his dress ; good living was 
 already beginning to affect his figure. His mellow voice 
 had a way of breaking an octave. 
 
 "Don't worry, my boy," he said. "You stick to business. 
 These college fellows are cocks of the walk just now, but some 
 day you'll be able to snap your fingers at all of 'em."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 73 
 
 The next day was dark, overcast, smoky, damp the 
 soft, unwholesome dampness that follows a spell of hard 
 frost. I spent the morning and afternoon on the gloomy 
 third floor of Breck and Company, making a list of the stock. 
 I remember the place as though I had just stepped out of it, 
 the freight elevator at the back, the dusty, iron columns, 
 the continuous piles of cases and bags and barrels with 
 narrow aisles between them; the dirty windows, spotted 
 and soot-streaked, that looked down on Second Street. I 
 was determined now to escape from all this, and I had my 
 plan in mind. I 
 
 No sooner had I swallowed my supper that evening than 
 I set out at a swift pace for a modest residence district ten 
 blocks away, coming to a little frame house set back in a 
 yard, one of those houses in which the ringing of the front 
 door-bell produces the greatest commotion ; children's voices 
 were excitedly raised and then hushed. After a brief silence 
 the door was opened by a pleasant-faced, brown-bearded man, 
 who stood staring at me in surprise. His hair was rumpled, 
 he wore an old house coat with a hole in the elbow, and with 
 one finger he kept his place in the book which he held in his 
 hand. 
 
 "Hugh Paret!" he exclaimed. 
 
 He ushered me into a little parlour lighted by two lamps, 
 that bore every evidence of having been recently vacated. 
 Its features somehow bespoke a struggle for existence; as 
 though its occupants had worried much and loved much. It 
 was a room best described by the word "home" home 
 made more precious by a certain precariousness. Toys and 
 school-books strewed the floor, a sewing-bag and apron lay 
 across the sofa, and in one corner was a roll-topped desk of 
 varnished oak. The seats of the chairs were comfortably 
 depressed. 
 
 So this was where Mr. Wood lived ! Mr. Wood, instructor 
 in Latin and Greek at Densmore Academy. It was now
 
 74 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 borne in on me for the first time that he did live and have his 
 ties like any other human being, instead of just appearing 
 magically from nowhere on a platform in a chalky room 
 at nine every morning, to vanish again in the afternoon. I 
 had formerly stood in awe of his presence. But now I was 
 suddenly possessed by an embarrassment, and (shall I say 
 it ?) by a commiseration bordering on contempt for a man who 
 would consent to live thus for the sake of being a school 
 teacher. How strange that civilization should set such a 
 high value on education and treat its functionaries with 
 such neglect ! 
 
 Mr. Wood's surprise at seeing me was genuine. For I 
 had never shown a particular interest in him, nor in the 
 knowledge which he strove to impart. 
 
 "I thought you had forgotten me, Hugh," he said, 
 and added whimsically: "most boys do, when they 
 graduate." 
 
 I felt the reproach, which made it the more difficult for 
 me to state my errand. 
 
 "I knew you sometimes took pupils in the evening, Mr. 
 Wood." 
 
 "Pupils, yes," he replied, still eyeing me. Suddenly 
 his eyes twinkled. He had indeed no reason to suspect me 
 of thirsting for learning. "But I was under the impression 
 that you had gone into business, Hugh." 
 
 "The fact is, sir," I explained somewhat painfully, "that 
 I am not satisfied with business. I feel as if I ought to 
 know more. And I came to see if you would give me lessons 
 *? about three nights a week, because I want to take the Har 
 vard examinations next summer." 
 
 ST Thus I made it appear, and so persuaded myself, that my 
 ambition had been prompted by a craving for knowledge. 
 As soon as he could recover himself he reminded me that he 
 had on many occasions declared I had a brain. 
 
 "Your father must be very happy over this decision of 
 yours," he said. 
 
 That was the point, I told him. It was to be a surprise
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 75 
 
 for my father ; I was to take the examinations first, and in 
 form him afterwards. 
 
 To my intense relief, Mr. Wood found the scheme wholly 
 laudable, and entered into it with zest. He produced ex 
 aminations of preceding years from a pigeonhole in his desk, 
 and inside of half an hour the arrangement was made, the 
 price of the lessons settled. They were well within my 
 salary, which recently had been raised. . . . 
 
 When I went down town, or collecting bills for Breck and 
 Company, I took a text-book along with me in the street-cars. 
 Now at last I had behind my studies a driving force. Algebra, 
 Latin, Greek and history became worth while, means to an 
 end. I astonished Mr. Wood; and sometimes he would 
 tilt back his chair, take off his spectacles and pull his beard. 
 
 "Why in the name of all the sages," he would demand, 
 "couldn't you have done this well at school? You might 
 have led your class, instead of Ralph Hambleton." 
 
 I grew very fond of Mr. Wood, and even of his thin little 
 wife, who occasionally flitted into the room after we had 
 finished. I fully intended to keep up with them in after 
 life, but I never did. I forgot them completely. . . . 
 -3k My parents were not wholly easy in their minds concerning 
 me; they were bewildered by the new aspect I presented. 
 For my lately acquired motive was strong enough to compel 
 me to restrict myself socially, and the evenings I spent at 
 home were given to study, usually in my own room. Once 
 I was caught with a Latin grammar: I was just "looking 
 over it, " I said. My mother sighed. I knew what was in 
 i her mind ; she had always been secretly disappointed that 
 i'I had not been sent to college. And presently, when my 
 father went out to attend a trustee's meeting, the impulse 
 to confide in her almost overcame me ; I loved her with that 
 affection which goes out to those whom we feel understand 
 us, but I was learning to restrain my feelings. She looked 
 at me wistfully. ... I knew that she would insist on telling 
 my father, and thus possibly frustrate my plans. That I 
 was not discovered was due to a certain quixotic twist in
 
 76 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 my father's character. I was working now, and though not 
 actually earning my own living, he no longer felt justified 
 in prying into my affairs. 
 
 When June arrived, however, my tutor began to show 
 signs that his conscience was troubling him, and one night 
 he delivered his ultimatum. The joke had gone far enough, 
 he implied. My intentions, indeed, he found praiseworthy, 
 but in his opinion it was high time that my father were in 
 formed of them; he was determined to call at my father's 
 office. 
 
 The next morning was blue with the presage of showers; 
 blue, too, with the presage of fate. An interminable morn 
 ing. My tasks had become utterly distasteful. And in 
 the afternoon, when I sat down to make out invoices, I 
 wrote automatically the names of the familiar customers, my 
 mind now exalted by hope, now depressed by anxiety. The 
 result of an interview perhaps even now going on would 
 determine whether or no I should be immediately released 
 from a slavery I detested. Would Mr. Wood persuade my 
 father? If not, I was prepared to take more desperate 
 measures; remain in the grocery business I would not. In 
 the evening, as I hurried homeward from the corner where 
 the Boyne Street car had dropped me, I halted suddenly in 
 front of the Peters house, absorbing the scene where my 
 childhood had been spent: each of these spreading maples 
 was an old friend, and in these yards I had played and 
 dreamed. An unaccountable sadness passed over me as 
 I walked on toward our gate ; I entered it, gained the door 
 way of the house and went upstairs, glancing into the sitting- 
 room. My mother sat by the window, sewing. She looked 
 up at me with an ineffable expression, in which I read a trace 
 of tears. 
 
 "Hugh!" she exclaimed. 
 
 I felt very uncomfortable, and stood looking down at her. 
 
 "Why didn't you tell us, my son?" In her voice was in 
 truth reproach, yet mingled with that was another note, 
 which I think was pride.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 77 
 
 "What has father said?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, my dear, he will tell you himself. If Ldon'tknow 
 he will talk to you." 
 
 Suddenly she seized my hands and drew me down to her, 
 and then held me away, gazing into my face with a passionate 
 questioning, her lips smiling, her eyes wet. What did she 
 see? Was there a subtler relationship between our natures 
 than I guessed? Did she understand by some instinctive 
 power the riddle within me? divine through love the force 
 that was driving me on she knew not whither, nor I ? At 
 the sound of my father's step in the hall she released me. 
 He came in as though nothing had happened. 
 
 "Well, Hugh, are you home?" he said. . . . 
 
 Never had I been more impressed, more bewildered by 
 his self-command than at that time. Save for the fact that 
 my mother talked less than usual, supper passed as though 
 nothing had happened. Whether I had shaken him, dis 
 appointed him, or gained his reluctant approval I could not 
 tell. Gradually his outward calmness turned my suspense 
 to irritation. . . . 
 
 But when at length we were alone together, I gained a 
 certain reassurance. His manner was not severe. He hes 
 itated a little before beginning. 
 
 " I must confess, Hugh, that I scarcely know what to say 
 about this proceeding of yours. The thing that strikes me 
 most forcibly is that you might have confided in your mother 
 and myself." 
 
 Hope flashed up within me, like an explosion. 
 
 "I I wanted to surprise you, father. And then, you 
 see,*I thought it would be wiser to find out first how well I 
 was likely to do at the examinations." 
 
 My father looked at me. Unfortunately he possessed 
 neither a sense of humour nor a sense of tragedy sufficient 
 to 'meet such a situation. For the first time in my life I 
 beheld him at a disadvantage ; for I had, somehow, managed 
 at length to force him out of position, and he was puzzled. 
 I was quick to play my trump card.
 
 78 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " I have been thinking it over carefully," I told him, "and 
 I have made up my mind that I want to go into the 
 law." 
 
 "The law I" he exclaimed sharply. 
 
 "Why, yes, sir. I know that you were disappointed be 
 cause I did not do sufficiently well at school to go to college 
 and study for the bar." 
 
 I felt indeed a momentary pang, but I remembered that I 
 was fighting for my freedom. 
 
 "You seemed satisfied where you were," he said in a 
 puzzled voice, "and your Cousin Robert gives a good ac 
 count of you." 
 
 "I've tried to do the work as well as I could, sir," I replied. 
 " But I don't like the grocery business, or any other business. 
 I have a feeling that I'm not made for it." 
 
 "And you think, now, that you are made for the law?" 
 he asked, with the faint hint of a smile. 
 
 "Yes, sir, I believe I could succeed at it. I'd like to try," 
 I replied modestly. 
 
 "You've given up the idiotic notion of wishing to be an 
 author?" 
 
 I implied that he himself had convinced me of the futility 
 of such a wish. I listened to his next words as in a dream. 
 
 "I must confess to you, Hugh, that there are times when 
 I fail to understand you. I hope it is as you say, that you 
 have arrived at a settled conviction as to your future, and 
 that this is not another of those caprices to which you have 
 been subject, nor a desire to shirk honest work. Mr. Wood 
 has made out a strong case for you, and I have therefore de 
 termined to give you a trial. If you pass the examinations 
 with credit, you may go to college, but if at any time you 
 fail to make good progress, you come home, and go into 
 business again. Is that thoroughly understood?" 
 
 I said it was, and thanked him effusively. ... I had 
 escaped, the prison doors had flown open. But it is 
 written that every happiness has its sting; and my joy, 
 intense though it was, had in it a core of remorse. . . .
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 79 
 
 I went downstairs to my mother, who was sitting in the hall 
 by the open door. 
 
 "Father says I may go!" I said. 
 
 She got up and took me in her arms. 
 
 "My dear, I am so glad, although we shall miss you dread 
 fully. . . . Hugh?" 
 
 "Yes, mother." 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, I so want you to be a good man !" 
 
 Her cry was a little incoherent, but fraught with a meaning 
 that came home to me, in spite of myself. . . . 
 
 A while later I ran over to announce to the amazed Tom 
 Peters that I was actually going to Harvard with him. He 
 stood in the half-lighted hallway, his hands in his pockets, 
 blinking at me. 
 
 "Hugh, you're a wonder!" he cried. ^" How in Jehosha- 
 phat did you work it?" . . . 
 
 I lay long awake that night thinking over the momentous 
 change so soon to come into my life, wondering exultantly 
 what Nancy Willett would say now. I was not one, at any 
 rate, to be despised or neglected.
 
 VI 
 
 1 
 
 THE following September Tom Peters and I went East 
 together. In the early morning Boston broke on us like a 
 Mecca as we rolled out of the old Albany station, joint lords 
 of a "herdic." How sharply the smell of the salt-laden 
 east wind and its penetrating coolness come back to me ! I 
 seek in vain for words to express the exhilarating effect of 
 that briny coolness on my imagination, and of the visions 
 it summoned up of the newer, larger life into which I had 
 marvellously been transported. We alighted at the Parker 
 House, full-fledged men of the world, and tried to act as 
 though the breakfast of which we partook were merely an 
 incident, not an Event ; as though we were Seniors, and not 
 freshmen, assuming an indifference to the beings by whom 
 we were surrounded and who were breakfasting, too, al 
 though the nice-looking ones with fresh faces and trim 
 clothes were all undoubtedly Olympians. The better to pro 
 claim our nonchalance, we seated ourselves on a lounge of 
 the marble-paved lobby and smoked cigarettes. This was 
 liberty indeed ! At length we departed for Cambridge, in 
 another herdic. 
 
 Boston ! Could it be possible ? Everything was so differ 
 ent here as to give the place the aspect of a dream : the 
 Bulfinch State House, the decorous shops, the still more 
 decorous dwellings with the purple-paned windows facing 
 the Common ; Back Bay, still boarded up, ivy-spread, sug 
 gestive of a mysterious and delectable existence. We 
 crossed the Charles River, blue-grey and still that morning ; 
 traversed a nondescript district, and at last found ourselves 
 gazing out of the windows at the mellowed, plum-coloured 
 bricks of the University buildings. . . . All at once our 
 
 80
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 81 
 
 exhilaration evaporated as the herdic rumbled into a side 
 street and backed up before the door of a not-too-inviting, 
 three-storied house with a queer extension on top. Its steps 
 and vestibule were, however, immaculate. The bell was 
 answered by a plainly overworked servant girl, of whom we 
 inquired for Mrs. Bolton, our landlady. There followed a 
 period of waiting in a parlour from which the light had been 
 almost wholly banished, with slippery horsehair furniture 
 and a marble-topped table; and Mrs. Bolton, when she 
 appeared, dressed in rusty black, harmonized perfectly with 
 the funereal gloom. She was a tall, rawboned, severe lady 
 with a peculiar red-mottled complexion that somehow 
 reminded one of the outcropping rocks of her native New 
 England soil. 
 
 "You want to see your rooms, I suppose," she remarked 
 impassively when we had introduced ourselves, and as we 
 mounted the stairs behind her Tom, in a whisper, nicknamed 
 her "Granite Face." Presently she left us. 
 
 " Hospitable soul ! " said Tom, who, with his hands in his 
 pockets, was gazing at the bare walls of our sitting-room. 
 " We'll have to go into the house-furnishing business, Hughie. 
 I vote we don't linger here to-day we'll get melancholia." 
 
 Outside, however, the sun was shining brightly, and we 
 departed immediately to explore Cambridge and announce 
 our important presences to the proper authorities. . . . 
 We went into Boston to dine. ... It was not until nine 
 o'clock in the evening that we returned and the bottom sud 
 denly dropped out of things. He who has tasted that first, 
 acute homesickness of college will know what I mean. It 
 usually comes at the opening of one's trunk. The sight of 
 the top tray gave me a pang I shall never forget. I would 
 not have believed that I loved my mother so much ! These 
 articles had been packed by her hands; and in one corner, 
 among the underclothes on which she had neatly sewed my 
 initials, lay the new Bible she had bought. " Hugh Moreton 
 Paret, from his Mother. September, 1881." I took it up 
 (Tom was not looking) and tried to read a passage, but my
 
 82 ATFAR COUNTRY 
 
 eyes were blurred. What was it within me that pressed 
 and pressed until I thought I could bear the pain of it no 
 longer ? I pictured the sitting-room at home, and my father 
 and mother there, thinking of me. Yes, I must acknowledge 
 it ; in the bitterness of that moment I longed to be back 
 once more in the railed-off space on the floor of Breck and 
 Company, writing invoices. . . . 
 
 Presently, as we went on silently with OUT unpacking, we 
 became aware of someone in the doorway. 
 
 "Hello, you fellows 1" he cried. "We're classmates, I 
 guess." 
 
 We turned to behold an ungainly young man in an ill- 
 fitting blue suit. His face was pimply, his eyes a Teutonic 
 blue, his yellow hair rumpled, his naturally large mouth 
 was made larger by a friendly grin. 
 
 "I'm Hermann Krebs," he announced simply. "Who are 
 
 you?" 
 
 We replied, I regret to say, with a distinct coolness that 
 did not seem to bother him in the least. He advanced into 
 the room, holding out a large, red, and serviceable hand, 
 evidently it had never dawned on him that there was such 
 a thing in the world as snobbery. But Tom and I had been 
 "coached" by Ralph Hambleton and Perry Blackwood, 
 warned to be careful of our friendships. There was a 
 Reason ! In any case Mr. Krebs would not have appealed 
 to us. In answer to a second question he was informed 
 what city we hailed from, and he proclaimed himself like 
 wise a native of our state. 
 
 "Why, I'm from Elkington !" he exclaimed, as though the 
 fact sealed our future relationships. He seated himself on 
 Tom's trunk and added: "Welcome to old Harvard!" 
 
 We felt that he was scarcely qualified to speak for "old 
 Harvard," but we did not say so. 
 
 "You look as if you'd been pall-bearers for somebody," 
 was his next observation. 
 
 To this there seemed no possible reply. 
 
 "You fellows are pretty well fixed here," he went on,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 83 
 
 undismayed, gazing about a room which had seemed to us 
 the abomination of desolation. "Your folks must be rich. 
 I'm up under the skylight." 
 
 Even this failed to touch us. His father he told us 
 with undiminished candour had been a German emigrant 
 who had come over in '49, after the cause of liberty had been 
 lost in the old country, and made eye-glasses and opera- 
 glasses. There hadn't been a fortune in it. He, Hermann, 
 had worked at various occupations in the summer time, from 
 peddling to farming, until he had saved enough to start 
 him at Harvard. Tom, who had been bending over his 
 bureau drawer, straightened up. 
 
 "What did you want to come here for?" he demanded. 
 
 "Say, what did you?" Mr. Krebs retorted genially. "To 
 get an education, of course." 
 
 "An education!" echoed Tom. 
 
 "Isn't Harvard the oldest and best seat of learning in 
 America?" There was an exaltation in Krebs's voice 
 that arrested my attention, and made me look at him again. 
 A troubled chord had been struck within me. 
 
 "Sure," said Tom. 
 
 "What did you come for?" Mr. Krebs persisted. 
 
 "To sow my wild oats," said Tom. "I expect to have 
 something of a crop, too." 
 
 For some reason I could not fathom, it suddenly seemed 
 to dawn on Mr. Krebs, as a result of this statement, that 
 he wasn't wanted. 
 
 "Well, so long," he said, with a new dignity that curiously 
 belied the informality of his farewell. 
 
 An interval of silence followed his departure. 
 
 "Well, he's got a crust!" said Tom, at last. 
 
 My own feeling about Mr. Krebs had become more com 
 plicated; but I took my cue from Tom, who dealt with 
 situations simply. 
 
 " He'll come in for a few knockouts," he declared. " Here's 
 to old Harvard, the greatest institution of learning in 
 America! Oh, gee 1"
 
 84 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Our visitor, at least, made us temporarily forget our 
 homesickness, but it returned with redoubled intensity 
 when we had put out the lights and gone to bed. 
 
 Before we had left home it had been mildly hinted to us 
 by Ralph and Perry Blackwood that scholarly eminence 
 was not absolutely necessary to one's welfare and happiness 
 at Cambridge. The hint had been somewhat superfluous; 
 but the question remained, what was necessary? With a 
 view of getting some light on this delicate subject we paid 
 a visit the next evening to our former friends and school 
 mates, whose advice was conveyed with a masterly cir 
 cumlocution that impressed us both. There are some things 
 that may not be discussed directly, and the conduct of 
 life at a modern university which is a reflection of life in 
 the greater world is one of these. Perry Blackwood and 
 Ham did most of the talking, while Ralph, characteristically, 
 lay at full length on the window-seat, interrupting with an 
 occasional terse and cynical remark very much to the point. 
 As a sophomore, he in particular seemed lifted immeasurably 
 above us, for he was as might have been expected al 
 ready a marked man in his class. The rooms which he shared 
 with his cousin made a tremendous impression on Tom and 
 me, and seemed palatial in comparison to our quarters at 
 Mrs. Bolton's, eloquent of the freedom and luxury of 
 undergraduate existence; their note, perhaps, was struck 
 by the profusion of gay sofa pillows, then something of an 
 innovation. The heavy, expensive furniture was of a pattern 
 new to me ; and on the mantel were three or four photographs 
 of ladies in the alluring costume of the musical stage, in 
 which Tom evinced a particular interest. 
 
 "Did grandfather send 'em?" he inquired. 
 
 "They're Ham's," said Ralph, and he contrived somehow 
 to get into those two words an epitome of his cousin's char 
 acter. Ham was stouter, and his clothes were more strik-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 85 
 
 ing, more obviously expensive than ever. ... On our way 
 homeward, after we had walked a block or two in silence, 
 Tom exclaimed : 
 
 " Don't make friends with the friendless ! eh, Hughie ? 
 We knew enough to begin all right, didn't we?" . . . 
 
 Have I made us out a pair of deliberate, calculating snobs ? 
 Well, after all it must be remembered that our bringing up 
 had not been of sufficient liberality to include the Krebses of 
 this world. We did not, indeed, spend much time in choos^ 
 ing and weighing those whom we should know and those whom 
 we should avoid ; and before the first term of that Freshman 
 year was over Tom had become a favourite. He had the 
 gift of making men feel that he delighted in their society, 
 that he wished for nothing better than to sit for hours in their 
 company, content to listen to the arguments that raged about 
 him. Once in a while he would make a droll observation 
 that was greeted with fits of laughter. He was always re 
 ferred to as "old Tom," or "good old Tom"; presently, 
 when he began to pick out chords on the banjo, it was dis 
 covered that he had a good tenor voice, though he could 
 not always be induced to sing. . . . Somewhat to the 
 jeopardy of the academic standard that my father expected 
 me to sustain, our rooms became a rendezvous for many 
 clubable souls whose maudlin, midnight attempts at harmony 
 often set the cocks crowing. 
 
 " Free from care and despair, 
 What care we ? 
 "Ti3 wine, 'tis wine 
 That makes the jollity." 
 
 As a matter of truth, on these occasions it was more 
 often beer ; beer transported thither in Tom's new valise, 
 given him by his mother, and stuffed with snow 
 to keep the bottles cold. Sometimes Granite Face, adorned
 
 86 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 in a sky-blue wrapper, would suddenly appear in the door 
 way to declare that we were a disgrace to her respectable 
 house: the university authorities should be informed, etc., 
 etc. Poor woman, we were outrageously inconsiderate 
 of her. . . . One evening as we came through the hall we 
 caught a glimpse in the dimly lighted parlour of a young 
 man holding a shy and pale little girl on his lap, Annie, 
 Mrs. Bolton's daughter : on the face of our landlady was an 
 expression I had never seen there, like a light. I should 
 scarcely have known her. Tom*and I paused at the foot of 
 the stairs. He clutched my arm. 
 
 "Darned if it wasn't our friend Krebs!" he whispered. 
 
 
 
 While I was by no means so popular as Tom, I got along 
 fairly well. I had escaped from provincialism, from the 
 obscure purgatory of the wholesale grocery business ; new 
 vistas, exciting and stimulating, had been opened up; nor 
 did I offend the sensibilities and prejudices of the new friends 
 I made, but gave a hearty consent to a code I found congenial. 
 I recognized in the social system of undergraduate life at 
 Harvard a reflection of that of a greater world where I 
 hoped some day to shine; yet my ambition did not prey 
 upon me. Mere conformity, however, would not have 
 taken me very far in a sphere from which I, in common with 
 many others, desired not to be excluded. . . . One day, 
 in an idle but inspired moment, I paraphrased a song 
 from " Pinafore," applying it to a college embroglio, and the 
 brief and lively vogue it enjoyed was sufficient to indicate 
 a future usefulness. I had "found myself." This was in 
 the last part of the freshman year, and later on I became a 
 sort of amateur, class poet-laureate. Many were the skits 
 I composed, and Tom sang them. . . . 
 
 During that freshman year we often encountered Hermann 
 Krebs, whistling merrily, on the stairs. 
 
 "Got your themes done?" he would inquire cheerfully. 
 
 And Tom would always mutter, when he was out of ear 
 shot :
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 87 
 
 F "He has got a crust!" 
 
 When I thought about Krebs at all, and this was seldom 
 indeed, his manifest happiness puzzled me. Our cool 
 politeness did not seem to bother him in the least; on 
 the contrary, I got the impression that it amused him. 
 He seemed to have made no friends. And after that first 
 evening, memorable for its homesickness, he never ventured 
 to repeat his visit to us. 
 
 One windy November day I spied his somewhat ludicrous 
 figure striding ahead of me, his trousers above his ankles. 
 I was bundled up in a new ulster, of which I was secretly 
 quite proud, but he wore no overcoat at all. 
 
 "Well, how are you getting along?" I asked, as I overtook 
 him. 
 
 He made clear, as he turned, his surprise that I should have 
 addressed him at all, but immediately recovered himself. 
 
 "Oh, fine," he responded. "I've had better luck than 
 I expected. I'm correspondent for two or three newspapers. 
 I began by washing windows, and doing odd jobs for the 
 professors' wives." He laughed. "I guess that doesn't 
 strike you as good luck." 
 
 He showed no resentment at my patronage, but a self- 
 sufficiency that made my sympathy seem superfluous, giving 
 the impression of an inner harmony and content that sur 
 prised me. 
 
 "I needn't ask how you're getting along," he said. . . . 
 
 At the end of the freshman year we abandoned Mrs. 
 Bolton's for more desirable quarters. 
 
 I shall not go deeply into my college career, recalling only 
 such incidents as, seen in the retrospect, appear to have had 
 significance. I have mentioned my knack for song-writing ; 
 but it was not, I think, until my junior year there was 
 startlingly renewed in me my youthful desire to write, to 
 create something worth while, that had so long been dormant.
 
 88 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 The inspiration came from Alonzo Cheyne, instructor m 
 English ; a remarkable teacher, in spite of the finicky manner 
 isms which Tom imitated. And when, in reading aloud 
 certain magnificent passages, he forgot his affectations, he 
 managed to arouse cravings I thought to have deserted me 
 forever. Was it possible, after all, that I had been right and 
 my father wrong? that I might yet be great in literature? 
 
 A mere hint from Alonzo Cheyne was more highly prized by 
 the grinds than fulsome praise from another teacher. And to 
 his credit it should be recorded that the grinds were the only 
 ones he treated with any seriousness ; he took pains to answer 
 their questions ; but towards the rest of us, the Chosen, he 
 showed a thinly veiled contempt. None so quick as he to 
 detect a simulated interest, or a wily effort to make him 
 ridiculous; and few tried this a second time, for he had a 
 rapier-like gift of repartee that transfixed the offender like 
 a moth on a pin. He had a way of eyeing me at times, his 
 glasses in his hand, a queer smile on his lips, as much as to 
 imply that there was one at least among the lost who was 
 made for better things. Not that my work was poor, but I 
 knew that it might have been better. Out of his classes, 
 however, beyond the immediate, disturbing influence of his 
 personality I would relapse into indifference. . . . 
 
 Returning one evening to our quarters, which were now 
 in the "Yard," I found Tom seated with a blank sheet be 
 fore him, thrusting his hand through his hair and biting the 
 end of his penholder to a pulp. In his muttering, which 
 was mixed with the curious, stingless profanity of which he 
 was master, I caught the name of Cheyne, and I knew that 
 he was facing the crisis of a fortnightly theme. The subject 
 assigned was a narrative of some personal experience, and 
 it was to be handed in on the morrow. My own theme was 
 already written. 
 
 "I've been holding down this chair for an hour, and I 
 can't seem to think of a thing." He rose to fling himself 
 down on the lounge. " I wish I was in Canada." 
 
 "Why Canada?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 89 
 
 "Trout fishing with Uncle Jake at that club of his where 
 he took me last summer." Tom gazed dreamily at the 
 ceiling. "Whenever I have some darned foolish theme like 
 this to^write I want to go fishing, and I want to go like the 
 devil. I'll get Uncle Jake to take you, too, next summer." 
 
 "I wish you would." 
 
 $ "Say, that's living all right, Hughie, up there among the 
 tamaracks and balsams!" And he began, for something 
 like the thirtieth time, to relate the adventures of the trip. 
 ... As he talked, the idea presented itself to me with sudden 
 fascination to use this incident as the subject of Tom's theme ; 
 to write it for him, from his point of view, imitating the droll 
 style he would have had if he had been able to write; for, 
 when he was interested in any matter, his oral narrative 
 did not lack vividness. I began to ask him questions: 
 what were the trees like, for instance ? How did the French- 
 Canadian guides talk ? He had the gift of mimicry : aided 
 by a partial knowledge of French I wrote down a few sen 
 tences as they sounded. The canoe had upset and he had 
 come near drowning. I made him describe his sensations. 
 
 " I'll write your theme for you," I exclaimed, when he had 
 finished. 
 
 "Gee, not about that!" 
 
 "Why not? It's a personal experience." 
 
 His gratitude was pathetic. . . . By this time I was so 
 full of the subject that it fairly clamoured for expression, 
 and as I wrote the hours flew. Once in a while I paused to 
 ask him a question as he sat with his chair tilted back and 
 his feet on the table, reading a detective story. I sketched 
 in the scene with bold strokes ; the desolate bois brule on the 
 mountain side, the polished crystal surface of the pool broken 
 here and there with the circles left by rising fish ; I pictured 
 Armand, the guide, his pipe between his teeth, holding the 
 canoe against the current ; and I seemed to smell the sharp 
 tang of the balsams, to hear the roar of the rapids below. 
 Then came the sudden hooking of the big trout, habitant 
 oaths from Armand, bouleversement, wetness, darkness, con-
 
 90 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 fusion; a half-strangled feeling, a brief glimpse of green 
 things and sunlight, and then strangulation, or what seemed 
 like it ; strangulation, the sense of being picked up and hurled 
 by a terrific force whither ? a blinding whiteness, in which 
 it was impossible to breathe, one sharp, almost unbearable 
 pain, then another, then oblivion. . . . Finally, awaken 
 ing, to be confronted by a much worried Uncle Jake. 
 
 By this time the detective story had fallen to the floor, 
 and Tom was huddled up in his chair, asleep. He arose 
 obediently and wrapped a wet towel around his head, 
 and began to write. Once he paused long enough to 
 mutter : 
 
 "Yes, that's about it, that's the way I felt I" and set 
 to work again, mechanically, all the praise I got for what 
 I deemed a literary achievement of the highest order ! At 
 three o'clock, A. M., he finished, pulled off his clothes automat 
 ically and tumbled into bed. I had no desire for sleep. My 
 brain was racing madly, like an engine without a governor. 
 I could write ! I could write ! I repeated the words over 
 and over to myself. All the complexities of my present 
 life were blotted out, and I beheld only the long, sweet 
 vista of the career for which I was now convinced that nature 
 had intended me. My immediate fortunes became unim 
 portant, immaterial. No juice of the grape I had ever 
 tasted made me half so drunk. . . . With the morning, 
 of course, came the reaction, and I suffered the after sensa 
 tions of an orgie, awaking to a world of necessity, cold and 
 grey and slushy, and necessity alone made me rise from my 
 bed. My experience of the night before might have taught 
 me that happiness lies in the trick of transforming necessity, 
 but it did not. The vision had faded, temporarily, at 
 least; and such was the distraction of the succeeding days 
 that the subject of the theme passed from my mind. . . . 
 
 One morning Tom was later than usual in getting home. 
 I was writing a letter when he came in, and did not notice 
 him, yet I was vaguely aware of his standing over me. When 
 at last I looked up I gathered from his expression that some-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 91 
 
 thing serious had happened, so mournful was his face, and 
 yet so utterly ludicrous. 
 
 "Say, Hugh, I'm in the deuce of a mess," he announced. 
 
 "What's the matter?" I inquired. 
 
 He sank down on the table with a groan. 
 
 "It's Alonzo," he said. 
 
 Then I remembered the theme. 
 
 " What what's he done ? " I demanded. 
 
 "He says I must become a writer. Think of it, me a 
 writer! He says I'm a young Shakespeare, that I've been 
 lazy and hid my light under a bushel ! He says he knows 
 now what I can do, and if I don't keep up the quality, he'll 
 know the reason why, and write a personal letter to my 
 father. Oh, hell!" 
 
 In spite of his evident anguish, I was seized with a con 
 vulsive laughter. Tom stood staring at me moodily. 
 
 " You think it's funny, don't you ? I guess it is, 
 but what's going to become of me ? That's what I want to 
 know. I've been in trouble before, but never in any like 
 this. And who got me into it? You!" 
 
 Here was gratitude ! 
 
 " You 've got to go on writing 'em, now." His voice became 
 desperately pleading. "Say, Hugh, old man, you can tem 
 per 'em down temper 'em down gradually. And by the 
 end of the year, let's say, they'll be about normal again." 
 ^iHe seemed actually shivering. 
 
 " The end of the year 1 " I cried, the predicament striking 
 me for the first time in its fulness. "Say, you've got a, 
 crust!" 
 
 "You'll do it, if I have to hold a gun over you," he an-^ 
 nounced grimly. 
 
 Mingled with my anxiety, which was real, was an exulta 
 tion that would not down. Nevertheless, the idea of develop 
 ing Tom into a Shakespeare, Tom, who had not the 
 slightest desire to be one ! was appalling, besides having 
 in it an element of useless self-sacrifice from which I recoiled. 
 On the other hand, if Alonzo should discover that I had
 
 92 A FAR COUNTRY 7 
 
 written his theme, there were penalties I did not care to 
 dwell upon. . . . With such a cloud hanging over me I 
 passed a restless night. 
 
 As luck would have it the very next evening in the level 
 light under the elms of the Square I beheld sauntering to 
 wards me a dapper figure which I recognized as that of Mr. 
 Cheyne himself. As I saluted him he gave me an amused 
 and most disconcerting glance ; and when I was congratulat 
 ing myself that he had passed me he stopped. 
 
 "Fine weather for March, Paret," he observed. 
 
 "Yes, sir," I agreed in a strange voice. 
 
 "By the way," he remarked, contemplating the bare 
 branches above our heads, " that was an excellent theme your 
 roommate handed in. I had no idea that he possessed such 
 such genius. Did you, by any chance, happen to read it ? " 
 
 "Yes, sir, I read it." 
 
 "Weren't you surprised?" inquired Mr. Cheyne. 
 
 " Well, yes, sir that is I mean to say he talks just 
 like that, sometimes that is, when it's anything he cares 
 about." 
 
 "Indeed!" said Mr. Cheyne. "That's interesting, most 
 interesting. In all my experience, I do not remember a case 
 in which a gift has been developed so rapidly. I don't 
 want to give the impression ah that there is no room 
 for improvement, but the thing was very well done, for an 
 undergraduate. I must confess I never should have sus 
 pected it in Peters, and it's most interesting what you say 
 about his cleverness in conversation." He twirled the head of 
 his stick, apparently lost in reflection. " I may be wrong," he 
 went on presently, " I have an idea it is you I must 
 literally have jumped away from him. He paused a moment, 
 without apparently noticing my panic, "that it is you who 
 have influenced Peters." 
 
 "I, sir?" 
 
 "I am wrong, then. Or is this merely commendable 
 modesty on your part?" 
 
 "Oh, no, sir."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 93 
 
 "Then my hypothesis falls to the ground. I had greatly 
 hoped," he added meaningly, "that you might be able to 
 throw some light on this mystery." 
 
 I was dumb. 
 
 "Paret," he asked, "have you time to come over to my 
 rooms for a few minutes this evening?" 
 
 "Certainly, sir." 
 
 He gave me his number in Brattle Street. . . . 
 
 Like one running in a nightmare and making no progress 
 I made my way home, only to learn from Hallam, who 
 lived on the same floor, that Tom had inconsiderately 
 gone to Boston for the evening, with four other weary spirits 
 in search of relaxation I Avoiding our club table, I took 
 what little nourishment I could at a modest restaurant, and 
 restlessly paced the moonlit streets until eight o'clock, when 
 I found myself in front of one of those low-gabled colonial 
 houses which, on less soul-shaking occasions, had exercised a 
 great charm on my imagination. My hand hung for an instant 
 over the bell. ... I must have rung it violently, for there 
 appeared almost immediately an old lady in a lace cap, who 
 greeted me with gentle courtesy, and knocked at a little door 
 with glistening panels. The latch was lifted by Mr. Cheyne 
 himself. 
 
 > - " Come in, Paret," he said, in a tone that was unexpectedly 
 hospitable. 
 
 I have rarely seen a more inviting room. A wood fire 
 burned brightly on the brass andirons, flinging its glare on the 
 big, white beam that crossed the ceiling, and reddening the 
 square panes of the windows in their panelled recesses. Be 
 tween these were rows of books, attractive books in chased 
 bindings, red and blue ; books that appealed to be taken 
 down and read. There was a table covered with reviews and 
 magazines in neat piles, and a lamp so shaded as to throw its 
 light only on the white blotter of the pad. Two easy chairs, 
 covered with flowered chintz, were ranged before the fire, in 
 one of which I sank, much bewildered, upon being urged to 
 do so.
 
 94 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I utterly failed to recognize "Alonzo" in this new atmos 
 phere. And he had, moreover, dropped the subtly sarcastic 
 manner I was wont to associate with him. 
 
 "Jolly old house, isn't it?" he observed, as though I had 
 casually dropped in on him for a chat ; and he stood, with 
 his hands behind him stretched to the blaze, looking down 
 at me. "It was built by a certain Colonel Draper, who 
 fought at Louisburg, and afterwards fled to England at the 
 time of the Revolution. He couldn't stand the patriots, 
 I'm not so sure that I blame him, either. Are you interested 
 in colonial things, Mr. Paret?" 
 
 I said I was. If the question had concerned Aztec relics 
 my answer would undoubtedly have been the same. And 
 I watched him, dazedly, while he took down a silver porringer 
 from the shallow mantel shelf. 
 
 "It's not a Revere," he said, in a slightly apologetic tone 
 as though to forestall a comment, "but it's rather good, I 
 think. I picked it up at a sale in Dorchester. But I have 
 never been able to identify the coat of arms." 
 
 He showed me a ladle, with the names of "Patience and 
 William Simpson " engraved quaintly thereon, and took 
 down other articles in which I managed to feign an interest. 
 Finally he seated himself in the chair opposite, crossed his 
 feet, putting the tips of his fingers together and gazing into 
 the fire. 
 
 " So you thought you could fool me," he said, at length. 
 
 I became aware of the ticking of a great clock in the corner. 
 My mouth was dry. 
 
 | "I am going to forgive you," he went on, more gravely, 
 ' "for several reasons. I don't flatter, as you know. It's 
 because you carried out the thing so perfectly that I am led 
 to think you have a gift that may be cultivated, Paret. You 
 wrote that theme in the way Peters would have written it if 
 he had not been what shall I say ? scripturally inarticu 
 late. And I trust it may do you some good if I say it was 
 something of a literary achievement, if not a moral one." 
 
 "Thank you, sir," I faltered.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 95 
 
 "Have you ever," he inquired, lapsing a little into his 
 lecture-room manner, "seriously thought of literature as a 
 career ? Have you ever thought of any career seriously ? " 
 
 "I once wished to be a writer, sir," I replied tremulously, 
 but refrained from telling him of my father's opinion of the 
 profession. Ambition a purer ambition than I had known 
 for years leaped within me at his words. He, Alonzo 
 Cheyne, had detected in me the Promethean fire ! 
 
 I sat there until ten o'clock talking to the real Mr. Cheyne, 
 a human Mr. Cheyne unknown in the lecture-room. Nor 
 had I suspected one in whom cynicism and distrust of under 
 graduates (of my sort) seemed so ingrained, of such idealism. 
 He did not pour it out in preaching; delicately, unobtru 
 sively and on the whole rather humorously he managed to 
 present to me in a most disillusionizing light that conception 
 of the university held by me and my intimate associates. 
 After I had left him I walked the quiet streets to behold as 
 through dissolving mists another Harvard, and there trembled 
 in my soul like the birth-struggle of a flame something of the 
 vision later to be immortalized by St. Gaudens, the spirit of 
 Harvard responding to the spirit of the Republic to the 
 call of Lincoln, who voiced it. The place of that bronze at 
 the corner of Boston Common was as yet empty, but I 
 have since stood before it to gaze in wonder at the light 
 shining in darkness on mute, uplifted faces black faces ! 
 at Harvard's son leading them on that the light might live 
 and prevail. 
 
 I, too, longed for a Cause into which I might fling myself, 
 in which I might lose myself. . . I halted on the sidewalk 
 to find myself staring from the opposite side of the street at a 
 familiar house, my old landlady's, Mrs. Bolton's, and sum 
 moned up before me was the tired, smiling face of Hermann 
 Krebs. Was it because when he had once spoken so crudely 
 of the University I had seen the reflection of her spirit in his 
 eyes ? A light still burned in the extension roof Krebs's 
 light; another shone dimly through the ground glass of the 
 front door. Obeying a sudden impulse, I crossed the street.
 
 96 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Mrs. Bolton, in the sky-blue wrapper, and looking more for* 
 bidding than ever, answered the bell. Life had taught her to 
 be indifferent to surprises, and it was I who became abruptly 
 embarrassed. 
 
 "Oh, it's you, Mr. Paret," she said, as though I had been 
 a frequent caller. I had never once darkened her threshold 
 since I had left her house. 
 
 "Yes," I answered, and hesitated. ... "Is Mr. Krebs 
 in?" 
 
 "Well," she replied in a lifeless tone, which nevertheless 
 had in it a touch of bitterness, " I guess there's no reason why 
 you and your friends should have known he was sick." 
 
 " Sick ! " I repeated. " Is he very sick ? " 
 
 "I calculate he'll pull through," she said. "Sunday the 
 doctor gave him up. And no wonder! He hasn't had any 
 proper food since he's be'n here!" She paused, eyeing me. 
 "If you'll excuse me, Mr. Paret, I was just going up to him 
 when you rang." 
 
 "Certainly," I replied awkwardly. "Would you be so 
 kind as to tell him when he's well enough that I came 
 to see him, and that I'm sorry?" 
 
 There was another pause, and she stood with a hand de 
 fensively clutching the knob. 
 
 "Yes, I'll tell him," she said. 
 
 With a sense of having been baffled, I turned away. 
 
 . 
 
 Walking back toward the Yard my attention was attracted 
 by a slowly approaching cab whose occupants were disturb 
 ing the quiet of the night with song. 
 
 " Shollity 'tis wine, 'tis wine, 
 That makesh shollity." 
 
 The vehicle drew up in front of a new and commodious 
 building, I believe the first of those designed to house 
 undergraduates who were willing to pay for private bath-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 97 
 
 rooms and other modern luxuries; out of one window of 
 the cab protruded a pair of shoeless feet, out of the other a 
 hatless head I recognized as belonging to Tom Peters; 
 hence I surmised that the feet were his also. The driver 
 got down from the box, and a lively argument was begun 
 inside for there were other occupants as to how Mr. 
 Peters was to be disembarked; and I gathered from his 
 frequent references to the "Shgyptian obelisk" that the 
 engineering problem presented struck him as similar to the 
 unloading of Cleopatra's Needle. 
 
 " Careful, careful ! " he cautioned, as certain expelling 
 movements began from within, "Easy, Ham, you jamfool, 
 keep the door shut, y'll break me." 
 
 " Now, Jerry, all heave sh'gether ! " exclaimed a voice from 
 the blackness of the interior. 
 
 "Will ye wait a minute, Mr. Durrett, sir?" implored the 
 cab driver. " You'll be after ruining me cab entirely." (Loud 
 roars and vigorous resistance from the obelisk, the cab rock 
 ing violently.) "This gintleman" (meaning me) "will have 
 him by the head, and I'll get hold of his feet, sir." Which 
 he did, after a severe kick in the stomach. 
 
 "Head'sh all right, Martin." 
 
 "To be sure it is, Mr. Peters. Now will ye rest aisy 
 awhile, sir?" 
 
 " I'm axphyxiated," cried another voice from the darkness, 
 the muffled voice of Jerome Kyme, our classmate. 
 
 "Get the tackles under him!" came forth in commanding 
 tones from Conybear. 
 
 In the meantime many windows had been raised and 
 much gratuitous advice was being given. The three occu 
 pants of the cab's seat who had previously clamoured for Mr. 
 Peters' removal, now inconsistently resisted it; suddenly 
 he came out with a jerk, and we had him fairly upright on 
 the pavement minus a collar and tie and the buttons of his 
 evening waistcoat. Those who remained in the cab en 
 gaged in a riotous game of hunt the slipper, while Tom 
 peered into the dark interior, observing gravely the progress
 
 98 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 of the sport. First flew out an overcoat and a much-bat 
 tered hat, finally the pumps, all of which in due time were 
 adjusted to his person, and I started home with him, with 
 much parting counsel from the other three. 
 
 "Whereinell were you, Hughie?" he inquired. "Hunted 
 all over for you. Had a sousin' good time. Went to Bab- 
 cock's had champagne then to see Babesh in-th' 
 Woods. Ham knows one of the, Babesh had supper with 
 four of 'em. Nice Babesh!" 
 
 ">For heaven's sake don't step on me again ! " I cried. 
 
 " Sh'poloshize, old man. But y'know I'm William Shake- 
 spheare. C'n do what I damplease." He halted in the 
 middle of the street and recited dramatically : 
 
 " ' Not marble, nor th' gilded monuments 
 Of prinches sh'll outlive m' powerful rhyme.' 
 
 How's that, Alonzho, b'gosh?" 
 
 "Where did you learn it?" I demanded, momentarily for 
 getting his condition. 
 
 "Fr'm Ralph," he replied, "says I wrote it. Can't re 
 member. . . ." 
 
 After I had got him to bed, a service I had learned to per 
 form with more or less proficiency, I sat down to consider 
 the events of the evening, to attempt to get a proportional view. 
 The intensity of my disgust was not hypocritical as I gazed 
 through the open door into the bedroom and recalled the 
 times when I, too, had been in that condition. Tom Peters 
 drunk, and sleeping it off, was deplorable, without doubt; 
 but Hugh Paret drunk was detestable, and had no excuse 
 whatever. Nor did I mean by this to set myself on a higher 
 ethical plane, for I felt nothing but despair and humility. 
 In my state of clairvoyance I perceived that he was a better 
 man than I, and that his lapses proceeded from a love of 
 liquor and the transcendent sense of good-fellowship that 
 liquor brings.
 
 VII 
 
 THE crisis through which I passed at Cambridge, inaugu 
 rated by the events I have just related, I find very difficult 
 to portray. It was a religious crisis, of course, and my most 
 pathetic memory concerning it is of the vain attempts to 
 connect my yearnings and discontents with the theology I 
 had been taught; I began in secret to read my Bible, yet 
 nothing I hit upon seemed to point a way out of my present 
 predicament, to give any definite clew to the solution of my 
 life. I was not mature enough to reflect that orthodoxy was 
 a Sunday religion unrelated to a world whose wheels were 
 turned by the motives of self-interest; that it consisted of 
 ideals not deemed practical, since no attempt was made to 
 put them into practice in the only logical manner, by re 
 organizing civilization to conform with them. The impli 
 cation was that the Christ who had preached these ideals was 
 not practical. . . . There were undoubtedly men in the 
 faculty of the University who might have helped me had I 
 known of them; who might have given me, even at that 
 time, a clew to the modern, logical explanation of the Bible 
 as an immortal record of the thoughts and acts of men who 
 had sought to do just what I was seeking to do, connect 
 the religious impulse to life and make it fruitful in life : an 
 explanation, by the way, a thousand-fold more spiritual than 
 the old. But I was hopelessly entangled in the meshes of 
 the mystic, the miraculous and supernatural. If I had ana 
 lyzed my yearnings, I might have realized that I wanted to 
 renounce the life I had been leading, not because it was sinful, 
 but because it was aimless. I had not learned that the Greek 
 word for sin is " a missing of the mark." Just aimlessness ! 
 I had been stirred with the desire to perform some service 
 
 99
 
 100 AIFAR COUNTRY 
 
 for which the world would be grateful : to write great liter 
 ature, perchance. But it had never been suggested to me 
 that such swellings of the soul are religious, that religion is 
 that kind of feeling, of motive power that drives the writer 
 and the scientist, the statesman and the sculptor as well as 
 the priest and the prophet to serve mankind for the joy of 
 serving : that religion is creative, or it is nothing : not 
 mechanical, not a force imposed from without, but a driving 
 power within. The "religion" I had learned was salvation 
 from sin by miracle : sin a deliberate rebellion, not a pathetic 
 missing of the mark of life; useful service of man, not 
 the wandering of untutored souls who had not been shown the 
 way. I felt religious. I wanted to go to church, I wanted 
 to maintain, when it was on me, that exaltation I dimly felt 
 as communion with a higher power, with God, and which also 
 was identical with my desire to write, to create. . . . 
 
 I bought books, sets of Wordsworth and Keats, of Milton 
 and Shelley and Shakespeare, and hid them away in my 
 bureau drawers lest Tom and my friends should see them. 
 These too I read secretly, making excuses for not joining in 
 the usual amusements. Once I walked to Mrs. Bolton's and 
 inquired rather shamefacedly for Hermann Krebs, only to 
 be informed that he had gone out. . . . There were lapses, 
 of course, when I went off on the old excursions, for the 
 most part the usual undergraduate follies, though some were 
 of a more serious nature ; on these I do not care to dwell. 
 Sex was still a mystery. . . . Always I awoke afterwards 
 to bitter self-hatred and despair. . . . But my work in 
 English improved, and I earned the commendation and 
 friendship of Mr. Cheyne. With a wisdom for which I was 
 grateful he was careful not to give much sign of it in classes, 
 but the fact that he was "getting soft on me" was evident 
 enough to be regarded with suspicion. Indeed the state 
 into which I had fallen became a matter of increasing con 
 cern to my companions, who tried every means from ridicule 
 to sympathy to discover its cause and shake me out of it. 
 The theory most accepted was that I was in love.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 101 
 
 " Come on now, Hughie tell me who she is. I won't 
 give you away," Tom would beg. Once or twice, indeed, I 
 had imagined I was in love with the sisters of Boston class 
 mates whose dances I attended ; to these parties Tom, not 
 having overcome his diffidence in respect to what he called 
 " social life," never could be induced to go. 
 
 It was Ralph who detected the true cause of my discon 
 tent. Typical as no other man I can recall of the code to 
 which we had dedicated ourselves, the code that moulded 
 the important part of the undergraduate world and defied 
 authority, he regarded any defection from it in the light of 
 treason. An instructor, in a fit of impatience, had once re 
 ferred to him as the Mephistopheles of his class; he had 
 fatal attractions, and a remarkable influence. His favourite 
 pastime was the capricious exercise of his will on weaker char 
 acters, such as his cousin, Ham Durrett ; if they "swore off," 
 Ralph made it his business to get them drunk again, and hav 
 ing accomplished this would proceed himself to administer 
 a new oath and see that it was kept. Alcohol seemed to 
 have no effect whatever on him. Though he was in the 
 class above me, I met him frequently at a club to which I 
 had the honour to belong, then a suite of rooms over a shop 
 furnished with a pool and a billiard table, easy-chairs and a 
 bar. It has since achieved the dignity of a house of its own. 
 
 We were having, one evening, a "religious" argument, 
 Conybear, Laurens and myself and some others. I can't 
 recall how it began; I think Conybear had attacked the 
 institution of compulsory chapel, which nobody defended; 
 there was something inherently wrong, he maintained, with 
 a religion to which men had to be driven against their wills. 
 Somewhat to my surprise I found myself defending a Chris 
 tianity out of which I had been able to extract but little com 
 fort and solace. Neither Laurens nor Conybear, however, 
 were for annihilating it : although they took the other side 
 of the discussion of a subject of which none of us knew any 
 thing, their attacks were but half-hearted; like me, they 
 were still under the spell exerted by a youthful training.
 
 102 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 We were all of us aware of Ralph, who sat at some distance 
 looking over the pages of an English sporting weekly. Pres 
 ently he flung it down. 
 
 "Haven't you found out yet that man created God, 
 Hughie?" he inquired. "And even if there were a personal 
 God, what reason have you to think that man would be his 
 especial concern, or any concern of his whatever? The 
 discovery of evolution has knocked your Christianity into 
 a cocked hat." 
 
 I don't remember how I answered him. In spite of the 
 superficiality of his own arguments, which I was not learned 
 enough to detect, I was ingloriously routed. Darwin had 
 kicked over the bucket, and that was all there was to it. ... 
 After we had left the club both Conybear and Laurens 
 admitted they were somewhat disturbed, declaring that 
 Ralph had gone too far. I spent a miserable night, recalling 
 the naturalistic assertions he had made so glibly, asking 
 myself again and again how it was that the religion to which 
 I so vainly clung had no greater effect on my actions and on 
 my will, had not prevented me from lapses into degradation. 
 And I hated myself for having argued upon a subject that 
 was still sacred. I believed in Christ, which is to say that 
 I believed that in some inscrutable manner he existed, con 
 tinued to dominate the world and had suffered on my account. 
 
 To whom should I go now for a confirmation of my waver 
 ing beliefs ? One of the results it will be remembered 
 of religion as I was taught it was a pernicious shyness, and 
 even though I had found a mentor and confessor, I might 
 have hesitated to unburden myself. This would be dif 
 ferent from arguing with Ralph Hambleton. In my predic 
 ament, as I was wandering through the yard, I came across 
 a notice of an evening talk to students in Holden Chapel, 
 by a clergyman named Phillips Brooks. This was before 
 the time," let me say in passing, when his sermons at 
 Harvard were attended by crowds of undergraduates. 
 Well, I stood staring at the notice, debating whether I 
 should go, trying to screw up my courage ; for I recognized
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 103 
 
 clearly that such a step, if it were to be of any value, 
 must mean a distinct departure from my present mode of 
 life; and I recall thinking with a certain revulsion that I 
 should have to "turn good." My presence at the meeting 
 would be known the next day to all my friends, for the idea 
 of attending a religious gathering when one was not forced 
 to do so by the authorities was unheard of in our set. I 
 should be classed with the despised "pious ones" who 
 did such things regularly. I shrank from the ridicule. 
 I had, however, heard of Mr. Brooks from Ned Symonds, 
 who was by no means of the pious type, and whose parents 
 attended Mr. Brooks's church in Boston. ... I left my 
 decision in abeyance. But when evening came I stole away 
 from the club table, on the plea of an engagement, and made 
 my way rapidly toward Holden Chapel. I had almost 
 reached it when I caught a glimpse of Symonds and of some 
 others approaching, and I went on, to turn again. By 
 this time the meeting, which was in a room on the second 
 floor, had already begun. Palpitating, I climbed the steps ; 
 the door of the room was slightly ajar; I looked in; I 
 recall a distinct sensation of surprise, the atmosphere 
 of that meeting was so different from what I had ex 
 pected. Not a "pious" atmosphere at all! I saw a very 
 tall and heavy gentleman, dressed in black, who sat, 
 wholly at ease, on the table ! One hand was in his pocket, 
 one foot swung clear of the ground ; and he was not preach 
 ing, but talking in an easy, conversational tone to some 
 forty young men who sat intent on his words. I was too 
 excited to listen to what he was saying, I was making a vain 
 attempt to classify him. But I remember the thought, 
 for it struck me with force, that if Christianity were so 
 thoroughly discredited by evolution, as Ralph Hambleton 
 and other agnostics would have one believe, why should 
 this remarkably sane and able-looking person be standing 
 up for it as though it were still an established and incon 
 trovertible fact? 
 He had not, certainly, the air of a dupe or a sentimentalist,
 
 104 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 but inspired confidence by his very personality. Youth- 
 like, I watched him narrowly for flaws, for oratorical tricks, 
 for all kinds of histrionic symptoms. Again I was near the 
 secret; again it escaped me. The argument for Christian 
 ity lay not in assertions about it, but in being it. This man 
 was Christianity. ... I must have felt something of this, 
 even though I failed to formulate it. And unconsciously I 
 contrasted his strength, which reinforced the atmosphere of 
 the room, with that of Ralph Hambleton, who had had a 
 greater influence over me than I have recorded, and had 
 come to sway me more and more, as he had swayed others. 
 The strength of each was impressive, yet this Mr. Brooks 
 seemed to me the bodily presentment of a set of values which 
 I would have kept constantly before my eyes. ... I felt him 
 drawing me, overcoming my hesitation, belittling my fear 
 of ridicule. I began gently to open the door when some 
 thing happened, one of those little things that may change 
 the course of a life. The door made little noise, yet one of the 
 men sitting in the back of the room chanced to look around, 
 and I recognized Hermann Krebs. His face was still sunken 
 from his recent illness. Into his eyes seemed to leap a sud 
 den appeal, an appeal to which my soul responded 
 yet I hurried down the stairs and into the street. In 
 stantly I regretted my retreat, I would have gone back, but 
 lacked the courage ; and I strayed unhappily for hours, now 
 haunted by that look of Krebs, now wondering what the 
 remarkably sane-looking and informal clergyman whose 
 presence dominated the little room had been talking about. 
 I never learned, but I did live to read his biography, to dis 
 cover what he might have talked about, for he if any man 
 believed that life and religion are one, and preached conse 
 cration to life's task. 
 
 Of little use to speculate whether the message, had I 
 learned it then, would have fortified and transformed me !
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 105 
 
 In spite of the fact that I was unable to relate to a satis 
 fying conception of religion my new-born determination, I 
 made up my mind, at least, to renounce my tortuous ways. 
 I had promised my father to be a lawyer ; I would keep my 
 promise, I would give the law a fair trial ; later on, perhaps, 
 I might demonstrate an ability to write. All very praise 
 worthy ! The season was Lent, a fitting time for renunci 
 ations and resolves. Although I had more than once fallen 
 from grace, I believed myself at last to have settled down on 
 my true course when something happened. The devil 
 interfered subtly, as usual now in the person of Jerry 
 Kyme. It should be said in justice to Jerry that he did not 
 look the part. He had sunny-red, curly hair, mischievous 
 blue eyes with long lashes, and he harboured no respect 
 whatever for any individual or institution, sacred or profane ; 
 he possessed, however, a shrewd sense of his own value, as 
 many innocent and unsuspecting souls discovered as early 
 as our freshman year, and his method of putting down the 
 presumptuous was both effective and unique. If he liked 
 you, there could be no mistake about it. 
 
 One evening when I was engaged in composing a theme for 
 Mr. Cheyne on no less a subject than the interpretation of the 
 work of William Wordsworth, I found myself unexpectedly 
 sprawling on the floor, in my descent kicking the table so vig 
 orously as to send the ink-well a foot or two toward the ceiling. 
 This, be it known, was a typical proof of Jerry's esteem. For 
 he had entered noiselessly, jerking the back of my chair, 
 which chanced to be tilted, and stood with his hands in his 
 pockets, surveying the ruin he had wrought, watching the ink 
 as it trickled on the carpet. Then he picked up the book. 
 
 "Poetry, you darned old grind 1" he exclaimed disgustedly. 
 "Say, Parry, I don't know what's got into you, but I want 
 you to come home with me for the Easter holidays. It'll 
 do you good. We'll be on the Hudson, you know, and we'll 
 manage to make life bearable somehow."
 
 106 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I forgot my irritation, in sheer surprise. 
 
 "Why, that's mighty good of you, Jerry " I began, 
 struggling to my feet. 
 
 " Oh, rot ! " he exclaimed. " I shouldn't ask you if I didn't 
 want you." 
 
 There was no denying the truth of this, and after he had 
 gone I sat for a long time with my pen in my mouth, reflect 
 ing as to whether or not I should go. For I had the instinct 
 that here was another cross-roads, that more depended on 
 my decision than I cared to admit. But even then I knew 
 what I should do. Ridiculous not to I told myself. How 
 could a week or ten days with Jerry possibly affect my new 
 born resolve? 
 
 Yet the prospect, now, of a visit to the Kymes' was by no 
 means so glowing as it once would have been. For I had seen 
 visions, I had dreamed dreams, beheld a delectable country of 
 my very own. A year ago nay, even a month ago how such 
 an invitation would have glittered ! . . . I returned at length 
 to my theme, over which, before Jerry's arrival, I had been 
 working feverishly. But now the glamour had gone from it. 
 
 Presently Tom came in. 
 
 "Anyone been here?" he demanded. 
 
 "Jerry," I told him. 
 
 "What did he want?" 
 
 "He wanted me to go home with him at Easter." 
 
 "You're going, of course." 
 
 "I don't know. I haven't decided." 
 
 "You'd be a fool not to," was Tom's comment. It 
 voiced, succinctly, a prevailing opinion. 
 
 It was the conclusion I arrived at in my own mind. But 
 just why I had been chosen for the honour, especially at 
 such a time, was a riddle. Jerry's invitations were charily 
 given, and valued accordingly ; and more than once, at our 
 table, I had felt a twinge of envy when Conybear or someone 
 else had remarked, with the proper nonchalance, in answer 
 to a question, that they were going to Weathersfield. Such 
 was the name of the Kyme place. ... *
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 107 
 
 I shall never forget the impression made on me by the 
 decorous luxury of that big house, standing amidst its old 
 trees, halfway up the gentle slope that rose steadily from 
 the historic highway where poor Andre was captured. I 
 can see now the heavy stone pillars of its portico vignetted 
 in a flush of tenderest green, the tulips just beginning to 
 flame forth their Easter colours in the well-kept beds, the 
 stately, well-groomed evergreens, the vivid lawns, the 
 clipped hedges. And like an overwhelming wave of emo 
 tion that swept all before it, the impressiveness of wealth 
 took possession of me. For here was a kind of wealth I 
 had never known, that did not exist in the West, nor even 
 in the still Puritan environs of Boston where I had visited. 
 It took itself for granted, proclaimed itself complacently 
 to have solved all problems. By ignoring them, perhaps. 
 But I was too young to guess this. It was order personified, 
 gaining effect at every turn by a multitude of details too 
 trivial to mention were it not for the fact that they entered 
 deeply into my consciousness, until they came to represent, 
 collectively, the very flower of achievement. It was a 
 wealth that accepted tribute calmly, as of inherent right. 
 Law and tradition defended its sanctity more effectively 
 than troops. Literature descended from her high altar to 
 lend it dignity; and the long, silent library displayed row 
 upon row of the masters, appropriately clad in morocco or 
 calf, Smollett, Macaulay, Gibbon, Richardson, Fielding, 
 Scott, Dickens, Irving and Thackeray, as though each had 
 striven for a tablet here. Art had denied herself that her 
 canvases might be hung on these walls; and even the 
 Church, on that first Sunday of my visit, forgot the 
 blood of her martyrs that she might adorn an appro 
 priate niche in the setting. The clergyman, at one of 
 the dinner parties, gravely asked a blessing as upon an 
 Institution that included and absorbed all other institutions 
 in its being. . . . 
 
 The note of that house was a tempered gaiety. Guests 
 arrived from New York, spent the night and departed again
 
 108 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 without disturbing the even tenor of its ways. Unobtrusive 
 servants ministered to their wants, and to mine. . . . 
 
 Conybear was there, and two classmates from Boston, 
 and we were treated with the amiable tolerance accorded to 
 college youths and intimates of the son of the house. One 
 night there was a dance in our honour. Nor have I forgotten 
 Jerry's sister, Nathalie, whom I had met at Class Days, a 
 slim and willowy, exotic young lady of the Botticelli type, 
 with a crown of burnished hair, yet more suggestive of a 
 hothouse than of spring. She spoke English with a French 
 accent. Capricious, impulsive, she captured my interest 
 because she put a high value on her favour; she drove me 
 over the hills, informing me at length that I was sympathique 
 different from the rest ; in short, she emphasized and 
 intensified what I may call the Weathersfield environment, 
 stirred up in me new and vague aspirations that troubled yet 
 excited me. 
 
 Then there was Mrs. Kyme, a pretty, light-hearted lady, 
 still young, who seemed to have no intention of growing older, 
 who romped and played songs for us on the piano. The 
 daughter of an old but now impecunious Westchester family, 
 she had been born to adorn the position she held, she was 
 adapted by nature to wring from it the utmost of the joys 
 it offered. From her, rather than from her husband, both 
 of the children seemed to have inherited. I used to watch 
 Mr. Grosvenor Kyme as he sat at the end of the dinner-table, 
 dark, preoccupied, taciturn, symbolical of a wealth new to 
 my experience, and which had about it a certain fabulous 
 quality. It toiled not, neither did it spin, but grew as if 
 by magic, day and night, until the very conception of it 
 was overpowering. What must it be to have had ancestors 
 who had been clever enough to sit still until a congested and 
 discontented Europe had begun to pour its thousands and 
 hundreds of thousands into the gateway of the western world, 
 until that gateway had become a metropolis? ancestors, of 
 course, possessing what now suddenly appeared to me as 
 the most desirable of gifts since it reaped so dazzling a har-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 109 
 
 vest business foresight. From time to time these ancestors 
 had continued to buy desirable corners, which no amount 
 of persuasion had availed to make them relinquish. Lease 
 them, yes; sell them, never! By virtue of such a system 
 wealth was as inevitable as human necessity; and the 
 thought of human necessity did not greatly bother me. Mr. 
 Kyme's problem of life was not one of making money, 
 but of investing it. One became automatically a person 
 age. . . . 
 
 It was due to one of those singular coincidences so inter 
 esting a subject for speculation that the man who revealed 
 to me this golden romance of the Kyme family was none 
 other than a resident of my own city, Mr. Theodore Watling, 
 now become one of our most important and influential citi 
 zens; a corporation lawyer, new and stimulating qualifica 
 tion, suggesting as it did, a deus ex machina of great affairs. 
 That he, of all men, should come to Weathersfield astonished 
 me, since I was as yet to make the connection between that 
 finished, decorous, secluded existence and the source of its 
 being. The evening before my departure he arrived in com 
 pany with two other gentlemen, a Mr. Talbot and a Mr. 
 Saxe, whose names were spoken with respect in a sphere of 
 which I had hitherto taken but little cognizance Wall 
 Street. Conybear informed me that they were " magnates," 
 . . . We were sitting in the drawing-room at tea, when they 
 entered with Mr. Watling, and no sooner had he spoken to 
 Mrs. Kyme than his quick eye singled me out of the group. 
 
 " Why, Hugh ! " he exclaimed, taking my hand. " I had 
 no idea I should meet you here I saw your father only last 
 week, the day I left home." And he added, turning to 
 Mrs. Kyme, "Hugh is the son of Mr. Matthew Paret, who 
 has been the leader of our bar for many years." 
 
 The recognition and the tribute to my father were so 
 graciously given that I warmed with gratitude and pride, 
 while Mr. Kyme smiled a little, remarking that I was a 
 friend of Jerry's. Theodore Watling, for being here, had 
 suddenly assumed in my eyes a considerable consequence,
 
 110 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 though the note he struck in that house was a strange one. 
 It was, however, his own note, and had a certain distinction, 
 a ring of independence, of the knowledge of self-worth. 
 Dinner at Weathersfield we youngsters had usually found 
 rather an oppressive ceremony, with its shaded lights and 
 precise ritual over which Mr. Kyme presided like a high 
 priest; conversation had been restrained. That night, as 
 Johnnie Laurens afterwards expressed it, "things loosened 
 up," and Mr. Watling was responsible for the loosening. 
 Taking command of the Kymes' dinner table appeared to 
 me to be no mean achievement, but this is just what he did, 
 without being vulgar or noisy or assertive. Suaviter in 
 modo, fortiter in re. If, as I watched him there with a new 
 born pride and loyalty, I had paused to reconstruct the idea 
 that the mention of his name would formerly have evoked, 
 I suppose I should have found him falling short of my notion 
 of a gentleman ; it had been my father's opinion ; but Mr. 
 Watling's marriage to Gene Hollister's aunt had given him a 
 standing with us at home. He possessed virility, vitality in 
 a remarkable degree, yet some elusive quality that was 
 neither tact nor delicacy though related to these 
 differentiated him from the commonplace, self-made man of 
 ability. He was just off the type. To liken him to a cloth 
 ing store model of a well-built, broad-shouldered man with a 
 firm neck, a handsome, rather square face not lacking in 
 colour and a conventional, drooping moustache would be 
 slanderous; yet he did suggest it. Suggesting it, he re 
 deemed it: and the middle western burr in his voice was 
 rather attractive than otherwise. He had not so much the 
 air of belonging there, as of belonging anywhere one of 
 those anomalistic American citizens of the world who 
 go abroad and make intimates of princes. Before the 
 meal was over he had inspired me with loyalty and 
 pride, enlisted the admiration of Jerry and Conybear 
 and Johnnie Laurens; we followed him into the smoking- 
 room, sitting down in a row on a leather lounge behind our 
 elders.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 111 
 
 Here, now that the gentlemen were alone, there was an 
 inspiring largeness in their talk that fired the imagination. 
 The subject was investments, at first those of coal and iron 
 in my own state, for Mr. Watling, it appeared, was counsel 
 for the Boyne Iron Works. 
 
 "It will pay you to keep an eye on that company, Mr. 
 Kyme," he said, knocking the ashes from his cigar. "Now 
 that old Mr. Durrett's gone " 
 
 "You don't mean to say Nathaniel Durrett's dead!" said 
 Mr. Kyme. 
 
 The lawyer nodded. 
 
 " The old regime passed with him. Adolf Scherer succeeds 
 him, and you may take my word for it, he's a coming man. 
 Mr. Durrett, who was a judge of men, recognized that. 
 Scherer was an emigrant, he had ideas, and rose to be a 
 foreman. For the last few years Mr. Durrett threw every 
 thing on his shoulders. . . ." 
 
 Little by little the scope of the discussion was enlarged 
 until it ranged over a continent, touching lightly upon lines 
 of railroad, built or projected, across the great west our 
 pioneers had so lately succeeded in wresting from the savages, 
 upon mines of copper and gold hidden away among the 
 mountains, and millions of acres of forest and grazing lands 
 which a complacent government would relinquish provided 
 certain technicalities were met : touching lightly, too, 
 very lightly, upon senators and congressmen at Washing 
 ton. And for the first time I learned that not the least of 
 the functions of these representatives of the people was 
 to act as the medium between capital and investment, to 
 facilitate the handing over of the Republic's resources to 
 those in a position to develop them. The emphasis was 
 laid on development, or rather on the resulting prosperity 
 for the country : that was the justification, and it was taken 
 for granted as supreme. Nor was it new to me, this cult of 
 prosperity. I recalled the torch-light processions of the 
 tariff enthusiasts of my childhood days, my father's cham 
 pionship of the Republican Party. He had not idealized
 
 112 ..A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 politicians, either. For the American, politics and ethics 
 were strangers. 
 
 Thus I listened with increasing fascination to these gentle 
 men in evening clothes calmly treating the United States 
 as a melon patch that existed largely for the purpose of 
 being divided up amongst a limited and favoured number 
 of persons. I had a feeling of being among the initiated. 
 Where, it may be asked, were my ideals? Let it not 
 be supposed that I believed myself to have lost them. 
 If so, the impression I have given of myself has been 
 wholly inadequate. No, they had been transmuted, that 
 is all, transmuted by the alchemy of Weathersfield, by 
 the personality of Theodore Watling into brighter visions. 
 My eyes rarely left his face; I hung on his talk, which 
 was interspersed with native humour, though he did not 
 always join in the laughter, sometimes gazing at the fire, 
 as though his keen mind were grappling with a prob 
 lem suggested. I noted the respect in which his opinions 
 were held, and my imagination was fired by an impression of 
 the power to be achieved by successful men of his profession, 
 by the evidence of their indispensability to capital itself. 
 ... At last when the gentlemen rose and were leaving 
 the (room, Mr. Watling lingered, with his hand on my 
 arm. 
 
 "Of course you're going through the Law School, Hugh," 
 he said. 
 
 "Yes, sir," I replied. 
 
 "Good!" he exclaimed emphatically. "The law, to-day, 
 is more of a career than ever, especially for a young man 
 with your antecedents and advantages, and I know of no 
 city in the United States where I would rather start practice, 
 if I were a young man, than ours. In the next twenty years 
 we shall see a tremendous growth. Of course you'll be going 
 into your father's office. You couldn't do better. But 
 I'll keep an eye on you, and perhaps I'll be able to help you 
 a little, too." 
 
 I thanked him gratefully.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 113 
 
 A famous artist, who started out in youth to embrace a 
 military career and who failed to pass an examination at 
 West Point, is said to have remarked that if silicon had been 
 a gas he would have been a soldier. I am afraid I may have 
 given the impression that if I had not gone to Weathersfield and 
 encountered Mr. Watling I might not have been a lawyer. 
 This impression would be misleading. And while it is certain 
 that I have not exaggerated the intensity of the spiritual expe 
 rience I went through at Cambridge, a somewhat belated con 
 sideration for the truth compels me to register my belief that 
 the mood would in any case have been ephemeral. * The poison 
 generated by the struggle of my nature with its environment 
 had sunk too deep, and the very education that was supposed 
 to make a practical man of me had turned me into a senti 
 mentalist. I became, as will be seen, anything but a practi 
 cal man in the true sense, though the world in which I had 
 been brought up and continued to live deemed me such. My 
 father was greatly pleased when I wrote him that I was now 
 more than ever convinced of the wisdom of choosing the law 
 as my profession, and was satisfied that I had come to my 
 senses at last. He had still been prepared to see me " go off at 
 a tangent," as he expressed it. On the other hand, the power 
 ful effect of the appeal made by Weathersfield and Mr. 
 Watling must not be underestimated. Here in one object 
 lesson was emphasized a host of suggestions each of which 
 had made its impression. And when I returned to Cambridge 
 Alonzo Cheyne knew that he had lost me. . . . 
 
 I pass over the rest of my college course, and the years I 
 spent at the Harvard Law School, where were instilled into 
 me without difficulty the dictums that the law is the most 
 important of all professions, that those who entered it were a 
 priestly class set aside to guard from profanation that Ark of 
 the Covenant, the Constitution of the United States. In 
 short, I was taught law precisely as I had been taught reli 
 gion, scriptural infallibility over again, a static law and a
 
 114 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 static theology, a set of concepts that were supposed to be 
 equal to any problems civilization would have to meet until 
 the millennium. What we are wont to call wisdom is often 
 naively innocent of impending change. It has no barometric 
 properties. 
 
 I shall content myself with relating one incident only of 
 this period. In the January of my last year I went with a 
 party of young men and girls to stay over Sunday at Beverly 
 Farms, where Mrs. Fremantle a young Boston matron 
 had opened her cottage for the occasion. This "cottage," 
 a roomy, gabled structure, stood on a cliff, at the foot of 
 which roared the wintry Atlantic, while we danced and popped 
 corn before the open fires. During the daylight hours we 
 drove about the country in sleighs, or made ridiculous 
 attempts to walk on snow-shoes. 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, left temporarily to my own devices, 
 I wandered along the cliff, crossing into the adjoining prop 
 erty. The wind had fallen; the waves, much subdued, 
 broke rhythmically against the rocks; during the night a 
 new mantle of snow had been spread, and the clouds were 
 still low and menacing. As I strolled I became aware of a 
 motionless figure ahead of me, one that seemed oddly 
 familiar; the set of the shabby overcoat on the stooping 
 shoulders, the unconscious pose contributed to a certain 
 sharpness of individuality; in the act of challenging my 
 memory, I halted. The man was gazing at the seascape, and 
 his very absorption gave me a sudden and unfamiliar thrill. 
 The word absorption precisely expresses my meaning, for 
 he seemed indeed to have become a part of his surroundings, 
 an harmonious part. Presently he swung about and 
 looked at me as though he had expected to find me there 
 and greeted me by name. 
 
 " Krebs ! " I exclaimed. 
 
 He smiled, and flung out his arm, indicating the scene. 
 His eyes at that moment seemed to reflect the sea, they 
 made the gaunt face suddenly beautiful. 
 
 "This reminds me of a Japanese print," he said.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 115 
 
 The words, or the tone in which he spoke, curiously trans 
 formed the picture. It was as if I now beheld it, anew, 
 through his vision: the grey water stretching eastward to 
 melt into the grey sky, the massed, black trees on the hill 
 side, powdered with white, the snow in rounded, fantastic 
 patches on the huge boulders at the foot of the cliff. Krebs 
 did not seem like a stranger, but like one whom I had known 
 always, one who stood in a peculiar relationship between 
 me and something greater I could not define. The impres 
 sion was fleeting, but real. ... I remember wondering 
 how he could have known anything about Japanese prints. 
 
 " I didn't think you were still in this part of the country," 
 I remarked awkwardly. 
 
 " I'm a reporter on a Boston newspaper, and I've been sent 
 up here to interview old Mr. Dome, who lives in that house," 
 and he pointed to a roof above the trees. "There is a 
 rumour, which I hope to verify, that he has just given a 
 hundred thousand dollars to the University." 
 
 "And won't he see you?" 
 
 "At present he's taking a nap," said Krebs. "He comes 
 here occasionally for a rest." 
 
 "Do you like interviewing?" I asked. 
 
 He smiled again. 
 
 "Well, I see a good many different kinds of people, and 
 that's interesting." 
 
 " But being a reporter ? " I persisted. 
 
 This continued patronage was not a conscious expression of 
 superiority on my part, but he did not seem to resent it. He 
 had aroused my curiosity. 
 
 "I'm going into the law," he said. 
 
 The quiet confidence with which he spoke aroused, sud 
 denly, a twinge of antagonism. He had every right to go 
 into the law, of course, and yet ! . . . my query would have 
 made it evident to me, had I been introspective in those 
 days, that the germ of the ideal of the profession, implanted 
 by Mr. Watling, was expanding. Were not influential 
 friends necessary for the proper kind of career ? and where
 
 116 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 were Krebs's? In spite of the history of Daniel Webster 
 and a long line of American tradition, I felt an incongruity 
 in my classmate's aspiration. And as he stood there, gaunt 
 and undoubtedly hungry, his eyes kindling, I must vaguely 
 have classed him with the revolutionaries of all the ages; 
 must have felt in him, instinctively, a menace to the stability 
 of that Order with which I had thrown my fortunes. And 
 yet there were comparatively poor men in the Law School 
 itself who had not made me feel this way ! He had impressed 
 me against my will, taken me by surprise, commiseration 
 had been mingled with other feelings that sprang out of 
 the memory of the night I had called on him, when he had 
 been sick. Now I resented something in him which Tom 
 Peters had called "crust." 
 
 " The law ! " I repeated. " Why ? " 
 
 "Well," he said, "even when I was a boy, working at odd 
 jobs, I used to think if I could ever be a lawyer I should have 
 reached the top notch of human dignity." 
 
 Once more his smile disarmed me. 
 
 "And now?" I asked curiously. 
 
 "You see, it was an ideal with me, I suppose. My father 
 was responsible for that. He had the German temperament 
 of '48, and when he fled to this country, he expected to find 
 Utopia." The smile emerged again, like the sun shining 
 through clouds, while fascination and antagonism again 
 struggled within me. "And then came frightful troubles. 
 For years he could get only enough work to keep him and 
 my mother alive, but he never lost his faith in America. ' It 
 is man/ he would say, 'man has to grow up to it to 
 liberty/ Without the struggle, liberty would be worth 
 nothing. And he used to tell me that we must all do our 
 part, we who had come here, and not expect everything to 
 be done for us. He had made that mistake. If things were 
 bad, why, put a shoulder to the wheel and help to make 
 them better. 
 
 "That helped me," he continued, after a moment's pause. 
 "For I've seen a good many things, especially since I've
 
 A FAR COUNTRY ( 117 
 
 been working for a newspaper. I've seen, again and again, 
 the power of the law turned against those whom it was 
 intended to protect, I've seen lawyers who care a great deal 
 more about winning cases than they do about justice, who 
 prostitute their profession to profit making, profit making 
 for themselves and others. And they are often the respect 
 able lawyers, too, men of high standing, whom you would 
 not think would do such things. They are on the side of 
 the powerful, and the best of them are all retained by rich 
 men and corporations. And what is the result? One of 
 the worst evils, I think, that can befall a country. The 
 poor man goes less and less to the courts. He is getting 
 bitter, which is bad, which is dangerous. But men won't 
 see it." 
 
 It was on my tongue to refute this, to say that everybody 
 had a chance. I could indeed recall many arguments that had 
 been drilled into me ; quotations, even, from court decisions. 
 But something prevented me from doing this, something 
 in his manner, which was neither argumentative nor com 
 bative. 
 
 "That's why I am going into the law," he added. "And 
 I intend to stay in it if I can keep alive. It's a great chance 
 for me for all of us. Aren't you at the Law School?" 
 
 I nodded. Once more, as his earnest glance fell upon me, 
 came that suggestion of a subtle, inexplicable link between 
 us; but before I could reply, steps were heard behind us, 
 and an elderly servant, bareheaded, was seen coming down 
 the path. 
 
 "Are you the reporter?" he demanded somewhat im 
 patiently of Krebs. "If you want to see Mr. Dome, you'd 
 better come right away. He's going out for a drive." 
 
 For a while, after he had shaken my hand and departed, 
 I stood in the snow, looking after him. . . .
 
 VIII 
 
 ON the Wednesday of that same week the news of my 
 father's sudden and serious illness came to me in a telegram, 
 and by the time I arrived at home it was too late to see him 
 again alive. It was my first experience with death, and what 
 perplexed me continually during the following days was an 
 inability to feel the loss more deeply. When a child, I had 
 been easily shaken by the spectacle of sorrow. Had I, dur 
 ing recent years, as a resultjof a discovery that emotions 
 arising from human relationships lead to discomfort and 
 suffering, deliberately been forming a shell, until now I was 
 incapable of natural feelings? Of late I had seemed closer 
 to my father, and his letters, though formal, had given evi 
 dence of his affection ; in his repressed fashion he had made 
 it clear that he looked forward to the time when I was to 
 practise with him. Why was it then, as I gazed upon his 
 fine features in death, that I experienced no intensity of 
 sorrow? What was it in me that would not break down? 
 He seemed worn and tired, yet I had never thought of him 
 as weary, never attributed to him any yearning. And now 
 he was released. 
 
 I wondered what had been his private thoughts about 
 himself, his private opinions about life; and when I reflect 
 now upon my lack of real knowledge at five and twenty, I 
 am amazed at the futility of an expensive education which 
 had failed to impress upon me the simple, basic fact that 
 life was struggle; that either development or retrogression 
 is the fate of all men, that characters are never completely 
 made, but always in the making. I had merely a disconcert 
 ing glimpse of this truth, with no powers of formulation, as 
 
 118
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 119 
 
 I sat beside my mother in the bedroom, where every article 
 evoked some childhood scene. Here was the dent in the 
 walnut foot-board of the bed made, one wintry day, by the 
 impact of my box of blocks ; the big arm-chair, covered with 
 I know not what stiff embroidery, which had served on count 
 less occasions as a chariot driven to victory. I even remem 
 bered how every Wednesday morning I had been banished 
 from the room, which had been so large a part of my 
 childhood universe, when Ella, the housemaid, had flung 
 open all its windows and crowded its furniture into the 
 hall. 
 
 The"thought of my wanderings since then became poignant, 
 almost terrifying. The room, with all its memories, was un 
 changed. How safe I had been within its walls! Why 
 could I not have been content with what it represented ? of 
 tradition, of custom, of religion ? And what was it within 
 me that had lured me away from these ? 
 
 I was miserable, indeed, but my misery was not of the kind 
 I thought it ought to be. At moments, when my mother 
 relapsed into weeping, I glanced at her almost in wonder. 
 Such sorrow as hers was incomprehensible. Once she sur 
 prised and discomfited me by lifting her head and gazing 
 fixedly at me through her tears. 
 
 I recall certain impressions of the funeral. There, among 
 the pall-bearers, was my Cousin Robert Breck, tears in the 
 furrows of his cheeks. Had he loved my father more than 
 I ? The sight of his grief moved me suddenly and strongly. 
 ... It seemed an age since I had worked in his store, and 
 yet here he was still, coming to town every morning and 
 returning every evening to Claremore, loving his friends, and 
 mourning them one by one. Was this, the spectacle pre 
 sented by my Cousin Robert, the reward of earthly exist 
 ence? Were there no other prizes save those known as 
 greatness of character and depth of human affections? 
 Cousin Robert looked worn and old. The other pall-bearers, 
 men of weight, of long standing in the community, were 
 aged, too; Mr. Blackwood, and Mr. Jules Hollister; and
 
 120 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 out of place, somehow, in this new church building. It 
 came to me abruptly that the old order was gone, had 
 slipped away during my absence. The church I had known 
 in boyhood had been torn down to make room for a business 
 building on Boyne Street; the edifice in which I sat was 
 expensive, gave forth no distinctive note; seemingly tran 
 sitory with its hybrid interior, its shiny oak and blue and red 
 organ-pipes, betokening a compromised and weakened faith. 
 Nondescript, likewise, seemed the new minister, Mr. Rand- 
 lett, as he prayed unctuously in front of the flowers massed 
 on the platform. I vaguely resented his laudatory refer 
 ences to my father. 
 
 The old church, with its severity, had actually stood for 
 something. It was the Westminster Catechism in wood 
 and stone, and Dr. Pound had been the human incarnation 
 of that catechism, the fit representative of a wrathful God, 
 a militant shepherd who had guarded with vigilance his re 
 spectable flock, who had protested vehemently against the 
 sins of the world by which they were surrounded, against 
 the "dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers 
 and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." 
 How Dr. Pound would have put the emphasis of the Ever 
 lasting into those words ! 
 
 Against what was Mr. Randlett protesting? 
 
 My glance wandered to the pews which held the committees 
 from various organizations, such as the Chamber of Com 
 merce and the Bar Association, which had come to do honour 
 to my father. And there, differentiated from the others, 
 I saw the spruce, alert figure of Theodore Watling. He, 
 too, represented a new type and a new note, this time 
 a forceful note, a secular note that had not belonged 
 to the old church, and seemed likewise anomalistic in the 
 new. . . . 
 
 During the long, slow journey in the carriage to the ceme 
 tery my mother did not raise her veil. It was not until she 
 reached out and seized my hand, convulsively, that I real 
 ized she"was still a part of my existence.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 121 
 
 In the days that followed I became aware that my father's 
 death had removed a restrictive element, that I was free 
 now to take without criticism or opposition whatever course 
 in life I might desire. It may be that I had apprehended 
 even then that his professional ideals would not have coin 
 cided with my own. Mingled with this sense of emancipa 
 tion was a curious feeling of regret, of mourning for some 
 thing I had never valued, something fixed and dependable 
 for which he had stood, a rock and a refuge of which I had 
 never availed myself! . . . When his will was opened it 
 was found that the property had been left to my mother 
 during her lifetime. It was larger than I had thought, 
 four hundred thousand dollars, shrewdly invested, for the 
 most part, in city real estate. My father had been very 
 secretive as to money matters, and my mother had no 
 interest in them. 
 
 Three or four days later I received in the mail a type 
 written letter signed by Theodore Watling, expressing sym 
 pathy for my bereavement, and asking me to drop in on him, 
 down town, before I should leave the city. In contrast to 
 the somewhat dingy offices where my father had practised 
 in the Blackwood Block, the quarters of Watling, Fowndes 
 and Ripon on the eighth floor of the new Durrett Building 
 were modern to a degree, finished in oak and floored with 
 marble, with a railed-off space where young women with 
 nimble fingers played ceaselessly on typewriters. One of 
 them informed me that Mr. Watling was busy, but on read 
 ing my card added that she would take it in. Meanwhile, 
 in company with two others who may have been clients, I 
 waited. This, then, was what it meant to be a lawyer of 
 importance, to have, like a Chesterfield, an ante-room where 
 clients cooled their heels and awaited one's pleasure. . . . 
 The young woman returned, and led me through a corridor 
 to a door on which was painted Mr. Watling. 
 
 I recall him tilted back in his chair in a debonnair manner
 
 122 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 beside his polished desk, the hint of a smile on his lips ; and 
 leaning close to him was a yellow, owl-like person whose 
 eyes, as they turned to me, gave the impression of having 
 stared for years into hard, artificial lights. Mr. Watling 
 rose briskly. 
 
 "How are you, Hugh?" he said, the warmth of his greeting 
 tempered by just the note of condolence suitable to my 
 black clothes. "I'm glad you came. I wanted to see you 
 before you went back to Cambridge. I must introduce you 
 to Judge Bering, of our State Supreme Court. Judge, this 
 is Mr. Paret's boy." 
 
 The judge looked me over with a certain slow impressive- 
 ness, and gave me a soft and fleshy hand. 
 
 " Glad to know you, Mr. Paret. Your father was a great 
 loss to our bar," he declared. 
 
 I detected in his tone and manner a slight reservation that 
 could not be called precisely judicial dignity; it was as 
 though, in these few words, he had gone to the limit of self- 
 commitment with a stranger a striking contrast to the 
 confidential attitude towards Mr. Watling in which I had 
 surprised him. 
 
 "Judge," said Mr. Watling, sitting down again, "do you 
 recall that time we all went up to Mr. Paret's house and tried 
 to induce him to run for mayor ? That was before you went 
 on the lower bench." 
 
 The judge nodded gloomily, caressing his watch chain, 
 and suddenly rose to go. 
 
 "That will be all right, then?" Mr. Watling inquired 
 cryptically, with a smile. The other made a barely percep 
 tible inclination of the head and departed. Mr. Watling 
 looked at me. "He's one of the best men we have on the 
 bench to-day," he added. There was a trace of apology in 
 his tone. 
 
 He talked a while of my father, to whom, so he said, he 
 had looked up ever since he had been admitted to the bar. 
 
 " It would be a pleasure to me, Hugh, as well as a matter 
 of pride," he said cordially, but with dignity, "to have
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 123 
 
 Matthew Paret's son in my office. I suppose you will be 
 wishing to take your mother somewhere this summer, but 
 if you care to come here in the autumn, you will be welcome. 
 You will begin, of course, as other young men begin, as I 
 began. But I am a believer in blood, and I'll be glad to 
 have you. Mr. Fowndes and Mr. Ripon feel the same way." 
 He escorted me to the door himself. 
 
 Everywhere I went during that brief visit home I was 
 struck by change, by the crumbling and decay of institutions 
 that once had held me in thrall, by the superimposition of a 
 new order that as yet had assumed no definite character. 
 Some of the old landmarks had disappeared ; there were new 
 and aggressive office buildings, new and aggressive residences, 
 new and aggressive citizens who lived in them, and of whom 
 my mother spoke with gentle deprecation. Even Claremore, 
 that paradise of my childhood, had grown shrivelled and 
 shabby, even tawdry, I thought, when we went out there one 
 Sunday afternoon; all that once represented the magic 
 word "country" had vanished. The old flat piano, made in 
 Philadelphia ages ago, the horsehair chairs and sofa had been 
 replaced by a nondescript furniture of the sort displayed 
 behind plate-glass windows of the city's stores : rocking-chairs 
 on stands, upholstered in clashing colours, their coiled springs 
 only half hidden by tassels, and "ornamental" electric 
 fixtures, instead of the polished coal-oil lamps. Cousin 
 Jenny had grown white, Willie was a staid bachelor, Helen 
 an old maid, while Mary had married a tall, anaemic young 
 man with glasses, Walter Kinley, whom Cousin Robert had 
 taken into the store. As I contemplated the Brecks odd ques 
 tions suggested themselves : did honesty and warm-hearted 
 ness necessarily accompany a lack of artistic taste ? and was 
 virtue its own reward, after all? They drew my mother 
 into the house, took off her wraps, set her down in the most 
 comfortable rocker, and insisted on making her a cup of tea.
 
 124 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I was touched. I loved them still, and yet I was conscious 
 of reservations concerning them. They, too, seemed a little 
 on the defensive with me, and once in a while Mary was 
 caustic in her remarks. 
 
 "I guess nothing but New York will be good enough for 
 Hugh now. He'll be taking Cousin Sarah away from us." 
 
 "Not at all, my dear," said my mother, gently, "he's 
 going into Mr. Watling's office next autumn." 
 
 "Theodore Watling?" demanded Cousin Robert, pausing 
 in his carving. 
 
 "Yes, Robert. Mr. Watling has been good enough to 
 say that he would like to have Hugh. Is there anything ? " 
 
 "Oh, I'm out of date, Sarah," Cousin Robert replied, 
 vigorously severing the leg of the turkey. " These modern 
 lawyers are too smart for me. Watling's no worse than 
 the others, I suppose, only he's got more ability." 
 
 "I've never heard anything against him," said my mother 
 in a pained voice. "Only the other day McAlery Willett 
 congratulated me that Hugh was going to be with him." 
 
 "You mustn't mind Robert, Sarah," put in Cousin Jenny, 
 a remark reminiscent of other days. 
 
 "Dad has a notion that his generation is the only honest 
 one," said Helen, laughingly, as she passed a plate. 
 
 I had gained a sense of superiority, and I was quite in 
 different to Cousin Robert's opinion of Mr. Watling, of 
 modern lawyers in general. More than once a wave of self- 
 congratulation surged through me that I had possessed the 
 foresight and initiative to get out of the wholesale grocery 
 business while there was yet time. I looked at Willie, still 
 freckled, still literal, still a plodder, at Walter Kinley, and 
 I thought of the drabness of their lives; at Cousin Robert 
 himself as he sat smoking his cigar in the bay-window on that 
 dark February day, and suddenly I pitied him. The suspi 
 cion struck me that he had not prospered of late, and this 
 deepened to a conviction as he talked. 
 
 "The Republican Party is going to the dogs," he asserted. 
 " It used to be an honourable party, but now it is no better
 
 'LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO JUDGE BERING OP OUR STATE SUPREME 
 
 COURT.' '
 
 A^ FAR COUNTRY 125 
 
 than the other. Politics are only conducted, now, for the 
 purpose of making unscrupulous men rich, sir. For years 
 I furnished this city with good groceries, if I do say it myself. 
 I took a pride in the fact that the inmates of the hospitals, 
 yes, and the dependent poor in the city's institutions, should 
 have honest food. You can get anything out of the city if 
 you are willing to pay the politicians for it. I lost my city 
 contracts. Why? Because I refused to deal with scoun 
 drels. Weill and Company and other unscrupulous up 
 starts are willing to do so, and poison the poor and the sick 
 with adulterated groceries ! The first thing I knew was that 
 the city auditor was holding back my bills for supplies, and 
 paying Weill's. That's what politics and business, yes, sir, 
 and the law, have come to in these days. If a man wants to 
 succeed, he must turn into a rascal." 
 
 I was not shocked, but I was silent, uncomfortable, wishing 
 that it were time to take the train back to the city. Cousin 
 Robert's face was more worn than I had thought, and I 
 contrasted him inevitably with the forceful person who used 
 to stand, in his worn alpaca coat, on the pavement in front 
 of his store, greeting with clear-eyed content his fellow- 
 merchants of the city. Willie Breck, too, was silent, and 
 Walter Kinley took off his glasses and wiped them. In the 
 meanwhile Helen had left the group in which my mother 
 sat, and, approaching us, laid her hands on her father's 
 shoulders. 
 
 "Now, dad," she said, in affectionate remonstrance, 
 "you're excited about politics again, and you know it isn't 
 good for you. And besides, they're not worth it." 
 
 "You're right, Helen," he replied. Under the pressure 
 of her hands he made a strong effort to control himself, and 
 turned to address my mother across the room. 
 
 "I'm getting to be a crotchety old man," he said. "It's 
 a good thing I have a daughter to remind me of it." 
 
 "It is a, good thing, Robert," said my mother. 
 
 During the rest of our visit he seemed to have recovered 
 something of his former spirits and poise, taking refuge in
 
 126 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the past. They talked of their own youth, of families whose 
 houses had been landmarks on the Second Bank. 
 
 "I'm worried about your Cousin Robert, Hugh," my 
 mother confided to me, when we were at length seated in 
 the train. "I've heard rumours that things are not so well 
 , at the store as they might be." We looked out at the winter 
 ' landscape, so different from that one which had thrilled every 
 fibre of my being in the days when the railroad on which we 
 travelled had been a winding narrow gauge. The orchards 
 those that remained were bare ; stubble pricked the 
 frozen ground where tassels had once waved in the hot, 
 summer wind. We flew by row after row of ginger-bread, 
 suburban houses built on "villa plots," and I read in large 
 letters on a hideous sign-board, "Woodbine Park." 
 
 "Hugh, have you ever heard anything against Mr. 
 Watling?" 
 
 "No, mother," I said. "So far as I knew, he is very much 
 looked up to by lawyers and business men. He is counsel, 
 I believe, for Mr. Blackwood's street car line on Boyne 
 Street. And I told you, I believe, that I met him once at 
 Mr. Kyme's." 
 
 "Poor Robert!" she sighed. "I suppose business trouble 
 does make one bitter, I've seen it so often. But I never 
 imagined that it would overtake Robert, and at his time of 
 life ! It is an old and respected firm, and we have always had 
 a pride in it." . . . 
 
 That night, when I was going to bed, it was evident that 
 the subject was still in her mind. She clung to my hand a 
 moment. 
 
 "I, too, am afraid of the new, Hugh," she said, a little 
 tremulously. "We all grow so, as age comes on." 
 
 "But you are not old, mother," I protested. 
 
 "I have a feeling, since your father has gone, that I have 
 lived my life, my dear, though I'd like to stay long enough to 
 see you happily married to have grandchildren. I was 
 not young when you were born." And she added, after a 
 little while, "I know nothing about business affairs, and
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 127 
 
 now now that your father is no longer here, sometimes 
 I'm afraid " 
 
 "Afraid of what, mother?" 
 
 She tried to smile at me through her tears. We were in 
 the old sitting-room, surrounded by the books. 
 
 "I know it's foolish, and it isn't that I don't trust you. 
 I know that the son of your father couldn't do anything 
 that was not honourable. And yet I am afraid of what the 
 world is becoming. The city is growing so fast, and so many 
 new people are coming in. Things are not the same. Robert 
 is right, there. And I have heard your father say the same 
 thing. Hugh, promise me that you will try to remember 
 always what he was, and what he would wish you to be ! " 
 
 "I will, mother," I answered. "But I think you would 
 find that Cousin Robert exaggerates a little, makes things 
 seem worse than they really are. Customs change, you 
 know. And politics were never well Sunday schools." 
 I, too, smiled a little. "Father knew that. And he would 
 never take an active part in them." 
 
 "He was too fine!" she exclaimed. 
 
 "And now," I continued, "Cousin Robert has happened 
 to come in contact with them through business. That is 
 what has made the difference in him. Before, he always 
 knew they were corrupt, but he rarely thought about them." 
 
 "Hugh," she said suddenly, after a pause, "you must 
 remember one thing, that you can afford to be indepen 
 dent. I thank God that your father has provided for that I" 
 
 I was duly admitted, the next autumn, to the bar of my 
 own state, and was assigned to a desk in the offices of Watling, 
 Fowndes and Ripon. Larry Weed was my immediate senior 
 among the apprentices, and Larry was a hero-worshipper. 
 I can see him now. He suggested a bullfrog as he sat in 
 the little room we shared in common, his arms akimbo over 
 a law book, his little legs doubled under him, his round eyes
 
 128 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 fixed expectantly on the doorway. And even if I had not 
 been aware of my good fortune in being connected with such 
 a firm as Theodore Watling's, Larry would shortly have 
 brought it home to me. During those weeks when I was 
 making my first desperate attempts at briefing up the law I 
 was sometimes interrupted by his exclamations when certain 
 . figures went by in the corridor. 
 * "Say, Hugh, do you know who that was?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Miller Gorse." 
 
 "Who's he?" 
 
 " Do you mean to say you never heard of Miller Gorse ? " 
 
 "I've been away a long time," I would answer apologeti 
 cally. A person of some importance among my contempo 
 raries at Harvard, I had looked forward to a residence in my 
 native city with the complacency of one who has seen some 
 thing of the world, only to find that I was the least in 
 the new kingdom. And it was a kingdom. Larry opened 
 up to me something of the significance and extent of it, 
 something of the identity of the men who controlled it. 
 
 "Miller Gorse," he said impressively, "is the counsel for 
 the railroad." 
 
 "What railroad? You mean the "I was adding, when 
 he interrupted me pityingly. 
 
 "After you've been here a while you'll find out there's 
 only one railroad in this state, so far as politics are concerned. 
 The Ashuela and Northern, the Lake Shore and the others 
 don't count." 
 
 I refrained from asking any more questions at that time, 
 but afterwards I always thought of the Railroad as spelled 
 with a capital. 
 
 "Miller Gorse isn't forty yet," Larry told me on another 
 occasion. "That's doing pretty well for a man who comes 
 near running this state." 
 
 For the sake of acquiring knowledge, I endured Mr. Weed's 
 patronage. I inquired how Mr. Gorse ran the state. 
 
 "Oh, you'll find out soon enough," he assured me.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 129 
 
 "But Mr. Barbour's president of the Railroad." 
 "Sure. Once in a while they take something up to him, 
 but as a rule he leaves things to Gorse." 
 
 Whereupon I resolved to have a good look at Mr. Gorse 
 at the first opportunity. , One day Mr. Watling sent out 
 for some papers. *>- 
 
 "He's in there now," said Larry. "You take 'em." 
 "In there" meant Mr. Watling's sanctum. And in there 
 he was. I had only a glance at the great man, for, with a 
 kindly but preoccupied "Thank you, Hugh," Mr. Watling 
 took the papers and dismissed me. Heaviness, blackness 
 and impassivity, these were the impressions of Mr. Gorse 
 which I carried away from that first meeting. The very 
 solidity of his flesh seemed to suggest the solidity of his 
 position. Such, say the psychologists, is the effect of 
 prestige. 
 
 I remember well an old-fashioned picture puzzle in one of 
 my boyhood books. The scene depicted was to all appear 
 ances a sylvan, peaceful one, with two happy lovers seated 
 on a log beside a brook ; but presently, as one gazed at the 
 picture, the head of an animal stood forth among the branches, 
 and then the body ; more animals began to appear, bit by bit ; 
 a tiger, a bear, a lion, a jackal, a fox, until at last, when 
 ever I looked at the page, I did not see the sylvan scene at 
 all, but only the predatory beasts of the forest. So, one 
 by one, the figures of the real rulers of the city superimposed 
 themselves for me upon the simple and democratic design 
 of Mayor, Council, Board of Aldermen, Police Force, etc., 
 that filled the eye of a naive and trusting electorate which 
 fondly imagined that it had something to say in government. 
 Miller Gorse was one of these rulers behind the screen, and 
 Adolf Scherer, of the Boyne Iron Works, another; there 
 was Leonard Dickinson of the Corn National Bank ; Fred 
 erick Grierson, becoming wealthy in city real estate ; Judah 
 B. Tallant, who, though outlawed socially, was deferred to 
 as the owner of the Morning Era; and even Ralph Ham- 
 bleton, rapidly superseding the elderly and conservative
 
 130 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Mr. Lord, who had hitherto managed the great Ham- 
 bleton estate. Ralph seemed to have become, in a 
 somewhat gnostic manner, a full-fledged financier. Not 
 having studied law, he had been home for four years when I 
 became a legal fledgling, and during the early days of my 
 apprenticeship I was beholden to him for many "eye open 
 ers" concerning the conduct of great affairs. I remember 
 him sauntering into my room one morning when Larry 
 Weed had gone out on an errand. 
 
 "Hello, Hughie," he said, with his air of having nothing 
 to do. "Grinding it out? Where's Watling?" 
 
 "Isn't he in his office?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Well, what can we do for you?" I asked. 
 
 Ralph grinned. 
 
 "Perhaps I'll tell you when you're a little older. You're 
 too young." And he sank down into Larry Weed's chair, 
 his long legs protruding on the other side of the table. 
 "It's a matter of taxes. Some time ago I found out that 
 Dickinson and Tallant and others I could mention were 
 paying a good deal less on their city property than we are. 
 We don't propose to do it any more that's all." 
 
 "How can Mr. Watling help you?" I inquired. 
 
 " Well, I don't mind giving you a few tips about your pro 
 fession, Hughie. I'm going to get Watling to fix it up with 
 the City Hall gang. Old Lord doesn't like it, I'll admit, 
 and when I told him we had been contributing to the city 
 long enough, that I proposed swinging into line with other 
 property holders, he began to blubber about disgrace and 
 what my grandfather would say if he were alive. Well, 
 he isn't alive. A good deal of water has flowed under the 
 bridges since his day. It's a mere matter of business, of 
 getting your respectable firm to retain a City Hall attorney 
 to fix it up with the assessor." 
 
 "How about the penitentiary?" I ventured, not too 
 seriously. 
 
 "I shan't go to the penitentiary, neither will Watling.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 131 
 
 What I do is to pay a lawyer's fee. There isn't anything 
 criminal in that, is there ? " 
 
 For some time after Ralph had departed I sat reflecting 
 upon this new knowledge, and there came into my mind the 
 bitterness of Cousin Robert Breck against this City Hall 
 gang, and his remarks about lawyers. I recalled the tone 
 in which he had referred to Mr. Watling. But Ralph's 
 philosophy easily triumphed. Why not be practical, and 
 become master of a situation which one had not made, and 
 could not alter, instead of being overwhelmed by it ? Need 
 less to say, I did not mention the conversation to Mr. Wat- 
 ling, nor did he dwindle in my estimation. These necessary 
 transactions did not interfere in any way with his personal 
 relationships, and his days were filled with kindnesses. And 
 was not Mr. Ripon, the junior partner, one of the evangelical 
 lights of the community, conducting advanced Bible classes 
 every week in the Church of the Redemption ? . . . The 
 unfolding of mysteries kept me alert. And I understood 
 that, if I was to succeed, certain esoteric knowledge must 
 be acquired, as it were, unofficially. I kept my eyes and 
 ears open, and applied myself, with all industry, to the 
 routine tasks with which every young man in a large legal 
 firm is familiar. I recall distinctly my pride when, the Board 
 of Aldermen having passed an ordinance lowering the water 
 rates, I was intrusted with the responsibility of going before 
 the court in behalf of Mr. Ogilvy's water company, obtaining ( 
 a temporary restricting order preventing the ordinance from \ 
 going at once into effect. Here was an affair in point. Were 
 it not for lawyers of the calibre of Watling, Fowndes and 
 Ripon, hard-earned private property would soon be confis 
 cated by the rapacious horde. Once in a while I was made 
 aware that Mr. Watling had his eye on me. 
 
 "Well, Hugh," he would say, "how are you getting along? 
 That's right, stick to it, and after a while we'll hand the 
 drudgery over to somebody else." 
 
 He possessed the supreme quality of a leader of men in 
 that he took pains to inform himself concerning the work of
 
 132 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the least of his subordinates ; and he had the gift of putting 
 fire into a young man by a word or a touch of the hand on 
 the shoulder. It was not difficult for me, therefore, to com 
 prehend Larry Weed's hero-worship, the loyalty of other 
 members of the firm or of those occupants of the office whom 
 I have not mentioned. My first impression of him, which I 
 had got at Jerry Kyme's, deepened as time went on, and I 
 readily shared the belief of those around me that his legal 
 talents easily surpassed those of any of his contemporaries. 
 I can recall, at this time, several noted cases in the city when 
 I sat in court listening to his arguments with thrills of 
 pride. He made us all feel no matter how humble may 
 have been our contributions to the preparation that 
 we had a share in his triumphs. We remembered his manner 
 with judges and juries, and strove to emulate it. He spoke 
 as if there could be no question as to his being right as to 
 the law and the facts, and yet, in some subtle way that baffled 
 analysis, managed not to antagonize the court. Victory was 
 in the air in that office. I do not mean to say there were 
 not defeats ; but frequently these defeats, by resourcefulness, 
 by a never-say-die spirit, by a consummate knowledge, not 
 only of the law, but of other things at which I have hinted, 
 were turned into ultimate victories. We fought cases from 
 one court to another, until our opponents were worn out or 
 t!ie decision was reversed. We won, and that spirit of win 
 ning got into the blood. What was most impressed on me in 
 those early years, I think, was the discovery that there was 
 always a path if one were clever enough to find it from 
 one terrace to the next higher. Staying power was the most 
 prized of all the virtues. One could always, by adroitness, 
 compel a legal opponent to fight the matter out all over 
 again on new ground, or at least on ground partially new. If 
 the Court of Appeals should fail one, there was the Supreme 
 Court; there was the opportunity, also, to shift from the 
 state to the federal courts; and likewise the much-prized 
 device known as a change of venue, when a judge was sup 
 posed to be "prejudiced."
 
 IX 
 
 As my apprenticeship advanced I grew more and more to 
 separate the inhabitants of our city into two kinds, the 
 efficient, who were served, and the inefficient, who were 
 neglected ; but the mental process of which the classification 
 was the result was not so deliberate as may be supposed. 
 Sometimes, when an important client would get into trouble, 
 the affair took me into the police court, where I saw the riff 
 raff of the city penned up, waiting to have justice doled out 
 to them : weary women who had spent the night in cells, in 
 different now as to the front they presented to the world, 
 the finery ruffled that they had tended so carefully to 
 catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets; brazen 
 young girls, who blazed forth defiance to all order ; derelict 
 men, sodden and hopeless, with scrubby beards; shifty- 
 looking burglars and pickpockets. All these I beheld, at 
 first with twinges of pity, later to mass them with the ugly 
 and inevitable with whom society had to deal somehow. 
 Lawyers, after all, must be practical men. I came to know 
 the justices of these police courts, as well as other judges. 
 And underlying my acquaintance with all of them was the 
 knowledge though not on the threshold of my conscious 
 ness that they depended for their living, every man 
 of them, those who were appointed and those who were 
 elected, upon a political organization which derived its 
 sustenance from the element whence came our clients. 
 Thus by degrees the sense of belonging to a special priest 
 hood had grown on me. 
 
 I recall an experience with that same Mr. Nathan Weill, 
 the wholesale grocer of whose commerce with the City Hall 
 
 133
 
 134 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 my Cousin Robert Breck had so bitterly complained. Late 
 one afternoon Mr. Weill's carriage ran over a child on its 
 way up-town through one of the poorer districts. The 
 parents, naturally, were frantic, and the coachman was 
 arrested. This was late in the afternoon, and I was alone 
 in the office when the telephone rang. Hurrying to the 
 police station, I found Mr. Weill in a state of excitement and 
 abject fear, for an ugly crowd had gathered outside. 
 
 "Could not Mr. Watling or Mr. Fowndes come?" de 
 manded the grocer. 
 
 With an inner contempt for the layman's state of mind 
 on such occasions I assured him of my competency to handle 
 the case. He was impressed, I think, by the sergeant's 
 deference, who knew what it meant to have such an office as 
 ours interfere with the affair. I called up the prosecuting 
 attorney, who sent to Monahan's saloon, close by, and pro 
 cured a release for the coachman on his own recognizance, 
 one of many signed in blank and left there by the justice for 
 privileged cases. The coachman was hustled out by a back 
 door, and the crowd dispersed. 
 
 The next morning, while a score or more of delinquents 
 sat in .the anxious seats, Justice Garry recognized me and 
 gave me precedence. And Mr. Weill, with a sigh of relief, 
 paid his fine. 
 
 "Mr. Paret, is it?" he asked, as we stood together for a 
 moment on the sidewalk outside the court. " You have man 
 aged this well. I will remember." 
 
 He was sued, of course. When he came to the office he 
 insisted on discussing the case with Mr. Watling, who sent 
 for me. 
 
 "That is a bright young man," Mr. Weill declared, shak 
 ing my hand. "He will get on." 
 
 "Some day," said Mr. Watling, "he may save you a lot 
 of money, Weill." 
 
 "When my friend Mr. Watling is United States Senator, 
 eh?" 
 
 Mr. Watling laughed. "Before that, I hope. I advise
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 135 
 
 you to compromise this suit, Weill," he added. "How would 
 a thousand dollars strike you? I've had Paret look up the 
 case, and he tells me the little girl has had to have an opera 
 tion." 
 
 "A thousand dollars!" cried the grocer. "What right 
 have these people to let their children play on the streets ? 
 It's an outrage." 
 
 "Where else have the children to play?" Mr. Watling 
 touched his arm. "Weill," he said gently, "suppose it had 
 been your little girl?" The grocer pulled out his handker 
 chief and mopped his bald forehead. But he rallied a little. 
 
 "You fight these damage cases for the street railroads all 
 through the courts." 
 
 "Yes," Mr. Watling agreed, "but there a principle is 
 involved. If the railroads once got into the way of paying 
 damages for every careless employee, they would soon be 
 bankrupt through blackmail. But here you have a child 
 whose father is a poor janitor and can't afford sickness. And 
 your coachman, I imagine, will be more particular in the 
 future." 
 
 In the end Mr. Weill made out a cheque and departed in a 
 good humour, convinced that he was well out of the matter. 
 Here was one of many instances I could cite of Mr. Watling's 
 tenderness of heart. I felt, moreover, as if he had done me a 
 personal favour, since it was I who had recommended the 
 compromise. For I had been to the hospital and had seen 
 the child on the cot, a dark little thing, lying still in her 
 pain, with the bewildered look of a wounded animal. . . . 
 
 Not long after this incident of Mr. Weill's damage suit I 
 obtained a more or less definite promotion by the departure 
 of Larry Weed. He had suddenly developed a weakness of 
 the lungs. Mr. Watling got him a place in Denver, and 
 paid his expenses west. 
 
 The first six or seven years I spent in the office of Watling, 
 Fowndes and Ripon were of importance to my future career f
 
 136 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 but there is little to relate of them. I was absorbed not only 
 in learning law, but in acquiring that esoteric knowledge at 
 which I have hinted not to be had from my seniors 
 and which I was convinced was indispensable to a successful 
 and lucrative practice. My former comparison of the or 
 ganization of our city to a picture puzzle wherein the dominat 
 ing figures become visible only after long study is rather 
 inadequate. A better analogy would be the human anat 
 omy : we lawyers, of course, were the brains ; the financial 
 and industrial interests the body, helpless without us; the 
 City Hall politicians, the stomach that must continually be 
 fed. All three, law, politics and business, were interde 
 pendent, united by a nervous system too complex to be 
 developed here. In these years, though I worked hard and 
 often late, I still found time for convivialities, for social 
 gaieties, yet little by little without realizing the fact, I was 
 losing zest for the companionship of my former intimates. 
 My mind was becoming polarized by the contemplation of 
 one object, success, and to it human ties were unconsciously 
 being sacrificed. 
 
 Tom Peters began to feel this, even at a time when I 
 believed myself still to be genuinely fond of him. Con 
 sidering our respective temperaments in youth, it is curious 
 that he should have been the first to fall in love and marry. 
 One day he astonished me by announcing his engagement to 
 Susan Blackwood. 
 
 "That ends the liquor, Hughie," he told me, beamingly. 
 "I promised her I'd eliminate it." 
 
 He did eliminate it, save for mild relapses on festive oc 
 casions. A more seemingly incongruous marriage could 
 scarcely be imagined, and yet it was a success from the start. 
 From a slim, silent, self-willed girl Susan had grown up into 
 a tall, rather rawboned and energetic young woman. She 
 was what we called in those days "intellectual," and had gone 
 in for kindergartens, and after her marriage she turned out 
 to be excessively domestic; practising her theories, with 
 entire success, upon a family that showed a tendency to
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 137 
 
 increase at an alarming rate. Tom, needless to say, did not 
 become intellectual. He settled down prematurely, I 
 thought into what is known as a family man, curiously 
 content with the income he derived from the commission 
 business and with life in general; and he developed a 
 somewhat critical view of the tendencies of the civili 
 zation by which he was surrounded. Susan held it also, 
 but she said less about it. In the comfortable but unpre 
 tentious house they rented on Cedar Street we had 
 many discussions, after the babies had been put to bed and 
 the door of the living-room closed, in order that our voices 
 might not reach the nursery. Perry Blackwood, now Tom's 
 brother-in-law, was often there. He, too, had lapsed into 
 what I thought was an odd conservatism. Old Josiah, his 
 father, being dead, he occupied himself mainly with looking 
 after certain family interests, among which was the Boyne 
 Street car line. Among "business men" he was already 
 getting the reputation of being a little difficult to deal with. 
 I was often the subject of their banter, and presently I began 
 to suspect that they regarded my career and beliefs with some 
 concern. This gave me no uneasiness, though at tunes I 
 lost my temper. I realized their affection for me; but 
 privately I regarded them as lacking in ambition, in force, in 
 the fighting qualities necessary for achievement in this 
 modern age. Perhaps, unconsciously, I pitied them a little. 
 
 "How is Judah B. to-day, Hughie?" Tom would inquire. 
 "I hear you've put him up for the Boyne Club, now that 
 Mr. Watling has got him out of that libel suit." 
 
 "Carter Ives is dead," Perry would add, sarcastically, 
 "let bygones be bygones." 
 
 It was well known that Mr. Tallant, in the early days of 
 his newspaper, had blackmailed Mr. Ives out of some hundred 
 thousand dollars. And that this, more than any other act, 
 stood in the way, with certain recalcitrant gentlemen, of his 
 highest ambition, membership in the Boyne. 
 
 "The trouble with you fellows is that you refuse to deal 
 with conditions as you find them," I retorted. "We didn't
 
 138 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 make them, and we can't change them. Tallant's a factor 
 in the business life of this city, and he has to be counted 
 with." 
 
 Tom would shake his head exasperatingly. 
 
 "Why don't you get after Ralph?" I demanded. "He 
 doesn't antagonize Tallant, either." 
 
 " Ralph's hopeless," said Tom. " He was born a pirate, 
 you weren't, Hughie. We think there's a chance for his 
 salvation, don't we, Perry?" 
 
 I refused to accept the remark as flattering. 
 
 Another object of their assaults was Frederick Grierson, 
 who by this time had emerged from obscurity as a small 
 dealer in real estate into a manipulator of blocks and corners. 
 
 "I suppose you think it's a lawyer's business to demand an 
 ethical bill of health of every client," I said. "I won't 
 stand up for all of Tallant's career, of course, but Mr. Watling 
 has a clear right to take his cases. As for Grierson, it seems 
 to me that's a matter of giving a dog a bad name. Just 
 because his people weren't known here, and because he has 
 worked up from small beginnings. To get down to hard-pan, 
 you fellows don't believe in democracy, in giving every 
 man a chance to show what's in him." 
 
 " Democracy is good ! " exclaimed Perry. " If the kind of 
 thing we're coming to is democracy, God save the state !" . . . 
 
 On the other hand I found myself drawing closer to Ralph 
 Hambleton, sometimes present at these debates, as the only one 
 of my boyhood friends who seemed to be able to " deal with 
 conditions as he found them." Indeed, he gave one the 
 impression that, if he had had the making of them, he would 
 not have changed them. 
 
 "What the deuce do you expect ? " I once heard him inquire 
 with good-natured contempt. "Business isn't charity, it's 
 war." 
 
 "There are certain things," maintained Perry, stoutly, 
 "that gentlemen won't do." 
 
 "Gentlemen!" exclaimed Ralph, stretching his slim six 
 feet two. We were sitting in the Boyne Club. " It's ungen-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 139 
 
 tlemanly to kill, or burn a town or sink a ship, but we keep 
 armies and navies for the purpose. For a man with a good 
 mind, Perry, you show a surprising inability to think things 
 out to a logical conclusion. What the deuce is competition, 
 when you come down to it ? Christianity ? Not by a long 
 shot! If our nations are slaughtering men and starving 
 populations in other countries, are carried on, in fact, for 
 the sake of business, if our churches are filled with business 
 men and our sky pilots pray for the government, you can't 
 expect heathen individuals like me to do business on a Chris 
 tian basis, if there is such a thing. You can make rules 
 for croquet, but not for a game that is based on the natural 
 law of the survival of the fittest. The darned fools in the 
 legislatures try it occasionally, but we all know it's a sop to 
 the 'common people.' Ask Hughie here if there ever was a 
 law put on the statute books that his friend Watling couldn't 
 get ' round ' ? Why, you've got competition even among the 
 churches. Yours, where I believe you teach in the Sunday- 
 school, would go bankrupt if it proclaimed real Christianity. 
 And you'll go bankrupt if you practise it, Perry, my boy. 
 Some early, wide-awake, competitive, red-blooded bird will 
 relieve you of the Boyne Street car line." 
 
 It was one of this same new and "fittest" species who had 
 already relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune. 
 Mr. Willett was a trusting soul who had never known how 
 to take care of himself or his money, people said, and now 
 that he had lost it they blamed him. Some had been saved 
 enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house, with 
 careful economy. It was Nancy who managed the economy, 
 who accomplished remarkable things with a sum they would 
 have deemed poverty in former days. Her mother had died 
 while I was at Cambridge. Reverses did not subdue Mr. 
 Willett's spirits, and the fascination modern "business" had 
 for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes it had 
 caused him. He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett 
 Building, where he appeared every morning about half-past 
 ten to occupy himself with heaven knows what short cuts to
 
 140 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 wealth, with prospectuses of companies in Mexico or Central 
 America or some other distant place : once, I remember, it 
 was a tea company in which he tried to interest his friends, 
 to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass 
 Orange Pekoe. In the afternoon between three and four he 
 would turn up at the Boyne Club, as well groomed, as spruce 
 as ever, generally with a flower in his buttonhole. He never 
 forgot that he was a gentleman, and he had a gentleman's 
 notions of the fitness of things, and it was against his prin 
 ciples to use a gentleman's club for the furtherance of his 
 various enterprises. 
 
 "Drop into my office some day, Dickinson," he would 
 say. " I think I've got something there that might interest 
 
 you." 
 
 He reminded me, when I met him, that he had always 
 predicted I would get along in life. . . . 
 
 The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn. 
 The decline of the family fortunes seemed to have had as 
 little effect upon her as upon her father, although their char 
 acters differed sharply. Something of that spontaneity, of 
 that love of life and joy in it she had possessed in youth she 
 must have inherited from McAlery Willett, but these qual 
 ities had disappeared in her long before the coming of finan 
 cial reverses. She was nearing thirty, and in spite of her 
 beauty and the rarer distinction that can best be described 
 as breeding, she had never married. Men admired her, but 
 from a distance ; she kept them at arm's length, they said : 
 strangers who visited the city invariably picked her out of 
 an assembly and asked who she was; one man from New 
 York who came to visit Ralph and who had been madly in 
 love with her, she had amazed many people by refusing, 
 spurning all he might have given her. This incident 
 seemed a refutation of the charge that she was calculating. 
 As might have been foretold, she had the social gift in a re 
 markable degree, and in spite of the limitations of her purse 
 the knack of dressing better than other women, though at 
 that time the organization of our social life still remained
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 141 
 
 comparatively simple, the custom of luxurious and expensive 
 entertainment not having yet set in. 
 
 The more I reflect upon those days, the more surprising 
 does it seem that I was not in love with her. It may be that 
 I was, unconsciously, for she troubled my thoughts occa 
 sionally, and she represented all the qualities I admired in 
 her sex. The situation that had existed at the time of our 
 first and only quarrel had been reversed, I was on the high 
 road to the worldly success I had then resolved upon, Nancy 
 was poor, and for that reason, perhaps, prouder than ever. 
 If she was inaccessible to others, she had the air of being 
 peculiarly inaccessible to me the more so because some of 
 the superficial relics of our intimacy remained, or rather had 
 been restored. Her very manner of camaraderie seemed 
 paradoxically to increase the distance between us. It piqued 
 me. Had she given me the least encouragement, I am sure 
 I should have responded ; and I remember that I used occa 
 sionally to speculate as to whether she still cared for me, and 
 took this method of hiding her real feelings. Yet, on the 
 whole, I felt a certain complacency about it all ; I knew that 
 suffering was disagreeable, I had learned how to avoid it, 
 and I may have had, deep within me, a feeling that I might 
 marry her after all. Meanwhile my life was full, and gave 
 promise of becoming even fuller, more absorbing and exciting 
 in the immediate future. 
 
 One of the most fascinating figures, to me, of that Order 
 being woven, like a cloth of gold, out of our hitherto drab 
 civilization, an Order into which I was ready and eager 
 to be initiated, was that of Adolf Scherer, the giant Ger 
 man immigrant at the head of the Boyne Iron Works. His 
 life would easily lend itself to riotous romance. In the old 
 country, in a valley below the castle perched on the rock 
 above, he had begun life by tending his father's geese. What 
 a contrast to "Steeltown" with its smells and sickening sum 
 mer heat, to the shanty where Mrs. Scherer took boarders
 
 142 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 and bent over the wash-tub ! She, too, was an immigrant, 
 but lived to hear her native Wagner from her own box at 
 Covent Garden ; and he to explain, on the deck of an im 
 perial yacht, to the man who might have been his sovereign 
 certain processes in the manufacture of steel hitherto untried 
 on that side of the Atlantic. In comparison with Adolf 
 Scherer, citizen of a once despised democracy, the minor 
 prince in whose dominions he had once tended geese was of 
 small account indeed ! 
 
 The Adolf Scherer of that day though it is not so long 
 ago as time flies was even more solid and impressive than 
 the man he afterwards became, when he reached the dizzier 
 heights from which he delivered to an eager press opinions 
 on politics and war, eugenics and woman's suffrage and other 
 subjects that are the despair of specialists. Had he stuck 
 to steel, he would have remained invulnerable. But even 
 then he was beginning to abandon the field of production for 
 that of exploitation : figuratively speaking, he had taken to 
 soap, which with the aid of water may be blown into beauti 
 ful, iridescent bubbles to charm the eye. Much good soap, 
 apparently, has gone that way, never to be recovered. 
 Everybody who was anybody began to blow bubbles about 
 that time, and the bigger the bubble the greater its attraction 
 for investors of hard-earned savings. Outside of this love for 
 financial iridescence, let it be called, Mr. Scherer seemed to 
 care little then for glitter of any sort. Shortly after his eleva 
 tion to the presidency of the Boyne Iron Works he had been 
 elected a member of the Boyne Club, an honour of 
 which, some thought, he should have been more sensible ; but 
 generally, when in town, he preferred to lunch at a little Ger 
 man restaurant annexed to a saloon, where I used often to 
 find him literally towering above the cloth, for he was a 
 giant with short legs, his napkin tucked into his shirt 
 front, engaged in lively conversation with the ministering 
 Heinrich. The chef at the club, Mr. Scherer insisted, could 
 produce nothing equal to Heinrich's sauer-kraut and sausage. 
 My earliest relationship with Mr. Scherer was that of an
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 143 
 
 errand boy, of bringing to him for his approval papers which 
 might not be intrusted to a common messenger. His gruff- 
 ness and brevity disturbed me more than I cared to confess. 
 I was pretty sure that he eyed me with the disposition of the 
 self-made to believe that college educations and good tailors 
 were the heaviest handicaps with which a young man could 
 be burdened: and I suspected him of an inimical attitude 
 toward the older families of the city. Certain men possessed 
 his confidence; and he had built, as it were, a stockade 
 about them, sternly keeping the rest of the world outside. 
 In Theodore Watling he had a childlike faith. 
 
 Thus I studied him, with a deliberation which it is the 
 purpose of these chapters to confess, though he little knew 
 that he was being made the subject of analysis. Nor did I 
 ever venture to talk with him, but held strictly to my role of 
 errand boy, even after the conviction came over me that 
 he was no longer indifferent to my presence. The day ar 
 rived, after some years, when he suddenly thrust toward 
 me a big, hairy hand that held the document he was 
 examining. 
 
 "Who drew this, Mr. Paret?" he demanded. 
 
 
 
 Mr. Ripon, I told him. 
 
 The Boyne Works were buying up coal-mines, and this was 
 a contract looking to the purchase of one in Putman County, 
 provided, after a certain period of working, the yield and 
 quality should come up to specifications. Mr. Scherer re 
 quested me to read one of the sections, which puzzled him. 
 And in explaining it an idea flashed over me. 
 
 "Do you mind my making a suggestion, Mr. Scherer?" I 
 ventured. 
 
 "What is it?" he asked brusquely. 
 
 I showed him how, by the alteration of a few words, the 
 difficulty to which he had referred could not only be elim 
 inated, but that certain possible penalties might be evaded, 
 while the apparent meaning of the section remained un 
 changed. In other words, it gave the Boyne Iron Works 
 an advantage that was not contemplated. He seized the
 
 144 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 paper, stared at what I had written in pencil on the margin, 
 and then stared at me. Abruptly, he began to laugh. 
 
 "Ask Mr. Watling what he thinks of it?" 
 
 " I intended to, provided it had your approval, sir," I replied. 
 
 "You have my approval, Mr. Paret," he declared, rather 
 cryptically, and with the slight German hardening of the v's 
 into which he relapsed at tunes. "Bring it to the Works 
 this afternoon." 
 
 Mr. Watling agreed to the alteration. He looked at me 
 amusedly. 
 
 "Yes, I think that's an improvement, Hugh," he said. I 
 had a feeling that I had gained ground, and from this time on 
 I thought I detected a change in his attitude toward me; 
 there could be no doubt about the new attitude of Mr. 
 Scherer, who would often greet me now with a smile and a 
 joke, and sometimes went so far as to ask my opinions. . . . 
 Then, about six months later, came the famous Ribblevale 
 case that aroused the moral indignation of so many persons, 
 among whom was Perry Blackwood. 
 
 "You know as well as I do, Hugh, how this thing is being 
 manipulated," he declared at Tom's one Sunday evening; 
 "there was nothing the matter with the Ribblevale Steel 
 Company it was as right as rain before Leonard Dickin 
 son and Grierson and Scherer and that crowd you train with 
 began to talk it down at the Club. Oh, they're very com 
 passionate. I've heard 'em. Dickinson, privately, doesn't 
 think much of Ribblevale paper, and Pugh" (the president 
 of the Ribblevale) " seems worried and looks badly. It's all 
 very clever, but I'd hate to tell you in plain words what I'd 
 call it." 
 
 " Go ahead," I challenged him audaciously. " You haven't 
 any proof that the Ribblevale wasn't in trouble." 
 
 "I heard Mr. Pugh tell my father the other day it was a 
 d d outrage. He couldn't catch up with these rumours, 
 and some of his stockholders were liquidating." 
 
 "You don't suppose Pugh would want to admit his situ 
 ation, do you?" I asked.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 145 
 
 "Pugh's a straight man," retorted Perry. "That's more 
 than I can say for any of the other gang, saving your presence. 
 The unpleasant truth is that Scherer and the Boyne people 
 want the Ribblevale, and you ought to know it if you don't." 
 He looked at me very hard through the glasses he had 
 lately taken to wearing. Tom, who was lounging by 
 the fire, shifted his position uneasily. I smiled, and took 
 another cigar. 
 
 " I believe Ralph is right, Perry, when he calls you a sen 
 timentalist. For you there's a tragedy behind every or 
 dinary business transaction. The Ribblevale people are 
 having a hard time to keep their heads above water, and 
 immediately you smell conspiracy. Dickinson and Scherer 
 have been talking it down. How about it, Tom?" 
 
 But Tom, in these debates, was inclined to be non-com 
 mittal, although it was clear they troubled him. 
 
 "Oh, don't ask me, Hughie," he said. 
 
 " I suppose I ought to cultivate the scientific point of view, 
 and look with impartial interest at this industrial canni 
 balism," returned Perry, sarcastically. "Eat or be eaten 
 that's what enlightened self-interest has come to. After all, 
 Ralph would say, it is nature, the insect world over again, 
 the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured, and the 
 lawyer how shall I put it ? facilitating the processes of 
 swallowing and digesting. . . ." 
 
 There was no use arguing with Perry when he was in this 
 vein. . . . 
 
 Since I am not writing a technical treatise, I need not go into 
 the details of the Ribblevale suit. Suffice it to say that the 
 affair, after a while, came apparently to a deadlock, owing 
 to the impossibility of getting certain definite information 
 from the Ribblevale books, which had been taken out of the 
 state. The treasurer, for reasons of his own, remained out 
 of the state also; the ordinary course of summoning him 
 before a magistrate in another state had naturally been re 
 sorted to, but the desired evidence was not forthcoming. 
 
 "The trouble is," Mr. Watling explained to Mr. Scherer,
 
 146 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "that there is no law in the various states with a sufficient 
 penalty attached that will compel the witness to divulge 
 facts he wishes to conceal." 
 
 It was the middle of a February afternoon, and they were 
 seated in deep, leather chairs in one corner of the reading 
 room of the Boyne Club. They had the place to themselves. 
 Fowndes was there also, one leg twisted around the other 
 in familiar fashion, a bored look on his long and sallow face. 
 Mr. Watling had telephoned to the office for me to bring 
 them some papers bearing on the case. 
 
 "Sit down, Hugh," he said kindly. 
 
 "Now we have present a genuine legal mind," said Mr. 
 Scherer, in the playful manner he had adopted of late, while 
 I grinned appreciatively and took a chair. Mr. Watling 
 presently suggested kidnapping the Ribblevale treasurer 
 until he should promise to produce the books as the only way 
 out of what seemed an impasse. But Mr. Scherer brought 
 down a huge fist on his knee. 
 
 "I tell you it is no joke, Watling, we've got to win that 
 suit," he asserted. 
 
 "That's all very well," replied Mr. Watling. "But we're 
 a respectable firm, you know. We haven't had to resort to 
 safe-blowing, as yet." 
 
 Mr. Scherer shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say it 
 were a matter of indifference to him what methods were 
 resorted to. Mr. Watling's eyes met mine; his glance was 
 amused, yet I thought I read in it a query as to the advisabil 
 ity, in my presence, of going too deeply into the question of 
 ways and means. I may have been wrong. At any rate, 
 its sudden effect was to embolden me to give voice to an idea 
 that had begun to simmer in my mind, that excited me, 
 and yet I had feared to utter it. This look of my chief's, 
 and the lighter tone the conversation had taken decided me. 
 
 "Why wouldn't it be possible to draw up a bill to fit the 
 situation?" I inquired. 
 
 Mr. Watling started. 
 
 "What do you mean?" he asked quickly. ._,_..... , ;
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 147 
 
 All three looked at me. I felt the blood come into my face, 
 but it was too late to draw back. 
 
 " Well the legislature is in session. And since, as Mr. 
 Watling says, there is no sufficient penalty in other states 
 to compel the witness to produce the information desired, 
 why not draw up a bill and and have it passed " I 
 paused for breath " imposing a sufficient penalty on 
 home corporations in the event of such evasions. The 
 Ribblevale Steel Company is a home corporation." 
 , I had shot my bolt. . . . There followed what was for 
 me an anxious silence, while the three of them continued to 
 stare at me. Mr. Watling put the tips of his fingers to 
 gether, and I became aware that he was not offended, that he 
 was thinking rapidly. 
 
 "By George, why not, Fowndes?" he demanded. 
 
 "Well," said Fowndes, "there's an element of risk in such 
 a proceeding I need not dwell upon." 
 
 "Risk!" cried the senior partner vigorously. "There's 
 risk in everything. They'll howl, of course. But they howl 
 anyway, and nobody ever listens to them. They'll say it's 
 special legislation, and the Pilot will print sensational ed 
 itorials for a few days. But what of it? All of that has 
 happened before. I tell you, if we can't see those books, 
 we'll lose the suit. That's in black and white. And, as a 
 matter of justice, we're entitled to know what we want to 
 know." 
 
 "There might be two opinions as to that," observed 
 Fowndes, with his sardonic smile. 
 
 Mr. Watling paid no attention to this remark. He was 
 already deep in thought. It was characteristic of his mind 
 to leap forward, sei:ze a suggestion that often appeared 
 chimerical to a man like Fowndes and turn it into an accom 
 plished fact. " I believe you've hit it, Hugh," he said. " We 
 needn't bother about the powers of the courts in other states. 
 We'll put into this bill an appeal to our court for an order on 
 the clerk to compel the witness to come before the court and 
 testify, and we'll provide for a special commissioner to take
 
 148 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 depositions in the state where the witness is. If the officers 
 of a home corporation who are outside of the state refuse 
 to testify, the penalty will be that the corporation goes into 
 the hands of a receiver." 
 
 Fowndes whistled. 
 
 "That's going some!" he said. 
 
 " Well, we've got to go some. How about it, Scherer ? " 
 
 Even Mr. Scherer's brown eyes were snapping. 
 
 "We have got to win that suit, Watling." 
 
 We were all excited, even Fowndes, I think, though he 
 remained expressionless. Ours was the tense excitement of 
 primitive man in chase: the quarry which had threatened 
 to elude us was again in view, and not unlikely to fall into 
 our hands. Add to this feeling, on my part, the thrill that 
 it was I who had put them on the scent. I had all the sen 
 sations of an aspiring young brave who for the first time is 
 admitted to the councils of the tribe ! 
 
 "It ought to be a popular bill, too," Mr. Scherer was saying, 
 with a smile of ironic appreciation at the thought of dema 
 gogues advocating it. "We should have one of Lawler's 
 friends introduce it." 
 
 "Oh, we shall have it properly introduced," replied Mr. 
 Watling. 
 
 "It may come back at us," suggested Fowndes pessimisti 
 cally. "The Boyne Iron Works is a home corporation too, 
 if I am not mistaken." 
 
 "The Boyne Iron Works has the firm of Watling, Fowndes 
 and Ripon behind it," asserted Mr. Scherer, with what 
 struck me as a magnificent faith. 
 
 "You mustn't forget Paret," Mr. Watling reminded him, 
 with a wink at me. 
 
 We had risen. Mr. Scherer laid a hand on my arm. 
 
 "No, no, I do not forget him. He will not permit me to 
 forget him." 
 
 A remark, I thought, that betrayed some insight into my 
 character. . . . Mr. Watling called for pen and paper and 
 made then and there a draft of the proposed bill, for no time
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 149 
 
 was to be lost. It was dark when we left the Club, and I 
 recall the elation I felt and strove to conceal as I accompanied 
 my chief back to the office. The stenographers and clerks 
 were gone; alone in the library we got down the statutes 
 and set to work to perfect the bill from the rough draft, on 
 which Mr. Fowndes had written his suggestions. I felt 
 that a complete yet subtle change had come over my re 
 lationship with Mr. Watling. 
 
 In the midst of our labours he asked me to call up the 
 attorney for the Railroad. Mr. Gorse was still at his office. 
 
 " Hello ! Is that you, Miller ? " Mr. Watling said. " This 
 is Watling. When can I see you for a few minutes this 
 evening? Yes, I am leaving for Washington at nine thirty. 
 Eight o'clock. All right, I'll be there." 
 
 It was almost eight before he got the draft finished to his 
 satisfaction, and I had picked it out on the typewriter. As 
 I handed it to him, my chief held it a moment, gazing at 
 me with an odd smile. 
 
 "You seem to have acquired a good deal of useful knowl 
 edge, here and there, Hugh," he observed. 
 
 " I've tried to keep my eyes open, Mr. Watling," I said. 
 
 "Well," he said, "there are a great many things a young 
 man practising law in these days has to learn for himself. 
 And if I hadn't given you credit for some cleverness, I 
 shouldn't have wanted you here. There's only one way to 
 look at at these matters we have been discussing, my boy, 
 that's the common-sense way, and if a man doesn't get that 
 point of view by himself, nobody can teach it to him. I 
 needn't enlarge upon it." 
 
 "No, sir," I said. 
 
 He smiled again, but immediately became serious. 
 
 " If Mr. Gorse should approve of this bill, I'm going to 
 send you down to the capital to-night. Can you go ? " 
 
 I nodded. 
 
 " I want you to look out for the bill in the legislature. Of 
 course there won't be much to do, except to stand by, but 
 you will get a better idea of what goes on down there."
 
 150 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I thanked him, and told him I would do my best. 
 
 "I'm sure of that," he replied. "Now it's time to go to 
 see Gorse." 
 
 The legal department of the Railroad occupied an entire 
 floor of the Corn Bank building. I had often been there on 
 various errands, having on occasions delivered sealed en 
 velopes to Mr. Gorse himself, approaching him in the ordi 
 nary way through a series of offices. But now, following Mr. 
 Watling through the dimly lighted corridor, we came to a 
 door on which no name was painted, and which was presently 
 opened by a stenographer. There was in the proceeding a 
 touch of mystery that revived keenly my boyish love for 
 romance ; brought back the days when I had been, in turn, 
 Captain Kidd and Ali Baba. 
 
 I have never realized more strongly than in that moment 
 the psychological force of prestige. Little by little, for five 
 years, an estimate of the extent of Miller Gorse' s power had 
 been coming home to me, and his features stood in my mind 
 for his particular kind of power. He was a tremendous 
 worker, and often remained in his office until ten and eleven 
 at night. He dismissed the stenographer by the wave of a 
 hand which seemed to thrust her bodily out of the room. 
 
 "Hello, Miller," said Mr. Watling. 
 
 "Hello, Theodore," replied Mr. Gorse. 
 
 "This is Paret, of my office." 
 
 "I know," said Mr. Gorse, and nodded toward me. I was 
 impressed by the felicity with which a cartoonist of the 
 Pilot had once caricatured him by the use of curved lines. 
 The circle of the heavy eyebrows ended at the wide nostrils ; 
 the mouth was a crescent, but bowed downwards ; the heavy 
 shoulders were rounded. Indeed, the only straight line to 
 be discerned about him was that of his hair, black as bitumen, 
 banged across his forehead; even his polished porphyry 
 eyes were constructed on some curvilinear principle, and 
 never seemed to focus. It might be said of Mr. Gorse that 
 he had an overwhelming impersonality. One could never 
 be quite sure that one's words reached the mark.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 151 
 
 In spite of the intimacy which I knew existed between 
 them, in my presence at least Mr. Gorse's manner was little 
 different with Mr. Watling than it was with other men. Mr. 
 Watling did not seem to mind. He pulled up a chair close 
 to the desk and began, without any preliminaries, to explain 
 his errand. 
 
 "It's about the Ribblevale affair," he said. "You know 
 we have a suit." 
 
 Gorse nodded. 
 
 " We've got to get at the books, Miller, that's all there 
 is to it. I told you so the other day. Well, we've found out 
 a way, I think." 
 
 He thrust his hand in his pocket, while the railroad attor 
 ney remained impassive, and drew out the draft of the bill. 
 Mr. Gorse read it, then read it over again, and laid it down 
 in front of him. 
 
 "Well," he said. 
 
 "I want to put that through both houses and have the 
 governor's signature to it by the end of the week." 
 
 "It seems a little raw, at first sight, Theodore," said Mr. 
 Gorse, with the suspicion of a smile. 
 
 My chief laughed a little. 
 
 " It's not half so raw as some things I might mention, that 
 went through like greased lightning," he replied. "What 
 can they do? I believe it will hold water. Tallant's, and 
 most of the other newspapers in the state, won't print a line 
 about it, and only Socialists and Populists read the Pilot. 
 They're disgruntled anyway. The point is, there's no other 
 way out for us. Just think a moment, bearing in mind what 
 I've told you about the case, and you'll see it." 
 
 Mr. Gorse took up the paper again, and read the draft 
 over. 
 
 "You know as well as I do, Miller, how dangerous it is to 
 leave this Ribblevale business at loose ends. The Carlisle 
 steel people and the Lake Shore road are after the Ribblevale 
 Company, and we can't afford to run any risk of their getting 
 it. It's logically a part of the Boyne interests, as Scherer
 
 152 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 says, and Dickinson is ready with the money for the reor 
 ganization. If the Carlisle people and the Lake Shore get 
 it, the product will be shipped out by the L and G, and the 
 Railroad will lose. What would Barbour say?" 
 
 Mr. Barbour, as I have perhaps mentioned, was the pres 
 ident of the Railroad, and had his residence in the other 
 great city of the state. He was then, I knew, in the West. 
 
 "We've got to act now," insisted Mr. Watling. "That's 
 open and shut. If you have any other plan, I wish you'd 
 trot it out. If not, I want a letter to Paul Varney and the 
 governor. I'm going to send Paret down with them on the 
 night train." 
 
 It was clear to me then, in the discussion following, that 
 Mr. W T atling's gift of persuasion, though great, was not the 
 determining factor in Mr. Gorse's decision. He, too, 
 possessed boldness, though he preferred caution. Nor did 
 the friendship between the two enter into the transaction. I 
 was impressed more strongly than ever with the fact that a 
 lawsuit was seldom a mere private affair between two 
 persons or corporations, but involved a chain of relationships : 
 and nine times out of ten that chain led up to the Railroad, 
 which nearly always was vitally interested in these legal 
 contests. Half an hour of masterly presentation of the sit 
 uation was necessary before Mr. Gorse became convinced 
 that the introduction of the bill was the only way out for 
 all concerned. 
 
 "Well, I guess you're right, Theodore," he said at length. 
 Whereupon he seized his pen and wrote off two notes with 
 great rapidity. These he showed to Mr. Watling, who 
 nodded and returned them. They were folded and sealed, 
 and handed to me. One was addressed to Colonel Paul 
 Varney, and the other to the Hon. W. W. Trulease, governor 
 of the state. 
 
 "You can trust this young man?" demanded Mr. Gorse. 
 
 "I think so," replied Mr. Watling, smiling at me. "The 
 bill was his own idea." 
 
 The railroad attorney wheeled about in his chair and looked
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 153 
 
 at me ; looked around me, would better express it, with his 
 indefinite, encompassing yet inclusive glance. I had riveted 
 his attention. And from henceforth, I knew, I should enter 
 into his calculations. He had made for me a compartment 
 in his mind. 
 
 "His own idea!" he repeated. 
 
 " I merely suggested it," I was putting in, when he cut me 
 short. 
 
 "Aren't you the son of Matthew Paret?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 He gave me a queer glance, the significance of which I 
 left untranslated. My excitement was too great to analyze 
 what he meant by this mention of my father. . . . 
 
 When we reached the sidewalk my chief gave me a few 
 parting instructions. 
 
 "I need scarcely say, Hugh," he added, "that your pres 
 ence in the capital should not be advertised as connected 
 with this legislation. They will probably attribute it to 
 us in the end, but if you're reasonably careful, they'll never 
 be able to prove it. And there's no use in putting our cards 
 on the table at the beginning." 
 
 "No indeed, sir!" I agreed. 
 
 He took my hand and pressed it. 
 
 " Good luck," he said. " I know you'll get along all right."
 
 X 
 
 THIS was not my first visit to the state capital. Indeed, 
 some of that recondite knowledge, in which I took a pride, 
 had been gained on the occasions of my previous visits. 
 Rising and dressing early, I beheld out of the car window 
 the broad, shallow river glinting in the morning sunlight, 
 the dome of the state house against the blue of the sky. Even 
 at that early hour groups of the gentlemen who made our 
 laws were scattered about the lobby of the Potts House, stand 
 ing or seated within easy reach of the gaily coloured cuspidors 
 that protected the marble floor : heavy-jawed workers from 
 the cities mingled with moonfaced but astute countrymen who 
 manipulated votes amongst farms and villages; fat or 
 cadaverous, Irish, German or American, all bore in common 
 a certain indefinable stamp. Having eaten my breakfast 
 in a large dining-room that resounded with the clatter of 
 dishes, I directed my steps to the apartment occupied from 
 year to year by Colonel Paul Varney, generalissimo of the 
 Railroad on the legislative battlefield, a position that 
 demanded a certain uniqueness of genius. 
 
 " How do you do, sir," he said, in a guarded but courteous 
 tone as he opened the door. I entered to confront a group 
 of three or four figures, silent and rather hostile, seated in a 
 haze of tobacco smoke around a marble-topped table. On 
 it reposed a Bible, attached to a chain. 
 
 "You probably don't remember me, Colonel," I said. 
 "My name is Paret, and I'm associated with the firm of 
 Watling, Fowndes and Ripon." 
 
 His air of martiality, heightened by a grey moustache 
 and goatee a la Napoleon Third, vanished instantly ; he 
 became hospitable, ingratiating. 
 
 154
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 155 
 
 "Why why certainly, you were down heah with Mr. 
 Fowndes two years ago." The Colonel spoke with a slight 
 Southern accent. "To be sure, sir. I've had the honour 
 of meeting your father. Mr. Norris, of North Haven, meet 
 Mr. Paret one of our rising lawyers ..." I shook hands 
 with them all and sat down. Opening his long coat, Colonel 
 Varney revealed two rows of cigars, suggesting cartridges in 
 a belt. These he proceeded to hand out as he talked. " I'm 
 glad to see you here, Mr. Paret. You must stay awhile, 
 and become acquainted with the men who ahem are 
 shaping the destinies of a great state. It would give me 
 pleasure to escort you about." 
 
 I thanked him. I had learned enough to realize how im 
 portant are the amenities in politics and business. The 
 Colonel did most of the conversing ; he could not have filled 
 with efficiency and ease the important post that was his 
 had it not been for the endless fund of humorous anecdotes 
 at his disposal. One by one the visitors left, each assuring 
 me of his personal regard: the Colonel closed the door, 
 softly, turning the key in the lock; there was a sly look in 
 his black eyes as he took a chair in proximity to mine. 
 
 "Well, Mr. Paret," he asked softly, "what's up?" 
 
 Without further ado I handed him Mr. Gorse's letter, and 
 another Mr. Watling had given me for him, which con 
 tained a copy of the bill. He read these, laid them on the 
 table, glancing at me again, stroking his goatee the while. 
 He chuckled. 
 
 " By gum ! " he exclaimed. " I take off my hat to Theodore 
 Watling, always did." He became contemplative. "It can 
 be done, Mr. Paret, but it's going to take some careful 
 driving, sir, some< reaching out and flicking 'em when they 
 r'ar and buck. Paul Varney's never been stumped yet. 
 Just as soon as this is introduced we'll have Gates and Arm 
 strong down here they're the Ribblevale attorneys, aren't 
 they ? I thought so, and the best legal talent they can 
 hire. And they'll round up all the disgruntled fellows, 
 you know, _that ain't friendly to the Railroad. We've
 
 156 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 got to do it quick, Mr. Paret. Gorse gave you a letter to 
 the Governor, didn't he?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 "Well, come along. I'll pass the word around among the 
 boys, just to let 'em know what to expect." His eyes glit 
 tered again. " I've been following this Ribblevale business," 
 he added, " and I understand Leonard Dickinson's all ready 
 1 to reorganize that company, when the time comes. He 
 ought to let me in for a little, on the ground floor." 
 : I did not venture to make any promises for Mr. Dickinson. 
 
 "I reckon it's just as well if you were to meet me at the 
 Governor's office," the Colonel added reflectively, and the 
 hint was not lost on me. "It's better not to let 'em find 
 out any sooner than they have to where this thing comes 
 from, you understand." He looked at his watch. "How 
 would nine o'clock do? I'll be there, with Trulease, when 
 you come, by accident, you understand. Of course he'll 
 be reasonable, but when they get to be governors they have 
 little notions, you know, and you've got to indulge 'em, 
 flatter 'em a little. It doesn't hurt, for when they get their 
 backs up it only makes more trouble." 
 
 He put on a soft, black felt hat, and departed noiselessly. . . 
 
 At nine o'clock I arrived at the State House and was ushered 
 into a great square room overlooking the park. The Governor 
 was seated at a desk under an elaborate chandelier, and sure 
 enough, Colonel Varney was there beside him, making 
 barely perceptible signals. 
 
 " It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Paret," 
 said Mr. Trulease. "Your name is a familiar one in your 
 city, sir. And I gather from your card that you are associated 
 with my good friend, Theodore Watling." 
 
 I acknowledged it. I was not a little impressed by the 
 perfect blend of cordiality, democratic simplicity and im- 
 pressiveness Mr. Trulease had achieved. For he had man 
 aged, in the course of a long political career, to combine in 
 exact proportions these elements which, in the public mind, 
 should make up the personality of a chief executive. Mo-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 157 
 
 mentarily he overcame the feeling of superiority with which 
 I had entered his presence; neutralized the sense I had 
 of being associated now with the higher powers which had 
 put him where he was. For I knew all about his "record." 
 
 "You're acquainted with Colonel Varney?" he inquired. 
 
 "Yes, Governor, I've met the Colonel," I said. 
 
 "Well, I suppose your firm is getting its share of business 
 these days," Mr. Trulease observed. I acknowledged * 
 it was, and after discussing for a few moments the remark 
 able growth of my native city the Governor tapped on his 
 desk and inquired what he could do for me. I produced the 
 letter from the attorney for the Railroad. The Governor 
 read it gravely. 
 
 "Ah," he said, "from Mr. Gorse." A copy of the pro 
 posed bill was enclosed, and the Governor read that also, 
 hemmed and hawed a little, turned and handed it to Colonel 
 Varney, who was sitting with a detached air, smoking con 
 templatively, a vacant expression on his face. "What do 
 you think of this, Colonel?" 
 
 Whereupon the Colonel tore himself away from his re 
 flections. 
 
 "What's that, Governor?" 
 
 "Mr. Gorse has called my attention to what seems to him 
 a flaw in our statutes, an inability to obtain testimony from 
 corporations whose books are elsewhere, and who may thus 
 evade, he says, to a certain extent, the sovereign will of our 
 state." 
 
 The Colonel took the paper with an admirable air of sur 
 prise, adjusted his glasses, and became absorbed in reading, 
 clearing his throat once or twice and emitting an exclama 
 tion. 
 
 "Well, if you ask me, Governor," he said, at length, "all 
 I can say is that I am astonished somebody didn't think of 
 this simple remedy before now. Many times, sir, have I seen 
 justice defeated because we had no such legislation as this." 
 
 He handed it back. The Governor studied it once more, 
 and coughed.
 
 158 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Does the penalty," he inquired, "seem to you a little 
 severe?" 
 
 "No, sir," replied the Colonel, emphatically. "Perhaps 
 it is because I am anxious, as a citizen, to see an evil abated. 
 I have had an intimate knowledge of legislation, sir, for more 
 } than twenty years in this state, and in all that time I do not 
 V remember to have seen a bill more concisely drawn, or better 
 calculated to accomplish the ends of justice. Indeed, I 
 often wondered why this very penalty was not imposed. 
 Foreign magistrates are notoriously indifferent as to affairs 
 in another state than their own. Rather than go into the 
 hands of a receiver I venture to say that hereafter, if this 
 bill is made a law, the necessary testimony will be forth 
 coming." 
 
 The Governor read the bill through again. 
 
 "If it is introduced, Colonel," he said, " the legislature and 
 the people of the state ought to have it made clear to them 
 that its aim is to remedy an injustice. A misunderstanding 
 on this point would be unfortunate." 
 
 "Most unfortunate, Governor." 
 
 "And of course," added the Governor, now addressing 
 me, "it would be improper for me to indicate what course 
 I shall pursue in regard to it if it should come to me for my 
 signature. Yet I may go so far as to say that the defect it 
 seeks to remedy seems to me a real one. Come in and see 
 me, Mr. Paret, when you are in town, and give my cordial 
 regards to Mr. Watling." 
 
 So gravely had the farce been carried on that I almost 
 laughed, despite the fact that the matter in question was a 
 serious one for me. The Governor held out his hand, and I 
 accepted my dismissal. 
 
 I had not gone fifty steps in the corridor before I heard the 
 Colonel's voice in my ear. 
 
 "We had to give him a little rope to go through with his 
 act," he whispered confidentially. "But he'll sign it all 
 right. And now, if you'll excuse me, Mr. Paret, I'll lay a 
 few mines. See you at the hotel, sir."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 159 
 
 Thus he indicated, delicately, that it would be better for me 
 to keep out of sight. On my way to the Potts House the 
 bizarre elements in the situation struck me again with consid 
 erable force. It seemed so ridiculous, so puerile to have to go 
 through with this political farce in order that a natural eco 
 nomic evolution might be achieved. Without doubt the de 
 velopment of certain industries had reached a stage where the 
 units in competition had become too small, when a greater 
 concentration of capital was necessary. Curiously enough, 
 in this mental argument of justification, I left out all consider 
 ation of the size of the probable profits to Mr. Scherer and 
 his friends. Profits and brains went together. And, since the 
 Almighty did not limit the latter, why should man attempt to 
 limit the former ? We were playing for high but justifiable 
 stakes ; and I resented the comedy which an hypocritical in 
 sistence on the forms of democracy compelled us to go through. 
 It seemed unworthy of men who controlled the destinies of 
 state and nation. The point of view, however, was consoling. 
 As the day wore on I sat in the Colonel's room, admiring the 
 skill with which he conducted the campaign : a green country 
 lawyer had been got to introduce the bill, it had been ex 
 pedited to the Committee on the Judiciary, which would have 
 an executive session immediately after dinner. I had ven 
 tured to inquire about the hearings. 
 
 "There won't be any hearings, sir," the Colonel assured 
 me. "We own that committee from top to bottom." 
 
 Indeed, by four oclock in the afternoon the message came 
 that the committee -had agreed to recommend the bill. 
 
 Shortly after that the first flurry occurred. There came 
 a knock at the door, followed by the entrance of a stocky 
 Irish American of about forty years of age, whose black hair 
 was plastered over his forehead. His sea-blue eyes had a 
 stormy look. 
 
 "Hello, Jim," said the Colonel. "I was just wondering 
 where you were." 
 
 "Sure, you must have been!" replied the gentleman 
 sarcastically.
 
 160 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 But the Colonel's geniality was unruffled. 
 
 "Mr. Maher," he said, "you ought to know Mr. Paret. 
 Mr. Maher is the representative from Ward Five of your city, 
 and we can always count on him to do the right thing, even 
 if he is a Democrat. How about it, Jim ? " 
 
 Mr. Maher relighted the stump of his cigar. 
 
 "Take a fresh one, Jim," said the Colonel, opening a 
 bureau drawer. 
 
 Mr. Maher took two. 
 
 "Say, Colonel," he demanded, "what's this bill that went 
 into the judiciary this morning?" 
 
 "What bill?" asked the Colonel, blandly. 
 
 "So you think I ain't on?" Mr. Maher inquired. 
 
 The Colonel laughed. 
 
 " Where have you been, Jim ? " 
 
 "I've been up to the city, seein' my wife that's where 
 I've been." 
 
 The Colonel smiled, as at a harmless fiction. 
 
 "Well, if you weren't here, I don't see what right you've 
 got to complain. I never leave my good Democratic friends 
 on the outside, do I ? " 
 
 "That's all right," replied Mr. Maher, doggedly, "I'm on, 
 I'm here now, and that bill in the Judiciary doesn't pass 
 without me. I guess I can stop it, too. How about a 
 thousand apiece for five of us boys ? " 
 
 "You're pretty good at a joke, Jim," remarked the Colonel, 
 stroking his goatee. 
 
 "Maybe you're looking for a little publicity in this here 
 game," retorted Mr. Maher, darkly. "Say, Colonel, ain't 
 we always treated the Railroad on the level?" 
 
 "Jim," asked the Colonel, gently, "didn't I always take 
 care of you ? " 
 
 He had laid his hand on the shoulder of Mr. Maher, who 
 appeared slightly mollified, and glanced at a massive silver 
 watch. 
 
 "Well, I'll be dropping in about eight o'clock," was his 
 significant reply, as he took his leave.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 161 
 
 "I guess we'll have to grease the wheels a little," the 
 Colonel remarked to me, and gazed at the ceiling. . . . 
 
 The telegram apropos of the Ward Five leader was by no 
 means the only cipher message I sent back during my stay. 
 I had not needed to be told that the matter in hand would 
 cost money, but Mr. Watling's parting instruction to me 
 had been to take the Colonel's advice as to specific sums, and 
 obtain confirmation from Fowndes. Nor was it any sur 
 prise to me to find Democrats on intimate terms with such 
 a stout Republican as the Colonel. Some statesman is 
 said to have declared that he knew neither Easterners nor 
 Westerners, Northerners nor Southerners, but only Americans ; 
 so Colonel Varney recognized neither Democrats nor Re 
 publicans; in our legislature party divisions were sunk in 
 a greater loyalty to the Railroad. 
 
 At the Colonel's suggestion I had laid in a liberal supply 
 of cigars and whiskey. The scene in his room that evening 
 suggested a session of a sublimated grand lodge of some secret 
 order, such were the mysterious comings and goings, knocks 
 and suspenses. One after another the "important" men 
 duly appeared and were introduced, the Colonel supplying 
 the light touch. 
 
 " Why, cuss me if it isn't Billy ! Mr. Paret, I want you 
 to shake hands with Mr. Donovan, the floor leader of the 
 'opposition/ sir. Mr. Donovan has had the habit of coming 
 up here for a friendly chat ever since he first came down to 
 the legislature. How long is it, Billy?" 
 
 "I guess it's nigh on to fifteen years, Colonel." 
 
 "Fifteen years!" echoed the Colonel, "and he's so good a 
 Democrat it hasn't changed his politics a particle." 
 
 Mr. Donovan grinned in appreciation of this thrust, helped 
 himself liberally from the bottle on the mantel, and took a 
 seat on the bed. We had a "friendly chat." 
 
 Thus I made the acquaintance also of the Hon. Joseph 
 Mecklin, Speaker of the House, who unbent in the most 
 flattering way on learning my identity. 
 
 "Mr. Paret's here on that little matter, representing
 
 162 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Watling, Fowndes and Ripon," the Colonel explained. And 
 it appeared that Mr. Mecklin knew all about the "little 
 matter," and that the mention of the firm of Watling, 
 Fowndes and Ripon had a magical effect in these parts. The 
 President of the Senate, the Hon. Lafe Giddings, went so 
 far as to say that he hoped before long to see Mr. Watling 
 in Washington. By no means the least among our callers 
 was the Hon. Fitch Truesdale, editor of the St. Helen's 
 Messenger, whose editorials were of the trite effectiveness 
 that is taken widely for wisdom, and were assiduously 
 copied every week by other state papers and labelled "Mr. 
 Truesdale's Common Sense." At countless firesides in our 
 state he was known as the spokesman of the plain man, who 
 was blissfully ignorant of the fact that Mr. Truesdale was 
 owned body and carcass by Mr. Cyrus Riddell, the principal 
 manufacturer of St. Helen's and a director in several sub 
 sidiary lines of the Railroad. In the legislature, the Hon. 
 Fitch's function was that of the moderate counsellor and bell 
 wether for new members, hence nothing could have been 
 more fitting than the choice of that gentleman for the honour 
 of moving, on the morrow, that Bill No. 709 ought to pass. 
 
 Mr. Truesdale reluctantly consented to accept a small 
 "loan" that would help to pay the mortgage on his new 
 press. . . . 
 
 When the last of the gathering had departed, about one 
 o'clock in the morning, I had added considerably to my 
 experience, gained a pretty accurate idea of who was who in 
 the legislature and politics of the state, and established 
 relationships as the Colonel reminded me likely to 
 prove valuable in the future. It seemed only gracious to 
 congratulate him on his management of the affair, so 
 far. He appeared pleased, and squeezed my hand. 
 
 "Well, sir, it did require a little delicacy of touch. And 
 if I do say it myself, it hasn't been botched," he admitted. 
 "There ain't an outsider, as far as I can learn, who has 
 caught on to the nigger in the wood-pile. That's the great 
 thing, to keep 'em ignorant as long as possible. You under-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 163 
 
 stand. They yell bloody murder when they do find out, 
 but generally it's too late, if a bill's been handled right." 
 
 I found myself speculating as to who the "outsiders" 
 might be. No Ribblevale attorneys were on the spot as 
 yet, of that I was satisfied. In the absence of these, 
 who were the opposition ? It seemed to me as though I had 
 interviewed that day every man in the legislature. 
 
 I was very tired. But when I got into bed, it was impossi 
 ble to sleep. My eyes smarted from the tobacco smoke; 
 and the events of the day, in disorderly manner, kept running 
 through my head. The tide of my exhilaration had ebbed, 
 and I found myself struggling against a revulsion caused, 
 apparently, by the contemplation of Colonel Varney and 
 his associates ; the instruments, in brief, by which our triumph 
 over our opponents was to be effected. And that same idea 
 which, when launched amidst the surroundings of the Boyne 
 Club, had seemed so brilliant, now took on an aspect of tawdri- 
 ness. Another thought intruded itself, that of Mr. Pugh, 
 the president of the Ribblevale Company. My father had 
 known him, and some years before I had travelled halfway 
 across the state in his company ; his kindliness had impressed 
 me. He had spent a large part of his business life, I knew, 
 in building up the Ribblevale, and now it was to be wrested 
 from him; he was to be set aside, perhaps forced to start 
 all over again when old age was coming on ! In vain I ac 
 cused myself of sentimentality, and summoned all my argu 
 ments to prove that in commerce efficiency must be the only 
 test. The image of Mr. Pugh would not down. 
 
 I got up and turned on the light,- and took refuge in a 
 novel I had in my bag. Presently I grew calmer. I had 
 chosen. I had succeeded. And now that I had my finger 
 at last on the nerve of power, it was no time to weaken. 
 
 It was half-past six when I awoke and went to the window, 
 relieved to find that the sun had scattered my morbid fancier
 
 164 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 with the darkness; and I speculated, as I dressed, whether 
 the thing called conscience were not, after all, a matter of 
 nerves. I went downstairs through the tobacco-stale at 
 mosphere of the lobby into the fresh air and sparkly sun 
 light of the mild February morning, and leaving the business 
 district I , reached the residence portion of the little town. 
 The front steps of some of the comfortable houses were being 
 swept by industrious servant girls, and out of the chimneys 
 twisted, fantastically, rich blue smoke; the bare branches 
 of the trees were silver-grey against the sky; gaining at 
 last an old-fashioned, wooden bridge, I stood for a while 
 gazing at the river, over the shallows of which the spend 
 thrift hand of nature had flung a shower of diamonds. And I 
 reflected that the world was for the strong, for him who dared 
 reach out his hand and take what it offered. It was not money 
 we coveted, we Americans, but power, the self-expression 
 conferred by power. A single experience such as I had had 
 the night before would suffice to convince any sane man 
 that democracy was a failure, that the world-old principle 
 of aristocracy would assert itself, that the attempt of our 
 ancestors to curtail political power had merely resulted in 
 the growth of another and greater economic power that 
 bade fair to be limitless. As I walked slowly back into town 
 I felt a reluctance to return to the noisy hotel, and finding 
 myself in front of a little restaurant on a side street, I entered 
 it. There was but one other customer in the place, and he 
 was seated on the far side of the counter, with a newspaper 
 in front of him ; and while I was ordering my breakfast I 
 was vaguely aware that the newspaper had dropped, and that 
 he was looking at me. In the slight interval that elapsed 
 before my brain could register his identity I experienced a 
 distinct shock of resentment; a sense of the reintrusion of 
 an antagonistic value at a moment when it was most unwel 
 come. . . . 
 
 The man had risen and was coming around the counter. 
 He was Hermann Krebs. 
 
 "Why, Paret!" I heard him say.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 165 
 
 "You here?" I exclaimed. 
 
 He did not seem to notice the lack of cordiality in my 
 tone. He appeared so genuinely glad to see me again that 
 I instantly became rather ashamed of my ill nature. 
 
 "Yes, I'm here in the legislature," he informed me. 
 
 "A Solon!" 
 
 "Exactly." He smiled. "And you?" he inquired. 
 
 "Oh, I'm only a spectator. Down here for a day or two." 
 
 He was still lanky, his clothes gave no evidence of an in 
 creased prosperity, but his complexion was good, his skin had 
 cleared. I was more than ever baffled by a resolute good 
 humour, a simplicity that was not innocence, a whimsical 
 touch seemingly indicative of a state of mind that refused to 
 take too seriously certain things on which I set store. What 
 right had he to be contented with life ? 
 
 "Well, I too am only a spectator here," he laughed. "I'm 
 neither fish, flesh nor fowl, nor good red herring." 
 
 "You were going into the law, weren't you?" I asked. 
 "I remember you said something about it that day we met 
 at Beverly Farms." 
 
 "Yes, I managed it, after all. Then I went back home 
 to Elkington to try to make a living." 
 
 "But somehow I have never thought of you as being 
 likely to develop political aspirations, Krebs," I said. 
 
 "I should say not!" he exclaimed. 
 
 "Yet here you are, launched upon a political career ! How 
 did it happen?" 
 
 "Oh, I'm not worrying about the career," he assured me. 
 "I got here by accident, and I'm afraid it won't happen 
 again in a hurry. You see, the hands in those big mills we 
 have in Elkington sprang a surprise on the machine, and the 
 first thing I knew I was nominated for the legislature. A 
 committee came to my boarding-house and told me, ami 
 there was the deuce to pay, right off. The Railroad politi 
 cians turned in and worked for the Democratic candidate, 
 of course, and the Hutchinses, who own the mills, tried 
 through emissaries to intimidate their operatives."
 
 166 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "And then?" Tasked. 
 
 "Well, I'm here," he said. 
 
 "Wouldn't you be accomplishing more," I inquired, "if 
 you hadn't antagonized the Hutchinses?" 
 
 "It depends upon what you mean by accomplishment," 
 he answered, so mildly that I felt more ruffled than ever. 
 
 "Well, from what you say, I suppose you're going in for 
 reform, that these workmen up at Elkington are not satisfied 
 with their conditions and imagine you can help to better 
 them. Now, provided the conditions are not as good as 
 they might be, how are you going to improve them if you 
 find yourself isolated here, as you say?" 
 
 "In other words, I should cooperate with Colonel Varney 
 and other disinterested philanthropists," he supplied, and I 
 realized that I was losing my temper. 
 
 "Well, what can you do?" I inquired defiantly. 
 
 "I can find out what's going on," he said. "I have al 
 ready learned something, by the way." 
 
 "And then?" I asked, wondering whether the implication 
 were personal. 
 
 "Then I can help disseminate the knowledge. I may 
 be wrong, but I have an idea that when the people of this 
 country learn how their legislatures are conducted they will 
 want to change things." 
 
 "That's right I" echoed the waiter, who had come up with 
 my griddle-cakes. "And you're the man to tell 'em, Mr. 
 1 Krebs." 
 
 "It will need several thousand of us to do that, I'm 
 afraid," said Krebs, returning his smile. 
 
 My distaste for the situation became more acute, but I 
 felt that I was thrown on the defensive. I could not re 
 treat, now. 
 
 "I think you are wrong," I declared, when the waiter had 
 departed to attend to another customer. "The people 
 the great majority of them, at least are indifferent, they 
 don't want to be bothered with politics. There will always 
 be labour agitation, of course, the more wages those fel-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 167 
 
 lows get, the more they want. We pay the highest wages 
 in the world to-day, and the standard of living is higher in 
 this country than anywhere else. They'd ruin our pros 
 perity, if we'd let 'em." 
 
 "How about the thousands of families who don't earn 
 enough to live decently even in tunes of prosperity?" in 
 quired Krebs. 
 
 "It's hard, I'll admit, but the inefficient and the shift 
 less are bound to suffer, no matter what form of government 
 you adopt." 
 
 "You talk about ' standards of living, ' I could show you 
 some examples of standards to make your heart sick," he 
 said. "What you don't realize, perhaps, is that low stand 
 ards help to increase the inefficient of whom you complain." 
 
 He smiled rather sadly. "The prosperity you are advo 
 cating," he added, after a moment, "is a mere fiction, it is 
 gorging the few at the expense of the many. And what is 
 being done in this country is to store up an explosive gas that 
 some day will blow your superstructure to atoms if you don't 
 wake up in time." 
 
 "Isn't that a rather one-sided view, too?" I suggested. 
 
 "I've no doubt it may appear so, but take the proceedings 
 in this legislature. I've no doubt you know something 
 about them, and that you would maintain they are justified 
 on account of the indifference of the public, and of other 
 reasons, but I can cite an instance that is simply legalized 
 thieving." For the first time a note of indignation crept 
 into Krebs's voice. "Last night I discovered by a mere 
 accident, in talking to a man who came in on a late train, 
 that a bill introduced yesterday, which is being rushed 
 through the Judiciary Committee of the House an ap 
 parently innocent little bill will enable, if it becomes a 
 law, the Boyne Iron Works, of your city, to take possession 
 of the Ribblevale Steel Company, lock, stock, and barrel. 
 And I am told it was conceived by a lawyer who claims to 
 be a respectable member of his profession, and who has 
 extraordinary ability, Theodore Watling."
 
 168 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Krebs put his hand in his pocket and drew out a paper. 
 
 "Here's a copy of it, House Bill 709." His expression 
 suddenly changed. "Perhaps Mr. Watling is a friend of 
 yours." 
 
 "I'm with his firm," I replied. . . . 
 
 Krebs's fingers closed over the paper, crumpling it. 
 
 " Oh, then, you know about this," he said. He was putting 
 the paper back into his pocket when I took it from him. But 
 my adroitness, so carefully schooled, seemed momentarily 
 to have deserted me. What should I say? It was neces 
 sary to decide quickly. 
 
 "Don't you take rather a prejudiced view of this, 
 Krebs ? " I said. " Upon my word, I can't see why you should 
 accept a rumour running around the lobbies that Mr. Wat- 
 ling drafted this bill for a particular purpose." 
 
 He was silent. But his eyes did not leave my face. 
 
 "Why should any sensible man, a member of the legisla 
 ture, take stock in that kind of gossip ? " I insisted. " Why not 
 judge this bill by its face, without heeding a cock and bull 
 story as to how it may have originated? It is a good bill, 
 or a bad bill? Let's see what it says." 
 
 I read it. 
 
 "So far as I can see, it is legislation which we ought to 
 have had long ago, and tends to compel a publicity in cor 
 poration affairs that is much needed, to put a stop to prac 
 tices which every decent citizen deplores." 
 
 He drew the paper out of my hand. 
 
 "You needn't go on, Paret," he told me. "It's no use." 
 
 "Well, I'm sorry we don't agree," I said, and got up. I 
 left him twisting the paper in his fingers. 
 
 Beside the clerk's desk in the Potts House, relating one 
 of his anecdotes, I spied Colonel Varney, and managed 
 presently to draw him upstairs to his room. 
 
 "What's the matter?" he asked.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 169 
 
 "Do you know a man named Krebs in the House?" I 
 said. 
 
 "From Elkington? Why, that's the man the Hutchinses 
 let slip through, the Hutchinses, who own the mills over 
 there. The agitators put up a job on them." The Colonel 
 was no longer the genial and social purveyor of anecdotes. 
 He had become tense, alert, suspicious. " What's he up to ? " 
 
 "He's found out about this bill," I replied. 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "I don't know. But someone told him that it originated 
 in our office, and that we were going to use it in our suit 
 against the Ribblevale." 
 
 I related the circumstances of my running across Krebs, 
 speaking of having known him at Harvard. Colonel Varney 
 uttered an oath, and strode across to the window, where he 
 stood looking down into the street from between the lace cur 
 tains. 
 
 "We'll have to attend to him, right off," he said. 
 
 I was surprised to find myself resenting the imputation, 
 and deeply. "I'm afraid he's one of those who can't be 
 ' attended to, ' " I answered. 
 
 "You mean that he's in the employ of the Ribblevale 
 people?" the Colonel inquired. 
 
 "I don't mean anything of the kind," I retorted, with 
 more heat, perhaps, than I realized. The Colonel looked 
 at me queerly. 
 
 "That's all right, Mr. Paret. Of course I don't want to 
 question your judgment, sir. And you say he's a friend of 
 yours." 
 
 "I said I knew him at college." 
 
 "But you will pardon me," the Colonel went on, "when 
 I tell you that I've had some experience with that breed, 
 and I have yet to see one of 'em you couldn't come to terms 
 with in some way in some way" he added, significantly. 
 I did not pause to reflect that the Colonel's attitude, from 
 his point of view (yes, and from mine, had I not adopted 
 it ?) was the logical one. In that philosophy every man had
 
 170 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 his price, or his weakness. Yet, such is the inconsistency 
 of human nature, I was now unable to contemplate this 
 attitude with calmness. 
 
 "Mr. Krebs is a lawyer. Has he accepted a pass from 
 the Railroad?" I demanded, knowing the custom of that 
 corporation of conferring this delicate favour on the prom 
 ising young talent in my profession. 
 
 "I reckon he's never had the chance," said Mr. Varney. 
 
 "Well, has he taken a pass as a member of the legislature ? " 
 
 "No, I remember looking that up when he first came 
 down. Sent that back, if I recall the matter correctly." 
 Colonel Varney went to a desk in the corner of the room, 
 unlocked it, drew forth a black book, and running his 
 fingers through the pages stopped at the letter K. "Yes, 
 sent back his legislative pass, but I've known 'em to do 
 that when they were holding out for something more. There 
 must be somebody who can get close to him." 
 
 The Colonel ruminated awhile. Then he strode to the 
 door and called out to the group of men who were always 
 lounging in the hall. 
 
 "Tell Alf Young I want to see him, Fred." 
 
 I waited, by no means free from uneasiness and anxiety, 
 from a certain lack of self-respect that was unfamiliar. Mr. 
 Young, the Colonel explained, was a legal light in Galesburg, 
 near Elkington, the Railroad lawyer there. And when 
 at last Mr. Young appeared he proved to be an oily gentle 
 man of about forty, inclining to stoutness, with one of 
 those "blue," shaven faces. 
 
 "Want me, Colonel?" he inquired blithely, when the door 
 had closed behind him ; and added obsequiously, when in 
 troduced to me, "Glad to meet you, Mr. Paret. My re 
 gards to Mr. Watling, when you go back." 
 
 "Alf," demanded the Colonel, "what do you know of 
 this fellow Krebs?" 
 
 Mr. Young laughed. Krebs was "nutty," he declared 
 that was all there was to it. 
 
 "Won't he listen to reason?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 171 
 
 "It's been tried, Colonel. Say, he wouldn't know a 
 hundred-dollar bill, if you showed him one." 
 
 "What does he want?" 
 
 "Oh, something, that's sure, they all want something." 
 Mr. Young shrugged his shoulder expressively, and by a 
 skilful manipulation of his lips shifted his cigar from one 
 side of his mouth to the other without raising his hands. 
 "But it ain't money. I guess he's got a notion that later 
 on the labour unions'll send him to the United States Senate 
 some day. He's no slouch, either, when it comes to law. I 
 can tell you that." 
 
 "No no flaw in his record? " Colonel Varney's agate 
 eyes sought those of Mr. Young, meaningly. 
 
 "That's been tried, too," declared the Galesburg attorney. 
 "Say, you can believe it or not, but we've never dug any 
 thing up so far. He's been too slick for us, I guess." 
 
 " Well," exclaimed the Colonel, at length, " let him squeal 
 
 and be d d ! He can't do any more than make a noise. 
 
 Only I hoped we'd be able to grease this thing along and slide 
 it through the Senate this afternoon before they got wind 
 of it." 
 
 "He'll squeal, all right, until you smother him," Mr. 
 Young observed. 
 
 "We'll smother him some day!" replied the Colonel, 
 savagely. 
 
 Mr. Young laughed. 
 
 But as I made my way toward the State House I was con 
 scious of a feeling of relief. I had no sooner gained a front 
 seat in the gallery of the House of Representatives when the 
 members rose, the Senate marched gravely in, the Speaker 
 stopped jesting with the Chaplain, and over the Chaplain's 
 face came suddenly an agonized expression. Folding his 
 hands across his stomach he began to call on God with ter 
 rific fervour, in an intense and resounding voice. I was struck 
 suddenly by the irony of it all. Why have a legislature when 
 Colonel Paul Varney was so efficient ! The legislature was 
 a mere sop to democratic prejudice, to pray over it height-
 
 172 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 ened the travesty. Suppose there were a God after all ? not 
 necessarily the magnified monarch to whom these pseudo- 
 democrats prayed, but an Intelligent Force that makes for 
 righteousness. How did He, or It, like to be trifled with in 
 this way? And, if He existed, would not His disgust be 
 immeasurable as He contemplated that unctuous figure in 
 the "Prince Albert" coat, who pretended to represent Him? 
 ... As the routine business began I searched for Krebs, 
 to find him presently at a desk beside a window in the rear of 
 the hall making notes on a paper; there was, confessedly, 
 little satisfaction in the thought that the man whose gaunt 
 features I contemplated was merely one of those impractical 
 idealists who beat themselves to pieces against the forces 
 that sway the world and must forever sway it. I should be 
 compelled to admit that he represented something unique 
 in that assembly if he had the courage to get up and oppose 
 House Bill 709. I watched him narrowly; the suggestion 
 intruded itself perhaps he had been "seen," as the Colo 
 nel expressed it. I repudiated it. I grew impatient, 
 feverish; the monotonous reading of the clerk was inter 
 rupted now and then by the sharp tones of the Speaker as 
 signing his various measures to this or that committee, " un 
 less objection is offered," while the members moved about 
 and murmured among themselves; Krebs had stopped 
 making notes ; he was looking out of the window. At last, 
 without any change of emphasis in his droning voice, the 
 clerk announced the recommendation of the Committee on 
 Judiciary that House Bill 709 ought to pass. 
 
 Down in front a man had risen from his seat the felic 
 itous Mr. Truesdale. Glancing around at his fellow-mem 
 bers he then began to explain in the impressive but conver 
 sational tone of one whose counsels are in the habit of 
 being listened to, that this was merely a little measure to 
 remedy a flaw in the statutes. Mr. Truesdale believed in 
 corporations when corporations were good, and this bill was 
 calculated to make them good, to put an end to jugglery and 
 concealment. Our great state, he said, should be in the fore-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 173 
 
 front of such wise legislation, which made for justice and 
 a proper publicity ; but the bill in question was of greater 
 interest to lawyers than to laymen, a committee composed 
 largely of lawyers had recommended it unanimously, and he 
 was sure that no opposition would develop in the House. 
 In order not to take up their time he asked, therefore, that 
 it be immediately put on its second and third reading and 
 allowed to pass. 
 
 He sat down, and I looked at Krebs. Could he, could any 
 man, any lawyer, have the presumption to question such ai> 
 obviously desirable measure, to arraign the united judgment 
 of the committee's legal talent? Such was the note Mr. 
 Truesdale so admirably struck. As though fascinated, 1 
 continued to gaze at Krebs. I hated him, I desired to see 
 him humilated, and yet amazingly I found myself wishing 
 with almost equal vehemence that he would be true to him 
 self. He was rising, slowly, timidly, I thought, his hand 
 clutching his desk lid, his voice sounding wholly inadequate 
 as he addressed the Speaker. The Speaker hesitated, his 
 tone palpably supercilious. 
 
 "The gentleman from from Elkington, Mr. Krebs." 
 
 There was a craning of necks, a staring, a tittering. I 
 burned with vicarious shame as Krebs stood there awk 
 wardly, his hand still holding the desk. There were cries of 
 " louder" when he began ; some picked up their newspapers, 
 while others started conversations. The Speaker rapped with 
 his gavel, and I failed to hear the opening words. Krebs paused, 
 and began again. His speech did not, at first, flow easily. 
 
 "Mr. Speaker, I rise to protest against this bill, which in 
 my opinion is not so innocent as the gentleman from St. 
 Helen's would have the House believe. It is on a par, indeed, 
 with other legislation that in past years has been engineered 
 through this legislature under the guise of beneficent law. 
 No, not on a par. It is the most arrogant, the most mon 
 strous example of special legislation of them all. And while 
 I do not expect to be able to delay its passage much longer 
 than the time I shall be on my feet "
 
 174 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Then why not sit down?" came a voice, just audible. 
 
 As he turned swiftly toward the offender his profile had an 
 eagle-like effect that startled me, seemingly realizing a new 
 quality in the man. It was as though he had needed just 
 the stimulus of that interruption to electrify and transform 
 him. His awkwardness disappeared ; and if he was a little 
 bombastic, a little "young," he spoke with the fire of con 
 viction. 
 
 "Because," he cried, " because I should lose my self-respect 
 for life if I sat here and permitted the political organization 
 of a railroad, the members of which are here under the guise 
 of servants of the people, to cow me into silence. And if it 
 be treason to mention the name of that Railroad in connec 
 tion, with its political tyranny, then make the most of it." 
 He let go of the desk, and tapped the copy of the bill. " What 
 are the facts ? The Boyne Iron Works, under the presidency 
 of Adolf Scherer, has been engaged in litigation with the Rib- 
 blevale Steel Company for some years : and this bill is in 
 tended to put into the hands of the attorneys for Mr. Scherer 
 certain information that will enable him to get possession 
 of the property. Gentlemen, that is what 'legal practice* 
 has descended to in the hands of respectable lawyers. This 
 device originated with the resourceful Mr. Theodore Wat- 
 ling, and if it had not had the approval of Mr. Miller Gorse, 
 it would never have got any farther than the judiciary com 
 mittee. It was confided to the skilful care of Colonel Paul 
 Varney to be steered through this legislature, as hundreds 
 of other measures have been steered through, without 
 unnecessary noise. It may be asked why the Railroad should 
 bother itself by lending its political organization to private 
 corporations? I will tell you. Because corporations like 
 the Boyne corporation are a part of a network of interests, 
 these corporations aid the Railroad to maintain its mo 
 nopoly, and in return receive rebates." 
 
 Krebs had raised his voice as the murmurs became louder. 
 At this point a sharp-faced lawyer from Belfast got to his feet 
 and objected that the gentleman from Elkington was wasting
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 175 
 
 the time of the House, indulging in hearsay. His remarks 
 were not germane, etc. The Speaker rapped again, with a 
 fine show of impartiality, and cautioned the member from 
 Elkington. 
 
 "Very well," replied Krebs. "I have said what I wanted 
 to say on that score, and I know it to be the truth. And if 
 this House does not find it germane, the day is coming when 
 its constituents will." 
 
 Whereupon he entered into a discussion of the bill, dis 
 secting it with more calmness, with an ability that must 
 have commanded, even from some hostile minds, an unwill 
 ing respect. The penalty, he said, was outrageous, hitherto 
 unheard of in law, putting a corporation in the hands of a 
 receiver, at the mercy of those who coveted it, because one 
 of its officers refused, or was unable, to testify. He might 
 be in China, in Timbuctoo when the summons was delivered 
 at his last or usual place of abode. Here was an enormity, 
 an exercise of tyrannical power exceeding all bounds, a 
 travesty on popular government. . . . He ended by point 
 ing out the significance of the fact that the committee had 
 given no hearings ; by declaring that if the bill became a law, 
 it would inevitably react upon the heads of those who were 
 responsible for it. 
 
 He sat down, and there was a flutter of applause from the 
 scattered audience in the gallery. 
 
 " By God, that's the only man in the whole place !" 
 
 I was aware, for the first time, of a neighbour at my side, 
 a solid, red-faced man, evidently a farmer. His trousers 
 were tucked into his boots, and his gnarled and powerful 
 hands, ingrained with dirt, clutched the arms of the seat as 
 he leaned forward. 
 
 "Didn't he just naturally lambaste 'em?" he cried excit 
 edly. "They'll down him, I guess, but say, he's right. 
 A man would lose his self-respect if he didn't let out his mind 
 at them boss thieves, wouldn't he? What's that fellow's 
 name?" 
 
 I told him.
 
 176 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Krebs," he repeated. "I want to remember that. 
 Durned if I don't shake hands with him." 
 
 His excitement astonished me. Would the public feel like 
 that, if they only knew? . . . The Speaker's gavel had 
 come down like a pistol shot. 
 
 One "war-hoss" as my neighbour called then: after 
 another proceeded to crush the member from Elkington. It 
 was, indeed, very skilfully done, and yet it was a process 
 from which I did not derive, somehow, much pleasure. Colo 
 nel Varney's army had been magnificently trained to meet 
 just this kind of situation : some employed ridicule, others 
 declared, in impassioned tones, that the good name of their 
 state had been wantonly assailed, and pointed fervently to 
 portraits on the walls of patriots of the past, sentiments 
 that drew applause from the fickle gallery. One gentleman 
 observed that the obsession of a "railroad machine" was a 
 sure symptom of a certain kind of insanity, of which the first 
 speaker had given many other evidences. The farmer at my 
 side remained staunch. 
 
 "They can't fool me," he said angrily, "I know 'em. Do 
 you see that fellow gettin' up to talk now? Well, I could 
 tell you a few things about him, all right. He comes from 
 Glasgow, and his name's Letchworth. He's done more 
 harm in his life than all the criminals he's kept out of prison, 
 belongs to one of the old families down there, too." 
 
 I had, indeed, remarked Letchworth's face, which seemed 
 to me peculiarly evil, its lividity enhanced by a shock of 
 grey hair. His method was withering sarcasm, and he was 
 clearly unable to control his animus. . . . 
 
 No champion appeared to support Krebs, who sat pale 
 and tense while this denunciation of him was going on. 
 Finally he got the floor. His voice trembled a little, whether 
 with passion, excitement, or nervousness it was impossible 
 to say. But he contented himself with a brief defiance. If 
 the bill passed, he declared, the men who voted for it, the 
 men who were behind it, would ultimately be driven from 
 political Me by an indignant public. He had a higher opin-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 177 
 
 ion of the voters of the state than those who accused him of 
 slandering it, than those who sat silent and had not lifted 
 their voices against this crime. 
 
 When the bill was put to a vote he demanded a roll call. 
 Ten members besides himself were recorded against House 
 Bill No. 709! 
 
 In spite of this overwhelming triumph my feelings were 
 not wholly those of satisfaction when I returned to the hotel 
 and listened to the exultations and denunciations of such poli 
 ticians as Letchworth, Young, and Colonel Varney. Perhaps 
 an image suggesting Hermann Krebs as some splendid animal 
 at bay, dragged down by the hounds, is too strong : he had 
 been ingloriously crushed, and defeat, even for the sake of 
 conviction, was not an inspiring spectacle. ... As the 
 chase swept on over his prostrate figure I rapidly regained 
 poise and a sense of proportion; a "master of life" could 
 not permit himself to be tossed about by sentimentality; 
 and gradually I grew ashamed of my bad quarter of an hour 
 in the gallery of the House, and of the effect of it which 
 lingered awhile as of a weakness suddenly revealed, which 
 must at all costs be overcome. I began to see something 
 dramatic and sensational in Krebs's performance. ... 
 
 The Ribblevale Steel Company was the real quarry, after 
 all. And such had been the expedition, the skill and secrecy, 
 with which our affair was conducted, that before the Ribble 
 vale lawyers could arrive, alarmed and breathless, the bill 
 had passed the House, and their only real chance of halting 
 it had been lost. For the Railroad controlled the House, 
 not by owning the individuals composing it, but through the 
 leaders who dominated it, men like Letchworth and Trues- 
 dale. These, and Colonel Varney, had seen to it that men 
 who had any parliamentary ability had been attended to ; all 
 save Krebs, who had proved a surprise. There were indeed 
 certain members who, although they had railroad passes in 
 their pockets (which were regarded as just perquisites,
 
 178 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the Railroad being so rich !), would have opposed the bill if 
 they had felt sufficiently sure of themselves to cope with such 
 veterans as Letchworth. Many of these had allowed them 
 selves to be won over or cowed by the oratory which had 
 crushed Krebs. 
 
 Nor did the Ribblevale people be it recorded scruple 
 to fight fire with fire. Their existence, of course, was at stake, 
 and there was no public to appeal to. A part of the legal 
 army that rushed to the aid of our adversaries spent the 
 afternoon and most of the night organizing all those who 
 could be induced by one means or another to reverse their 
 sentiments, and in searching for the few who had grievances 
 against the existing power. The following morning a motion 
 was introduced to reconsider; and in the debate that fol 
 lowed, Krebs, still defiant, took an active part. But the 
 resolution required a two-thirds vote, and was lost. 
 
 When the battle was shifted to the Senate it was as good 
 as lost. The Judiciary Committee of the august body did 
 indeed condescend to give hearings, at which the Ribblevale 
 lawyers exhausted their energy and ingenuity without result : 
 with only two dissenting votes the bill was calmly passed. 
 In vain was the Governor besieged, entreated, threatened, 
 it was said ; Mr. Trulease had informed protesters so 
 Colonel Varney gleefully reported that he had "become 
 fully convinced of the inherent justice of the measure." On 
 Saturday morning he signed it, and it became a law. ... I 
 
 Colonel Varney, as he accompanied me to the train, did' 
 not conceal his jubilation. 
 
 " Perhaps I ought not to say it, Mr. Paret, but it couldn't 
 have been done neater. That's the art in these little affairs, 
 to get 'em runnin' fast, to get momentum on 'em before the 
 other party wakes up, and then he can't stop 'em." As he 
 shook hands in farewell he added, with more gravity : " We'll 
 see each other often, sir, I guess. My very best regards to 
 Mr. Watling." 
 
 Needless to say, I had not confided to him the part I had 
 played in originating House Bill No. 709, now a law of the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 179 
 
 state. But as the train rolled on through the sunny winter 
 landscape a sense of well-being, of importance and power 
 began to steal through me. I was victoriously bearing 
 home my first scalp, one which was by no means to be 
 despised. ... It was not until we reached Rossiter, about 
 five o'clock, that I was able to get the evening newspapers. 
 Such was the perfection of the organization of which I might 
 now call myself an integral part that the "best" publications 
 contained only the barest mention, and that in the legis 
 lative news, of the signing of the bill. I read with com 
 placency and even with amusement the flaring headlines I 
 had anticipated in Mr. Lawler's Pilot. 
 
 "The Governor Signs It 1" 
 
 " Special legislation, forced through by the Railroad Lobby, 
 which will drive honest corporations from this state." 
 
 "Ribblevale Steel Company the Victim." 
 
 It was common talk in the capital, the article went on to 
 say, that Theodore Watling himself had drawn up the 
 measure. . . . Perusing the editorial page my eye fell on 
 the name, Krebs. One member of the legislature above all 
 deserved the gratitude of the people of the state, the 
 member from Elkington. "An unknown man, elected in 
 spite of the opposition of the machine, he had dared to raise 
 his voice against this iniquity," etc., etc. 
 
 We had won. That was the essential thing. And my 
 legal experience had taught me that victory counts ; defeat 
 is soon forgotten. Even the discontented, half-baked and 
 heterogeneous element from which the Pilot got its circu 
 lation had short memories.
 
 XI 
 
 THE next morning, which was Sunday, I went to Mr. Wat- 
 ling's house in Fillmore Street a new residence at that 
 time, being admired as the dernier cri in architecture. It 
 had a mediaeval look, queer dormers in a steep roof of red 
 tiles, leaded windows buried deep, in walls of rough stone. 
 Emerging from the recessed vestibule on a level with the 
 street were the Watling twins, aglow with health, dressed 
 in identical costumes of blue. They had made their bow to 
 society that winter. 
 
 "Why, here's Hugh!" said Frances. "Doesn't he look 
 pleased with himself?" 
 
 "He's come to take us to church," said Janet. 
 
 "Oh, he's much too important," said Frances. "He's 
 made a killing of some sort, haven't you, Hugh?" . . . 
 
 I rang the bell and stood watching them as they departed, 
 reflecting that I was thirty-two years of age and unmarried. 
 Mr. Watling, surrounded with newspapers and seated before 
 his library fire, glanced up at me with a welcoming smile: 
 how had I borne the legislative baptism of fire? Such, I 
 knew, was its implication. 
 
 "Everything went through according to schedule, eh? 
 Well, I congratulate you, Hugh," he said. 
 
 "Oh, I didn't have much to do with it," I answered, smil 
 ing back at him. "I kept out of sight." 
 
 "That's an art in itself." 
 
 " I had an opportunity, at close range, to study the methods 
 of our lawmakers." 
 
 "They're not particularly edifying," Mr. Watling replied. 
 "But they seem, unfortunately, to be necessary." 
 
 180
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 181 
 
 Such had been my own thought. 
 
 "Who is this man Krebs?" he inquired suddenly. "And 
 why didn't Varney get hold of him and make him listen to 
 reason?" 
 
 " I'm afraid it wouldn't have been any use," I replied. " He 
 was in my class at Harvard. I knew him slightly. He 
 worked his way through, and had a pretty hard time of it. 
 I imagine it affected his ideas." 
 
 "What is he, a Socialist?" 
 
 "Something of the sort." In Theodore Watling's vigor 
 ous, sanity-exhaling presence Krebs's act appeared fantastic, 
 ridiculous. "He has queer notions about a new kind of 
 democracy which he says is coming. I think he is the kind 
 of man who would be willing to die for it." 
 
 "What, in these days!" Mr. Watling looked at me in 
 credulously. " If that's so, we must keep an eye on him, 
 a sincere fanatic is a good deal more dangerous than a re 
 former who wants something. There are such men," he 
 added, " but they are rare. How was the Governor, 
 Trulease ? " he asked suddenly. " Tractable ? " 
 
 "Behaved like a lamb, although he insisted upon going 
 through with his little humbug," I said. 
 
 Mr. Watling laughed. "They always do," he observed, 
 "and waste a lot of valuable time. You'll find some light 
 cigars in the corner, Hugh." 
 
 I sat down beside him and we spent the morning going 
 over the details of the Ribblevale suit, Mr. Watling delegat 
 ing to me certain matters connected with it of a kind with 
 Avhich I had not hitherto been entrusted ; and he spoke again, 
 before I left, of his intention of taking me into the firm as soon 
 as the affair could be arranged. Walking homeward, with 
 my mind intent upon things to come, I met my mother at 
 the corner of Lyme Street coming from church. Her face 
 lighted up at sight of me. 
 
 " Have you been working to-day, Hugh ? " she asked. 
 
 I explained that I had spent the morning with Mr. Wat- 
 ling.
 
 182 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " I'll tell you a secret, mother. I'm going to be taken into 
 the firm." 
 
 "Oh, my dear, I'm so glad!" she exclaimed. "I often 
 think, if only your father were alive, how happy he would be, 
 and how proud of you. I wish he could know. Perhaps 
 he does know." 
 
 Theodore Watling had once said to me that the man who 
 can best keep his own counsel is the best counsel for other 
 men to keep. I did not go about boasting of the part I had 
 played in originating the now famous Bill No. 709, the pas 
 sage of which had brought about the capitulation of the 
 Ribblevale Steel Company to our clients. But Ralph Ham- 
 bleton knew of it, of course. 
 
 "That was a pretty good thing you pulled qff, Hughie," 
 he said. " I didn't think you had it in you." 
 
 It was rank patronage, of course, yet I was secretly pleased. 
 As the years went on I was thrown more and more with him, 
 though in boyhood there had been between us no bond of 
 sympathy. About this time he was beginning to increase 
 very considerably the Hambleton fortune, and a little later 
 I became counsel for the Crescent Gas and Electric Company, 
 in which he had shrewdly gained a controlling interest. Even 
 toward the colossal game of modern finance his attitude was , 
 characteristically that of the dilettante, of the amateur ; he \ 
 played it, as it were, contemptuously, even as he had played 
 poker at Harvard, with a cynical audacity that had a pecul 
 iarly disturbing effect upon his companions. He bluffed, he 
 raised the limit in spite of protests, and when he lost one 
 always had the feeling that he would ultimately get his 
 money back twice over. At the conferences in the Boyne 
 Club, which he often attended, his manner toward Mr. Dick 
 inson and Mr. Scherer and even toward Miller Gorse was 
 frequently one of thinly veiled amusement at their serious 
 ness. I often wondered that they did not resent it. But 
 he was a privileged person.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 183 
 
 His cousin, Ham Durrett, whose inheritance was even 
 greater than Ralph's had been, had also become a privileged 
 person whose comings and goings and more reputable doings 
 were often recorded in the newspapers. Ham had attained 
 to what Gene Hollister aptly but inadvertently called " noto 
 riety" : as Ralph wittily remarked, Ham gave to polo and 
 women that which might have gone into high finance. He 
 spent much of his time in the East ; his conduct there and 
 at home would once have created a black scandal in our 
 community, but we were gradually leaving our Calvinism 
 behind us and growing more tolerant : we were ready to 
 forgive much to wealth especially if it was inherited. 
 Hostesses lamented the fact that Ham was "wild," but they 
 asked him to dinners and dances to meet their daughters. 
 If some moralist better educated and more far-seeing than 
 Perry Blackwood (for Perry had become a moralist) had 
 told these hostesses that Hambleton Durrett was a victim 
 of our new civilization, they would have raised their eye 
 brows. They deplored while they coveted. If Ham had 
 been told he was a victim of any sort, he would have laughed. 
 He enjoyed life; he was genial and jovial, both lavish and 
 parsimonious, this latter characteristic being the curious 
 survival of the trait of the ancestors to which he owed his 
 millions. He was growing even heavier, and decidedly red 
 in the face. 
 
 Perry used to take Ralph to task for not saving Ham from 
 his iniquities, and Ralph would reply that Ham was going 
 to the devil anyway, and not even the devil himself could 
 stop him. 
 
 "You can stop him, and you know it," Perry retorted 
 indignantly. 
 
 "What do you want me to do with him?" asked Ralph. 
 "Convert him to the saintly life I lead?" 
 
 This was a poser. 
 
 "That's a fact," said Perry, "you're no better than he is." 
 
 "I don't know what you mean by ' better, '" retorted 
 Ralph, grinning. "I'm wiser, that's all." (We had been
 
 184 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 talking about the ethics of business when Perry had switched 
 off to Ham.) " I believe, at least, in restraint of trade. Hani 
 doesn't believe in restraint of any kind." 
 
 When, therefore, the news suddenly began to be circulated 
 in the Boyne Club that Ham was showing a tendency to 
 straighten up, surprise and incredulity were genuine. He 
 was drinking less, much less ; and it was said that he 
 had severed certain ties that need not again be definitely 
 mentioned. The theory of religious regeneration not being 
 tenable, it was naturally supposed that he had fallen in love ; 
 the identity of the unknown lady becoming a fruitful sub 
 ject of speculation among the feminine portion of society. 
 The announcement of the marriage of Hambleton Durrett 
 would be news of the first magnitude, to be absorbed eagerly 
 by the many who had not the honour of his acquaintance, 
 comparable only to that of a devastating flood or a murder 
 mystery or a change in the tariff. 
 
 Being absorbed in affairs that seemed more important, 
 the subject did not interest me greatly. But one cold Sun 
 day afternoon, as I made my way, in answer to her invitation, 
 to see Nancy Willett, I found myself wondering idly whether 
 she might not be by way of making a shrewd guess as to the 
 object of Hambleton's affections. It was well known that 
 he had entertained a hopeless infatuation for her ; and some 
 were inclined to attribute his later lapses to her lack of re 
 sponse. He still called on her, and her lectures, which she 
 delivered like a great aunt with a recondite knowledge of the 
 world, he took meekly. But even she had seemed powerless 
 to alter his habits. . . . 
 
 Powell Street, that happy hunting-ground of my youth, 
 had changed its character, become contracted and unfamil 
 iar, sooty. The McAlerys and other older families who had 
 not decayed with the neighbourhood were rapidly deserting 
 it, moving out to the new residence district known as "the 
 Heights." I came to the Willett House. That, too, had an 
 air of shabbiness, of well-tended shabbiness, to be sure ; 
 the stone steps had been scrupulously scrubbed, but one of
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 185 
 
 them was'cracked clear across, and the silver on the polished 
 name-plate was wearing off; even the act of pulling the 
 knob of a door-bell was becoming obsolete, so used had 
 we grown to pushing porcelain buttons in bright, new 
 vestibules. As I waited for my summons to be answered 
 it struck me as remarkable that neither Nancy nor her 
 father had been contaminated by the shabbiness that sur 
 rounded them. 
 
 She had managed rather marvellously to redeem one room 
 from the old-fashioned severity of the rest of the house, the 
 library behind the big "parlour." It was Nancy's room, 
 eloquent of her daintiness and taste, of her essential mo 
 dernity and luxuriousness ; and that evening, as I was ush 
 ered into it, this quality of luxuriousness, of being able to 
 shut out the disagreeable aspects of life that surrounded and 
 threatened her, particularly impressed me. She had not 
 lacked opportunities to escape. I wondered uneasily as I 
 waited why she had not embraced them. I strayed about 
 the room. A coal fire burned in the grate, the red-shaded 
 lamps gave a subdued but cheerful light; some impulse 
 led me to cross over to the windows and draw aside the 
 heavy hangings. Dusk was gathering over that garden, 
 bleak and frozen now, where we had romped together as 
 children. How queer the place seemed! How shrivelled! 
 Once it had had the wide range of a park. There, still 
 weathering the elements, was the old-fashioned latticed 
 summer-house, but the fruit-trees that I recalled as clouds 
 of pink and white were gone. ... A touch of poignancy 
 was in these memories. I dropped the curtain, and turned 
 to confront Nancy, who had entered noiselessly. 
 
 "Well, Hugh, were you dreaming?" she said. 
 
 "Not exactly," I replied, embarrassed. "I was looking 
 at the garden." 
 
 "The soot has ruined it. My life seems to be one con 
 tinual struggle against the soot, the blacks, as the Eng 
 lish call them. It's a more expressive term. They are like 
 an army, you know, overwhelming in their relentless in-
 
 186 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 vasion. Well, do sit down. It is nice of you to come. 
 You'll have some tea, won't you ? " 
 
 The maid had brought in the tray. Afternoon tea was 
 still rather a new custom with us, more of a ceremony than 
 a meal ; and as Nancy handed me my cup and the thinnest 
 of slices of bread and butter I found the intimacy of the sit 
 uation a little disquieting. Her manner was indeed intimate, 
 and yet it had the odd and disturbing effect of making her 
 seem more remote. As she chatted I answered her perfunc 
 torily, while all the time I was asking myself why I had 
 ceased to desire her, whether the old longing for her might 
 not return was not even now returning ? I might indeed 
 go far afield to find a wife so suited to me as Nancy. She 
 had beauty, distinction, and position. She was a woman of 
 whom any man might be proud. . . . 
 
 "I haven't congratulated you yet, Hugh," she said sud 
 denly, "now that you are a partner of Mr. Watling's. I 
 hear on all sides that you are on the high road to a great 
 success." 
 
 " Of course I'm glad to be in the firm," I admitted. 
 
 It was a new tack for Nancy, rather a disquieting one, 
 this discussion of my affairs, which she had so long avoided 
 or ignored. 
 
 "You are getting what you have always wanted, aren't 
 you?" 
 
 I wondered in some trepidation whether by that word 
 "always" she was making a deliberate reference to the past. 
 
 "Always?" I repeated, rather fatuously. 
 
 "Nearly always, ever since you have been a man." 
 
 I was incapable of taking advantage of the opening, if it 
 were one. She was bafflling. 
 
 "A man likes to succeed in his profession, of course," I 
 said. 
 
 "And you made up your mind to succeed more deliber 
 ately than most men. I needn't ask you if you are satisfied, 
 Hugh. Success seems to agree with you, although I 
 imagine you will never be satisfied."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 187 
 
 "Why do you say that?" I demanded. 
 
 "I haven't known you all your life for nothing. I think 
 I know you much better than you know yourself." 
 
 "You haven't acted as if you did," I exclaimed. 
 
 She smiled. 
 
 "Have you been interested in what I thought about 
 you?" she asked. 
 
 "That isn't quite fair, Nancy," I protested. "You 
 haven't given me much evidence that you did think about 
 me." 
 
 "Have I received much encouragement to do so?" she 
 inquired. 
 
 "But you haven't seemed to invite you've kept me 
 at arm's length." 
 
 "Oh, don't fence!" she cried, rather sharply. 
 
 I had become agitated, but her next words gave me a 
 shock that was momentarily paralyzing. 
 
 " I asked you to come here to-day, Hugh, because I wished 
 you to know that I have made up my mind to marry Hamble- 
 ton Durrett." 
 
 "Hambleton Durrett!" I echoed stupidly. "Hambleton 
 Durrett!" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "Have you have you accepted him?" 
 
 "No. But I mean to do so." 
 
 " You you love him ? " 
 
 "I don't see what right you have to ask." 
 
 "But 'you just said that you invited me here to talk 
 frankly." 
 
 "No, I don't love him." 
 
 "Then why, in heaven's name, are you going to marry 
 him?" 
 
 She lay back in her chair, regarding me, her lips slightly 
 parted. All at once the full flavour of her, the superfine 
 quality was revealed after years of blindness. Nor can I 
 describe the sudden rebellion, the revulsion that I experi 
 enced. Hambleton Durrett! It was an outrage, a sacri-
 
 188 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 lege! I got up, and put my hand on the mantel. Nancy 
 remained motionless, inert, her head lying back against the 
 chair. Could it be that she were enjoying my discomfiture ? 
 There is no need to confess that I knew next to nothing of 
 women; had I been less excited, I might have made the 
 discovery that I still regarded them sentimentally. Certain 
 romantic axioms concerning them, garnered from Victorian 
 literature, passed current in my mind for wisdom ; and one 
 of these declared that they were prone to remain true to an 
 early love. Did Nancy still care for me? The query, 
 coming as it did on top of my emotion, brought with it a 
 strange and overwhelming perplexity. Did I really care for 
 her? The many years during which I had practised the habit 
 of caution began to exert an inhibiting pressure. Here was 
 a situation, an opportunity suddenly thrust upon me which 
 might never return, and which I was utterly unprepared to 
 meet. Would I be happy with Nancy, after all? Her 
 expression was still enigmatic. 
 
 "Why shouldn't I marry him?" she demanded. 
 
 "Because he's not good enough for you." 
 
 "Good!" she exclaimed, and laughed. "He loves me. 
 He wants me without reservation or calculation." There 
 was a sting in this. " And is he any worse," she asked slowly, 
 "than many others who might be mentioned?" 
 
 "No," I agreed. I did not intend to be led into the thank 
 less and disagreeable position of condemning Hambleton 
 Durrett. "But why have you waited all these years if you 
 did not mean to marry a man of ability, a man Who has 
 made something of himself?" 
 
 "A man like you, Hugh?" she said gently. 
 
 I flushed. 
 
 "That isn't quite fair, Nancy." 
 
 "What are you working for?" she suddenly inquired, 
 straightening up. 
 
 "What any man works for, I suppose." 
 
 "Ah, there you have hit it, what any man works for in 
 our world. Power, personal power. You want to be
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 189 
 
 somebody, isn't that it ? Not the noblest ambition, you'll 
 have to admit, not the kind of thing we used to dream 
 about, when we did dream. Well, when we find we can't 
 realize our dreams, we take the next best thing. And I 
 fail to see why you should blame me for taking it when you 
 yourself have taken it. Hambleton Durrett can give it 
 to me. He'll accept me on my own terms, he won't inter 
 fere with me, I shan't be disillusionized, and I shall have 
 a position which I could not hope to have if I remained un 
 married, a very marked position as Hambleton Durrett's 
 wife. I am thirty, you know." 
 
 Her frankness appalled me. 
 
 "The trouble with you, Hugh, is that you still deceive 
 yourself. You throw a glamour over things. You want 
 to keep your cake and eat it too." 
 
 " I don't see why you say that. And marriage especially " 
 
 She took me up. 
 
 "Marriage! What other career is open to a woman? 
 Unless she is married, and married well, according to the 
 money standard you men have set up, she is nobody. We 
 can't all be Florence Nightingales, and I am unable to im 
 agine myself a Julia Ward Howe or a Harriet Beecher Stowe. 
 What is left? Nothing but marriage. I'm hard and cyni 
 cal, you will say, but I have thought, and I'm not afraid, as I 
 have told you, to look things in the face. There are very few 
 women, I think, who would not take the real thing if they 
 had the chance before it were too late, who wouldn't be 
 willing to do their own cooking in order to get it." 
 
 She fell silent suddenly. I began to pace the room. 
 
 "For God's sake, don't do this, Nancy!" I begged. 
 
 But she continued to stare into the fire, as though she 
 had not heard me. 
 
 "If you had made up your mind to do it, why did you 
 tell me?" I asked. 
 
 "Sentiment, I suppose. I am paying a tribute to what I 
 once was, to what you once were," she said. "A a sort 
 of good-bye to sentiment."
 
 190 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " Nancy ! " I said hoarsely. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "No, Hugh. Surely you can't misjudge me so!" she 
 answered reproachfully. "Do you think I should have sent 
 for you if I had meant that? " 
 
 "No, no, I didn't think so. But why not? You you 
 cared once, and you tell me plainly you don't love him. It 
 was all a terrible mistake. We were meant for each other." 
 
 "I did love you then," she said. "You never knew how 
 much. And there is nothing I wouldn't give to bring it 
 all back again. But I can't. It's gone. You're gone, and 
 I'm gone. I mean what we were. Oh, why did you 
 change ? " 
 
 "It was you who changed," I declared, bewildered. 
 
 "Couldn't you see can't you see now what you did? 
 But perhaps you couldn't help it. Perhaps it was just 
 you, after all." 
 
 "What I did?" 
 
 "Why couldn't you have held fast to your faith? If 
 you had, you would have known what it was I adored in 
 you. Oh, I don't mind telling you now, it was just that 
 faith, Hugh, that faith you had in life, that faith you had in 
 me. You weren't cynical and calculating, like Ralph 
 Hambleton, you had imagination. I I dreamed, too. 
 And do you remember the tune when you made the boat, 
 and we went to Logan's Pond, and you sank in her?" 
 
 "And you stayed," I went on, "when all the others ran 
 away ? You ran down the hill like a whirlwind." 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "And then you came here one day, to a party, and said 
 you were going to Harvard, and quarrelled with me." 
 
 "Why did you doubt mef" I asked agitatedly. "Why 
 didn't you let me see that you still cared?" 
 
 "Because that wasn't you, Hugh, that wasn't your real 
 self. Do you suppose it mattered to me whether you went 
 to Harvard with the others ? Oh, I was foolish too, I know. 
 I shouldn't have said what I did. But what is the use of
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 191 
 
 regrets?" she exclaimed. "We've both run after the prac 
 tical gods, and the others have hidden their faces from us. 
 It may be that we are not to blame, either of us, that the 
 practical gods are too strong. We've learned to love and 
 worship them, and now we can't do without them." 
 
 "We can try, Nancy," I pleaded. 
 
 "No," she answered in a low voice, "that's the difference 
 between you and me. I know myself better than you know 
 yourself, and I know you better." She smiled again. " Un 
 less we could have it all back again, I shouldn't want any of 
 it. You do not love me " 
 
 I started once more to protest. 
 
 "No, no, don't say it !" she cried. "You may think you 
 do, just this moment, but it's only because you've been 
 moved. And what you believe you want isn't me, it's what 
 I was. But I'm not that any more, I'm simply recalling 
 that, don't you see ? And even then you wouldn't wish me, 
 now, as I was. That sounds involved, but you must under 
 stand. You want a woman who will be wrapped up in your 
 career, Hugh, and yet who will not share it, who will devote 
 herself body and soul to what you have become. A woman 
 whom you can shape. And you won't really love her, but 
 only just so much of her as may become the incarnation of 
 you. Well, I'm not that kind of woman. I might have 
 been, had you been different. I'm not at all sure. Cer 
 tainly I'm not that kind now, even though I know in my heart 
 that the sort of career you have made for yourself, and that 
 I intend to make for myself is all dross. But now I can't 
 do without it." 
 
 "And yet you are going to marry Hambleton Durrett!" 
 I said. 
 
 She understood me, although I regretted my words at 
 once. 
 
 "Yes, I am going to marry him." There was a shade of 
 bitterness, of defiance in her voice. "Surely you are not 
 offering me the the other thing, now. Oh, Hughl" 
 
 " I am willing to abandon it all, Nancy."
 
 192 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "No," she said, "you're not, and I'm not. What you 
 can't see and won't see is that it has become part of you. 
 Oh, you are successful, you will be more and more successful. 
 And you think I should be somebody, as your wife, Hugh, 
 more perhaps, eventually, than I shall be as Hambleton's. 
 > But I should be nobody, too. I couldn't stand it now, my 
 dear. You must realize that as soon as you have time to 
 think it over. We shall be friends." 
 
 The sudden gentleness in her voice pierced me through 
 and through. She held out her hand. Something in her 
 grasp spoke of a resolution which could not be shaken. 
 
 "And besides," she added sadly, "I don't love you any 
 more, Hugh. I'm mourning for something that's gone. I 
 wanted to have just this one talk with you. But we shan't 
 mention it again, we'll close the book." . . . 
 
 At that I fled out of the house, and at first the thought of 
 her as another man's wife, as Hambleton Durrett's wife, 
 was seemingly not to be borne. It was incredible ! "We'll 
 close the book." I found myself repeating the phrase ; and 
 it seemed then as though something within me I had believed 
 dead something that formerly had been all of me had 
 revived again to throb with pain. 
 
 It is not surprising that the acuteness of my suffering was 
 of short duration, though I remember certain sharp twinges 
 when the announcement of the engagement burst on the city. 
 There was much controversy over the question as to whether 
 or not Ham Durrett's reform would be permanent; but 
 most people were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt ; 
 it was tune he settled down and took the position in the com 
 munity that was to be expected of one of his name ; and as 
 for Nancy, it was generally agreed that she had done well 
 for herself. She was not made for poverty and who so 
 well as she was fitted for the social leadership of our commu 
 nity?
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 193 
 
 They were married in Trinity Church in the month of 
 May, and I was one of Ham's attendants. Ralph was 
 "best man." For the last time the old Willett mansion in 
 Powell Street wore the gala air of former days ; carpets were 
 spread over the sidewalk, and red and white awnings ; rooms 
 were filled with flowers and flung open to hundreds of guests. ; 
 I found the wedding something of an ordeal. I do not like 
 to dwell upon it especially upon that moment when I 
 came to congratulate Nancy as she stood beside Ham at 
 the end of the long parlour. She seemed to have no regrets. 
 I don't know what I expected of her certainly not tears 
 and tragedy. She seemed taller than ever, and very beauti 
 ful in her veil and white satin gown and the diamonds Ham 
 had given her; very much mistress of herself, quite a con 
 trast to Ham, who made no secret of his elation. She smiled 
 when I wished her happiness. 
 
 "We'll be home in the autumn, Hugh, and expect to see 
 a great deal of you," she said. 
 
 As I paused in a corner of the room my eye fell upon 
 Nancy's father. McAlery Willett's elation seemed even 
 greater than Ham's. With a gardenia in his frock-coat 
 and a glass of champagne in his hand he went from group to 
 group ; and his familiar laughter, which once had seemed so 
 full of merriment and fun, gave me to-day a somewhat scandal 
 ized feeling. I heard Ralph's voice, and turned to discover 
 him standing beside me, his long legs thrust slightly apart, 
 his hands in his pockets, overlooking the scene with typical, 
 semi-contemptuous amusement. 
 
 "This lets old McAlery out, anyway," he said. 
 
 "What do you mean?" I demanded. 
 
 "One or two little notes of his will be cancelled, sooner 
 or later that's all." 
 
 For a moment I was unable to speak. 
 
 " And do you think that she that Nancy found out ? " 
 I stammered. 
 
 "Well, I'd be willing to take that end of the bet," he 
 replied. "Why the deuce should she marry Ham? You
 
 194 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 ought to know her well enough to understand how she'd 
 feel if she discovered some of McAlery's financial coups? 
 Of course it's not a thing I talk about, you understand. 
 Are you going to the Club?" 
 
 "No, I'm going home," I said. I was aware of his some 
 what compassionate smile as I left him. , , .
 
 XII 
 
 ONE November day nearly two years after my admission 
 as junior member of the firm of Watling, Fowndes and 
 Ripon seven gentlemen met at luncheon in the Boyne Club ; 
 Mr. Barbour, President of the Railroad, Mr. Scherer, of the 
 Boyne Iron Works and other corporations, Mr. Leonard 
 Dickinson, of the Corn National Bank, Mr. Halsey, a prom 
 inent banker from the other great city of the state, Mr. 
 Grunewald, Chairman of the Republican State Committee, 
 and Mr. Frederick Grierson, who had become a very impor 
 tant man in our community. At four o'clock they emerged 
 from the club : citizens in Boyne Street who saw them chat 
 ting amicably on the steps little suspected that in the last 
 three hours these gentlemen had chosen and practically elected 
 the man who was to succeed Mr. Wade as United States 
 Senator in Washington. Those were the days in which great 
 affairs were simply and efficiently handled. No democratic 
 nonsense about leaving the choice to an electorate that did 
 not know what it wanted. 
 
 The man chosen to fill this high position was Theodore 
 Watling. He said he would think about the matter. 
 
 In the nation at large, through the defection of certain 
 Northern states neither so conservative nor fortunate as 
 ours, the Democratic party was in power, which naturally 
 implies financial depression. There was no question about 
 our ability to send a Republican Senator ; the choice in the 
 Boyne Club was final; but before the legislature should 
 ratify it, a year or so hence, it were just as well that the 
 people of the state should be convinced that they desired 
 Mr. Watling more than any other man ; and surely enough, 
 
 195
 
 196 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 in a little while such a conviction sprang up spontaneously. 
 In offices and restaurants and hotels, men began to suggest 
 to each other what a fine thing it would be if Theodore 
 Watling might be persuaded to accept the toga ; at the banks, 
 when customers called to renew their notes and tight money 
 was discussed and Democrats excoriated, it was generally 
 agreed that the obvious thing to do was to get a safe man 
 in the Senate. From the very first, Watling sentiment 
 stirred like spring sap after a hard winter. The country 
 newspapers, watered by providential rains, began to put 
 forth tender little editorial shoots, which Mr. Judah B. 
 Tallant presently collected and presented in a charming 
 bouquet in the Morning Era. "The Voice of the State 
 Press;" thus was the column headed; and the remarks 
 of the Hon. Fitch Truesdale, of the St. Helen's Messenger, 
 were given a special prominence. Mr. Truesdale was the 
 first, in his section, to be inspired by the happy thought 
 that the one man preeminently fitted to represent the state 
 in the present crisis, when her great industries had been 
 crippled by Democratic folly, was Mr. Theodore Watling. 
 The Rossiter Banner, the Elkington Star, the Belfast Recorder, 
 and I know not how many others simultaneously began to 
 sing Mr. Watling's praises. 
 
 "Not since the troublous times of the Civil War," declared 
 the Morning Era, "had the demand for any man been so 
 unanimous." As a proof of it, there were the country news 
 papers, "which reflected the sober opinion of the firesides 
 of the common people." 
 
 There are certain industrious gentlemen to whom little 
 credit is given, and who, unlike the average citizen who 
 reserves his enthusiasm for election tune, are patriotic enough 
 to labour for their country's good all the year round. When 
 in town, it was their habit to pay a friendly call on the 
 Counsel for the Railroad, Mr. Miller Gorse, in the Corn 
 Bank Building. He was never too busy to converse with 
 them ; or, it might better be said, to listen to them converse. 
 Let some legally and politically ambitious young man ok-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 197 
 
 serve Mr. Gorse's method. Did he inquire what the party 
 worker thought of Mr. Watling for the Senate? Not at 
 all ! But before the party worker left he was telling Mr. 
 Gorse that public sentiment demanded Mr. Watling. After 
 leaving Mr. Gorse they wended their way to the Durrett 
 Building and handed their cards over the rail of the offices 
 of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon. Mr. Watling shook hands 
 with scores of them, and they departed, well satisfied with 
 the flavour of his cigars and intoxicated by his personality. 
 He had a marvellous way of cutting short an interview with 
 out giving offence. Some of them he turned over to Mr. 
 Paret, whom he particularly desired they should know. 
 Thus Mr. Paret acquired many valuable additions to his 
 acquaintance, cultivated a memory for names and faces 
 that was to stand him in good stead; and kept, besides, 
 an indexed note-book into which he put various bits of in 
 teresting information concerning each. Though not imme 
 diately lucrative, it was all, no doubt, part of a lawyer's 
 education. 
 
 During the summer and the following winter Colonel 
 Paul Varney came often to town and spent much of his 
 time in Mr. Paret's office smoking Mr. Watling's cigars and 
 discussing the coming campaign, in which he took a whole- 
 souled interest. 
 
 "Say, Hugh, this is goin' slick!" he would exclaim, his 
 eyes glittering like round buttons of jet. "I never saw a 
 campaign where they fell in the way they're doing now. If 
 it was anybody else but Theodore Watling, it would scare 
 me. You ought to have been in Jim Broadhurst's cam 
 paign," he added, referring to the junior senator, "they 
 wouldn't wood up at all, they was just listless. But Gorse 
 and Barbour and the rest wanted him, and we had to put 
 him over. I reckon he is useful down there in Washington, 
 but say, do you know what he always reminded me of ? One 
 of those mud-turtles I used to play with as a boy up in 
 Columbia County, shuts up tight soon as he sees you 
 coming. Now Theodore Watling ain't like that, any way
 
 198 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 of speaking. We can get up some enthusiasm for a man 
 of his sort. He's liberal and big. He's made his pile, and 
 he don't begrudge some of it to the fellows who do the work. 
 Mark my words, when you see a man who wants a big office 
 cheap, look out for him." 
 
 This, and much more wisdom I imbibed while assenting 
 ' J to my chief's greatness. For Mr. Varney was right, one 
 ' could feel enthusiasm for Theodore Watling ; and my growing 
 intimacy with him, the sense that I was having a part in 
 his career, a share in his success, became for the moment 
 the passion of my life. As the campaign progressed I gave 
 more and more time to it, and made frequent trips of a 
 confidential nature to the different counties of the state. 
 The whole of my being was energized. The national fever 
 had thoroughly pervaded my blood the national fever 
 to win. Prosperity writ large demanded it, and 
 Theodore Watling personified, incarnated the cause. I had 
 neither the time nor the desire to philosophize on this national 
 fever, which animated all my associates : animated, I might 
 say, the nation, which was beginning to get into a fever about 
 games. If I remember rightly, it was about this time that 
 golf was introduced, tennis had become a commonplace, 
 professional base-ball was in full swing ; Ham Durrett had 
 even organized a local polo team. . . . The man who 
 failed to win something tangible in sport or law or business 
 or politics was counted out. Such was the spirit of America 
 in the closing years of the nineteenth century. 
 
 And yet, when one has said this, one has failed to express 
 the national Geist in all its subtlety. In brief, the great 
 American sport was not so much to win the game as to beat 
 it ; the evasion of rules challenged our ingenuity ; and having 
 won, we set about devising methods whereby it would be 
 less and less possible for us winners to lose in the future. 
 No better illustration of this tendency could be given than
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 199 
 
 the development which had recently taken place in the field 
 of our city politics, hitherto the battle-ground of Irish 
 politicians who had fought one another for supremacy. 
 Individualism had been rampant, competition the custom; 
 you bought an alderman, or a boss who owned four or five 
 aldermen, and then you never could be sure you were to 
 get what you wanted, or that the aldermen and the bosses 
 would "stay bought." But now a genius had appeared, 
 an American genius who had arisen swiftly and almost 
 silently, who appealed to the imagination, and whose name 
 was often mentioned in a whisper, the Hon. Judd Jason, 
 sometimes known as the Spider, who organized the City 
 Hall and capitalized it; an ultimate and logical effect if 
 one had considered it of the Manchester school of eco 
 nomics. Enlightened self-interest, stripped of sentiment, 
 ends on Judd Jasons. He ran the city even as Mr. Sherrill 
 ran his department store; you paid your price. It was 
 very convenient. Being a genius, Mr. Jason did not wholly 
 break with tradition, but retained those elements of the old 
 muddled system that had their value, chartering steam 
 boats for outings on the river, giving colossal picnics in 
 Lowry Park. The poor and the wanderer and the criminal 
 (of the male sex at least) were cared for. But he was not 
 loved, as the rough-and-tumble Irishmen had been loved; 
 he did not make himself common; he was surrounded by 
 an aura of mystery which I confess had not failed of 
 effect on me. Once, and only once during my legal appren 
 ticeship, he had been pointed out to me on the street, 
 where he rarely ventured. His appearance was not im- 1 
 pressive. . . . 
 
 Mr. Jason could not, of course, prevent Mr. Watling's 
 election, even did he so desire, but he did command the al 
 legiance of several city candidates both democratic and 
 republican for the state legislature, who had as yet failed 
 to announce their preferences for United States Senator. 
 It was important that Mr. Watling's vote should be large, 
 as indicative of a public reaction and repudiation of Demo-
 
 200 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 cratic national folly. This matter among others was the 
 subject of discussion one July morning when the Republican 
 State Chairman was in the city; Mr. Grunewald expressed 
 anxiety over Mr. Jason's continued silence. It was expe 
 dient that somebody should "see" the boss. 
 
 "Why not Paret?" suggested Leonard Dickinson. Mr. 
 Watling was not present at this conference. "Paret seems 
 to be running Watling's campaign, anyway." 
 
 It was settled that I should be the emissary. With lively 
 sensations of curiosity and excitement, tempered by a certain 
 anxiety as to my ability to match wits with the Spider, I 
 made my way to his "lair" over Monahan's saloon, situated 
 in a district that was anything but respectable. The saloon, 
 on the ground floor, had two apartments ; the bar-room proper 
 where Mike Monahan, chamberlain of the establishment, was 
 wont to stand, red faced and smiling, to greet the courtiers, 
 big and little, the party workers, the district leaders, the 
 hangers-on ready to be hired, the city officials, the police 
 judges, yes, and the dignified members of state courts 
 whose elections depended on Mr. Jason's favour: even 
 Judge Bering, whose acquaintance I had made the day I 
 had come, as a law student, to Mr. Watling's office, unbent 
 from time to time sufficiently to call there for a small glass 
 of rye and water, and to relate, with his owl-like gravity, 
 an anecdote to the "boys." The saloon represented De 
 mocracy, so dear to the American public. Here all were 
 welcome, even the light-fingered gentlemen who enjoyed 
 the privilege of police protection; and who sometimes, 
 through fortuitous circumstances, were haled before the 
 very magistrates with whom they had rubbed elbows on the 
 polished rail. Behind the bar-room, and separated from it 
 by swinging doors only the elite ventured to thrust apart, 
 was an audience chamber whither Mr. Jason occasionally 
 descended. Anecdote and political reminiscence gave place 
 here to matters of high policy. 
 
 I had several times come to the saloon in the days of my 
 apprenticeship in search of some judge or official, and once
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 201 
 
 I had run down here the city auditor himself. Mike Mona- 
 han, whose affair it was to know everyone, recognized me. 
 It was part of his business, also, to understand that I was 
 now a member of the firm of Watling, Fowndes and Ripon. 
 
 "Good morning to you, Mr. Paret," he said suavely. We 
 held a colloquy in undertones over the bar, eyed by the two 
 or three customers who were present. Mr. Monahan dis 
 appeared, but presently returned to whisper: "Sure, he'll 
 see you," to lead the way through the swinging doors and up 
 a dark stairway. I came suddenly on a room in the greatest 
 disorder, its tables and chairs piled high with newspapers 
 and letters, its windows streaked with soot. From an open 
 door on its farther side issued a voice. 
 
 "Is that you, Mr. Paret? Come in here." 
 
 It was little less than a command. 
 
 "Heard of you, Mr. Paret. Glad to know you. Sit 
 down, won't you?" 
 
 The inner room was almost dark. I made out a bed in 
 the corner, and propped up in the bed a man ; but for the 
 moment I was most aware of a pair of eyes that flared up 
 when the man spoke, and died down again when he became 
 silent. They reminded me of those insects which in my 
 childhood days we called "lightning bugs." Mr. Jason 
 gave me a hand like a woman's. I expressed my pleasure 
 at meeting him, and took a chair beside the bed. 
 
 " I believe you're a partner of Theodore Watling's now 
 aren't you? Smart man, Watling." 
 
 "He'll make a good senator," I replied, accepting the 
 opening. 
 
 "You think he'll get elected do you?" Mr. Jason in 
 quired. 
 u I laughed. 
 
 "Well, there isn't much doubt about that, I imagine." 
 
 " Don't know don't know. Seen some dead-sure things 
 go wrong in my time." 
 
 "What's going to defeat him?" I asked pleasantly. 
 
 "/ don't say anything," Mr. Jason replied. "But I've
 
 202 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 known funny things to happen never does to be dead 
 sure." 
 
 "Oh, well, we're as sure as it's humanly possible to be," 
 I declared. The eyes continued to fascinate me, they had 
 a peculiar, disquieting effect. Now they died down, and it 
 was as if the man's very presence had gone out, as though 
 I had been left alone; and I found it exceedingly difficult, 
 under the circumstances, to continue to address him. Sud 
 denly he flared up again. 
 
 "Watling send you over here?" he demanded. 
 
 "No. As a matter of fact, he's out of town. Some of 
 Mr. Watling's friends, Mr. Grunewald and Mr. Dickinson, 
 Mr. Gorse and others, suggested that I see you, Mr. Jason." 
 
 There came a grunt from the bed. 
 
 "Mr. Watling has always valued your friendship and sup 
 port," I said. 
 
 "What makes him think he ain't going to get it?" 
 
 "He hasn't a doubt of it," I went on diplomatically. 
 " But we felt and I felt personally, that we ought to 
 be in touch with you, to work along with you, to keep in 
 formed how things are going in the city." 
 
 "What things?" 
 
 "Well there are one or two representatives, friends of 
 yours, who haven't come out for Mr. Watling. We aren't 
 worrying, we know you'll do the right thing, but we feel that 
 it would have a good deal of influence in some other parts 
 of the state if they declared themselves. And then you 
 know as well as I do that this isn't a year when any of us 
 can afford to recognize too closely party lines ; the Demo 
 cratic administration has brought on a panic, the business 
 men in that party are down on it, and it ought to be rebuked . 
 And we feel, too, that some of the city's Democrats ought 
 to be loyal to Mr. Watling, not that we expect them to 
 vote for him in caucus, but when it comes to the joint bal 
 lot" 
 
 "Who?" demanded Mr. Jason. 
 
 "Senator Dowse and Jim Maher, for instance," I sug 
 gested.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 203 
 
 "Jim voted for Bill 709 all right didn't he?" said Mr. 
 Jason abruptly. 
 
 "That's just it," I put in boldly. "We'd like to induce 
 him to come hi with us this time. But we feel that the 
 inducement would better come through you." 
 
 I thought Mr. Jason smiled. By this time I had grown 
 accustomed to the darkness, the face and figure of the man 
 in the bed had become discernible. Power, I remember 
 thinking, chooses odd houses for itself. Here was no over 
 bearing, full-blooded ward ruffian brimming with vitality, 
 but a thin, sallow little man in a cotton night-shirt, with iron- 
 grey hair and a wiry moustache; he might have been an 
 overworked clerk behind a drygoods counter; and yet 
 somehow, now that I had talked to him, I realized that 
 he never could have been. Those extraordinary eyes of his, 
 when they were functioning, marked his individuality as 
 unique. It were almost too dramatic to say that he required 
 darkness to make his effect, but so it seemed. I should 
 never forget him. He had in truth been well named the 
 Spider. 
 
 "Of course we haven't tried to get in touch with them. 
 We are leaving them to you," I added. 
 
 "Paret," he said suddenly, "I don't care a damn about 
 Grunewald never did. I'd turn him down for ten cents. 
 But you can tell Theodore Watling for me, and Dickinson, 
 that I guess the 'inducement' can be fixed." 
 
 I felt a certain relief that the interview had come to an 
 end, that the moment had arrived for amenities. To my 
 surprise, Mr. Jason anticipated me. 
 
 "I've been interested in you, Mr. Paret," he observed. 
 " Know who you are, of course, knew you were in Watling's 
 office. Then some of the boys spoke about you when you 
 were down at the legislature on that Ribblevale matter. 
 Guess you had more to do with that bill than came out in 
 the newspapers eh?" 
 
 I was taken off my guard. 
 
 "Oh, that's talk," I said.
 
 204 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "All right, it's talk, then? But I guess you and I will 
 have some more talk after a while, after Theodore Wat- 
 ling gets to be United States Senator. Give him my re 
 gards, and and come in when I can do anything for you, 
 Mr. Paret." 
 
 Thanking him, I groped my way downstairs and let myself 
 out by a side door Monahan had shown me into an alleyway, 
 thus avoiding the saloon. As I walked slowly back to the 
 office, seeking the shade of the awnings, the figure in the 
 darkened room took on a sinister aspect that troubled 
 me. , 
 
 The autumn arrived, the campaign was on with a whoop, 
 and I had my first taste of "stump" politics. The acrid 
 smell of red fire brings it back to me. It was a medley of 
 railroad travel, of committees provided with badges and 
 cigars, of open carriages slowly drawn between lines of 
 bewildered citizens, of Lincoln clubs and other clubs marching 
 in serried ranks, uniformed and helmeted, stalwarts carrying 
 torches and banners. And then there were the draughty 
 opera-houses with the sylvan scenery pushed back and plush 
 chairs and sofas pushed forward; with an ominous table, 
 a pitcher of water on it and a glass, near the footlights. 
 The houses were packed with more bewildered citizens. What 
 a wonderful study of mob-psychology it would have offered ! 
 Men who had not thought of the grand old Republican 
 party for two years, and who had not cared much about 
 it when they had entered the doors, after an hour or so went 
 mad with fervour. The Hon. Joseph Mecklin, ex-Speaker 
 of the House, with whom I travelled on occasions, had a 
 speech referring to the martyred President, ending with 
 an appeal to the revolutionary fathers who followed Wash 
 ington with bleeding feet. The Hon. Joseph possessed that 
 most valuable of political gifts, presence; and when with 
 quivering voice he finished his peroration, citizens wept 
 with him. What it all had to do with the tariff was
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 205 
 
 not quite clear. Yet nobody seemed to miss the connec 
 tion. 
 
 We were all of us most concerned, of course, about the 
 working-man and his dinner pail, whom the Democrats 
 had wantonly thrown out of employment for the sake of a 
 doctrinaire theory. They had put him in competition with 
 the serf of Europe. Such was the subject-matter of my 
 own modest addresses in this, my maiden campaign. I had 
 the sense to see myself in perspective ; to recognize that not 
 for me, a dignified and substantial lawyer of affairs, were 
 the rhetorical flights of the Hon. Joseph Mecklin. I spoke 
 with a certain restraint. Not too dryly, I hope. But I 
 sought to curb my sentiments, my indignation, at the manner 
 in which the working-man had been treated; to appeal to 
 the common sense rather than to the passions of my au 
 diences. Here were the statistics ! (drawn, by the way, from 
 the Republican Campaign book). Unscrupulous dema 
 gogues Democratic, of course had sought to twist and 
 evade them. Let this terrible record of lack of employment 
 and misery be compared with the prosperity under Republi 
 can rule. 
 
 " One of the most effective speakers in this campaign for the 
 restoration of Prosperity," said the Rossiter Banner, "is 
 Mr. Hugh Paret, of the firm of Watling, Fowndes and 
 Ripon. Mr. Paret's speech at the Opera-House last even 
 ing made a most favourable impression. Mr. Paret deals 
 with facts. And his thoughtful analysis of the situation 
 into which the Democratic party has brought this country 
 should convince any sane-minded voter that the time has 
 ' come for a change." 
 
 I began to keep a scrap-book, though I locked it up in 
 the drawer of my desk. In it are to be found many clip 
 pings of a similarly gratifying tenor. . . . 
 
 Mecklin and I were well contrasted. In this way, in 
 cidentally, I made many valuable acquaintances among 
 the "solid" men of the state, the local capitalists and 
 manufacturers, with whom my manner of dealing with
 
 206 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 public questions was in particular favour. These were 
 practical men; they rather patronized the Hon. Joseph, 
 thus estimating, to a nicety, a man's value; or solidity, 
 or specific gravity, it might better be said, since our 
 universe was one of checks and balances. The Hon. 
 Joseph and his like, skyrocketing through the air, were 
 somehow necessary in the scheme of things, but not to be 
 taken too seriously. Me they did take seriously, these 
 provincial lords, inviting me to their houses and opening 
 their hearts. Thus, when we came to Elkington, Mr. 
 Me'cklin reposed in the Commercial House, on the noisy 
 main street. Fortunately for him, the clanging of trolley 
 cars never interfered with his slumbers. I slept in a wide 
 chamber in the mansion of Mr. Ezra Hutchins. There 
 were many Hutchinses in Elkington, brothers and cousins 
 and uncles and great-uncles, and all were connected with 
 the woollen mills. But there is always one supreme Hutch- 
 ins, and Ezra was he : tall, self-contained, elderly, but well 
 preserved through frugal living, essentially American and 
 typical of his class, when he entered the lobby of the Commer 
 cial House that afternoon the babel of political discussion 
 was suddenly hushed; politicians, travelling salesmen and 
 the members of the local committee made a lane for him ; 
 to him, the Hon. Joseph and I were introduced. Mr. 
 Hutchins knew what he wanted. He was cordial to Mr. 
 Mecklin, but he took me. We entered a most respectable 
 surrey with tassels, driven by a raw-boned coachman in a 
 black overcoat, drawn by two sleek horses. 
 
 "How is this thing going, Paret?" he asked. 
 
 I gave him Mr. Grunewald's estimated majority. 
 
 "What do you think ? " he demanded, a shrewd, humorous 
 look in his blue eyes. 
 
 "Well, I think we'll carry the state. I haven't had 
 Grunewald's experience in estimating." 
 
 Ezra Hutchins smiled appreciatively. 
 
 "What does Watling think?" 
 
 "He doesn't seem to be worrying much." 
 
 "Ever been in Elkington before?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 207 
 
 I said I hadn't. 
 
 "Well, a drive will do you good." 
 
 It was about four o'clock on a mild October afternoon. 
 The little town, of fifteen thousand inhabitants or so, had 
 a wonderful setting in the widening valley of the Scopanong, 
 whose swiftly running waters furnished the power for the 
 mills. We drove to these through a gateway over which 
 the words "No Admittance" were conspicuously painted, 
 past long brick buildings that bordered the canals; and 
 in the windows I caught sight of drab figures of men and 
 women bending over the machines. Half of the buildings, as 
 Mr. Hutchins pointed out, were closed, mute witnesses 
 of tariff-tinkering madness. Even more eloquent of demo 
 cratic folly was that part of the town through which we 
 presently passed, streets lined with rows of dreary houses 
 where the workers lived. Children were playing on the 
 sidewalks, but theirs seemed a listless play; listless, too, 
 were the men and women who sat on the steps, listless, 
 and somewhat sullen, as they watched us passing. Ezra 
 Hutchins seemed to read my thought. 
 
 " Since the unions got in here I've had nothing but trouble," 
 he said. "I've tried to do my duty by my people, God 
 knows. But they won't see which side their bread's buttered 
 on. They oppose me at every step, they vote against their 
 own interests. Some years ago they put up a job on us, 
 and sent a scatter-brained radical to the legislature." 
 
 "Krebs." 
 
 "Do you know him?" 
 
 "Slightly. He was in my class at Harvard. ... Is he 
 still here?" I asked, after a pause. 
 
 "Oh, yes. But he hasn't gone to the legislature this time, 
 we've seen to that. His father was a respectable old Ger 
 man who had a little shop and made eye-glasses. The son 
 is an example of too much education. He's a notoriety 
 seeker. Oh, he's clever, in a way. He's given us a good 
 deal of trouble, too, in the courts with damage cases." . . . 
 
 We came to a brighter, more spacious, well-to-do portion
 
 208 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 of the town, where the residences faced the river. In a little 
 while the waters widened into a lake, which was surrounded 
 by a park, a gift to the city of the Hutchins family. Facing 
 it, on one side, was the Hutchins Library; on the other, 
 across a wide street, where the maples were turning, were 
 the Hutchinses' residences of various dates of construction, 
 from that of the younger George, who had lately married 
 a wife, and built in bright yellow brick, to the old-fashioned 
 mansion of Ezra himself. This, he told me, had been good 
 enough for his father, and was good enough for him. The 
 picture of it comes back to me, now, with singular attrac 
 tiveness. It was of brick, and I suppose a modification of 
 the Georgian ; the kind of house one still sees in out-of-the- 
 way corners of London, with a sort of Dickensy flavour; 
 high and square and uncompromising, with small-paned 
 windows, with a flat roof surrounded by a low balustrade, 
 and many substantial chimneys. The third storey was lower 
 than the others, separated from them by a distinct line. 
 On one side was a wide porch. Yellow and red leaves, the 
 day's fall, scattered the well-kept lawn. Standing in the 
 doorway of the house was a girl in white, and as we de 
 scended from the surrey she came down the walk to meet us. 
 She was young, about twenty. Her hair was the colour of 
 the russet maple leaves. 
 
 "This is Mr. Paret, Maude." Mr. Hutchins looked at 
 his watch as does a man accustomed to live by it. "If 
 you'll excuse me, Mr. Paret, I have something important 
 to attend to. Perhaps Mr. Paret would like to look about 
 the grounds?" He addressed his daughter. 
 
 I said I should be delighted, though I had no idea what 
 grounds were meant. As I followed Maude around the 
 house she explained that all the Hutchins connection had 
 a common back yard, as she expressed it. In reality, there 
 were about two blocks of the property, extending behind 
 all the houses. There were great trees with swings, groves, 
 orchards where the late apples glistened between the leaves, 
 an old-fashioned flower garden loath to relinquish its bloom-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 209 
 
 ing. In the distance the shadowed wjestern ridge hung like 
 a curtain of deep blue velvet against the sunset. 
 
 "What a wonderful spot !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "Yes, it is nice," she agreed, "we were all brought up here 
 I mean my cousins and myself. There are dozens of us. 
 And dozens left," she added, as the shouts and laughter of 
 children broke the stillness. 
 
 A boy came running around the corner of the path. He 
 struck out at Maude. With a remarkably swift movement 
 she retaliated. 
 
 " Ouch ! " he exclaimed. 
 
 "You got him that time," I laughed, and, being detected, 
 she suddenly blushed. It was this act that drew my atten 
 tion to her, that defined her as an individual. Before that 
 I had regarded her merely as a shy and provincial girl. Now 
 she was brimming with an unsuspected vitality. A certain 
 interest was aroused, although her shyness towards me was 
 not altered. I found it rather a flattering shyness. 
 
 "It's Hugh," she explained, "he's always trying to be 
 funny. Speak to Mr. Paret, Hugh." 
 
 "Why, that's my name, too," I said. 
 
 "Is it?" 
 
 "She knocked my hat off a little while ago," said Hugh. 
 "I was only getting square." 
 
 "Well, you didn't get square, did you?" I asked. 
 
 "Are you going to speak in the town hall to-night?" the 
 boy demanded. I admitted it. He went off, pausing once 
 to stare back at me. . . . Maude and I walked on. 
 
 "It must be exciting to speak before a large audience," 
 she said. "If I were a man, I think I should like to be in 
 politics." 
 
 " I cannot imagine you in politics," I answered. 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "I said, if I were a man." 
 
 "Are you going to the meeting?" 
 
 "Oh, yes. Father promised to take me. He has a box." 
 
 I thought it would be .pleasant to have her there.
 
 210 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " I'm afraid you'll find what I have to say rather dry," 
 I said. 
 
 "A woman can't expect to understand everything," she 
 answered quickly. 
 
 This remark struck me favourably. I glanced at her 
 sideways. She was not a beauty, but she was distinctly 
 well-formed and strong. Her face was oval, her features 
 not quite regular, giving them a certain charm ; her 
 colour was fresh, her eyes blue, the lighter blue one sees on 
 Chinese ware: not a poetic comparison, but so I thought 
 of them. She was apparently not sophisticated, as were 
 most of the young women at home whom I knew intimately 
 (as were the Watling twins, for example, with one of whom, 
 Frances, I had had, by the way, rather a lively flirtation 
 the spring before) ; she seemed refreshingly original, im 
 pressionable and plastic. . . . 
 
 We walked slowly back to the house, and in the hallway I 
 met Mrs. Hutchins, a bustling, housewifely lady, inclined to 
 stoutness, whose creased and kindly face bore witness to 
 long acquiescence in the discipline of matrimony, to the 
 contentment that results from an essentially circumscribed 
 and comfortable life. She was, I learned later, the second 
 Mrs. Hutchins, and Maude their only child. The children 
 of the first marriage, all girls, had married and scattered. 
 
 Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old- 
 fashioned sort that gives one the choice between tea and 
 cocoa. It was something of an occasion, I suspected. The 
 minister was there, the Reverend Mr. Doddridge, who would 
 have made, in appearance at least, a perfect Puritan divine 
 in a steeple hat and a tippet. Only he was no longer 
 the leader of the community ; and even in his grace he had 
 the air of deferring to the man who provided the bounties of 
 which we were about to partake rather than to the Almighty. 
 Young George was there, Mr. Hutchins's nephew, who was 
 daily becoming more and more of a factor in the management 
 of the mills, and had built the house of yellow brick that stood 
 out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses' mansions,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 211 
 
 and marked a transition. I thought him rather a yellow- 
 brick gentleman himself for his assumption of cosmopolitan 
 manners. His wife was a pretty, discontented little woman 
 who plainly deplored her environment, longed for larger 
 fields of conquest : George, she said, must remain where he 
 was, for the present at least, Uncle Ezra depended on 
 him; but Elkington was a prosy place, and Mrs. George 
 gave the impression that she did not belong here. They 
 went to the city on occasions; both cities. And when she 
 told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs. Hambleton 
 Durrett whom she thought so lovely ! I knew that she 
 had taken Nancy as an ideal : Nancy, the social leader of 
 what was to Mrs. George a metropolis. 
 
 Presently the talk became general among the men, the 
 subject being the campaign, and I the authority, bombarded 
 with questions I strove to answer judicially. What was the 
 situation in this county and in that ? the national situation ? 
 George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment of the 
 demagogues, national and state, who were hurting business 
 in order to obtain political power. The Reverend Mr. 
 Doddridge assented, deploring the poverty that the local 
 people had brought on themselves by heeding the advice 
 of agitators; and Mrs. Hutchins, who spent much of her 
 tune in charity work, agreed with the minister when he de 
 clared that the trouble was largely due to a decline in Chris 
 tian belief. Ezra Hutchins, too, nodded at this. 
 
 "Take that man Krebs, for example," the minister went 
 on, stimulated by this encouragement, "he's an atheist, 
 pure and simple." A sympathetic shudder went around 
 the table at the word. George alone smiled. "Old Krebs 
 was a free-thinker ; I used to get my glasses of him. He 
 was at least a conscientious man, a good workman, which 
 is more than can be said for the son. Young Krebs has 
 talent, and if only he had devoted himself to the honest 
 practice of law, instead of stirring up dissatisfaction among 
 these people, he would be a successful man to-day." 
 
 Mr. Hutchins explained that I was at college with Krebs.
 
 212 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "These people must like him," I said, "or they wouldn't 
 have sent him to the legislature." 
 
 "Well, a good many of them do like him," the minister 
 admitted. " You see, he actually lives among them. They 
 believe his socialistic doctrines because he's a friend of theirs." 
 
 "He won't represent this town again, that's sure," ex 
 claimed George. "You didn't see in the papers that he was 
 nominated, did you, Paret?" 
 
 "But if the mill people wanted him, George, how could it 
 be prevented?" his wife demanded. 
 
 George winked at me. 
 
 "There are more ways of skinning a cat than one," he said 
 cryptically. 
 
 "Well, it's tune to go to the meeting, I guess," remarked 
 Ezra, rising. Once more he looked at his watch. 
 
 We were packed into several family carriages and started 
 off. In front of the hall the inevitable red fire was burning, 
 its quivering light reflected on the faces of the crowd that 
 blocked the street. They stood silent, strangely apathetic 
 as we pushed through them to the curb, and the red fire 
 went out suddenly as we descended. My temporary sense 
 of depression, however, deserted me as we entered the hall, 
 which was well lighted and filled with people, who clapped 
 when the Hon. Joseph and I, accompanied by Mr. Dod- 
 dridge and the Hon. Henry Clay Mellish from Pottstown, 
 with the local chairman, walked out on the stage. A glance 
 over the audience sufficed to ascertain that that portion of 
 the population whose dinner pails we longed to fill was 
 evidently not present in large numbers. But the farmers had 
 driven in from the hills, while the merchants and store 
 keepers of Elkington had turned out loyally. 
 
 The chairman, in introducing me, proclaimed me as a 
 coming man, and declared that I had already achieved, in 
 the campaign, considerable notoriety. As I spoke, I was 
 pleasantly aware of Maude Hutchins leaning forward a 
 little across the rail of the right-hand stage box for the 
 town hall was half opera-house ; her attitude was one of
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 213 
 
 semi-absorbed admiration ; and the thought that I had made 
 an impression on her stimulated me. I spoke with more 
 aplomb. Somewhat to my surprise, I found myself making 
 occasional, unexpected witticisms that drew laughter and 
 applause. Suddenly, from the back of the hall, a voice called 
 out: 
 
 "How about House Bill 709?" 
 
 There was a silence, then a stirring and craning of necks. 
 It was my first experience of heckling, and for the moment 
 I was taken aback. I thought of Krebs. He had, indeed, 
 been in my mind since I had risen to my feet, and I had 
 scanned the faces before me in search of his. But it was 
 not his voice. 
 
 "Well, what about Bill 709?" I demanded. 
 
 " You ought to know something about it, I guess," the 
 voice responded. 
 
 "Put him out!" came from various portions of the hall. 
 
 Inwardly, I was shaken. Not in orthodox language 
 from any "conviction of sin." Yet it was my first intima 
 tion that my part in the legislation referred to was known 
 to any save a select few. I blamed Krebs, and a hot anger 
 arose within me against him. After all, what could they 
 prove ? 
 
 "No, don't put him out," I said. "Let him come up here 
 to the platform. I'll yield to him. And I'm entirely willing 
 to discuss with him and defend any measures passed in the 
 legislature of this state by a Republican majority. Per 
 haps," I added, "the gentleman has a copy of the law in 
 his pocket, that I may know what he is talking about, and 
 answer him intelligently." 
 
 At this there was wild applause. I had the audience with 
 me. The offender remained silent and presently I finished 
 my speech. After that Mr. Mecklin made them cheer and 
 weep, and Mr. Hellish made them laugh. The meeting had 
 been highly successful. 
 
 "You polished him off, all right," said George Hutchins, 
 as he took my hand.
 
 214 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Who was he?" 
 
 "Oh, one of the local soreheads. Krebs put him up to it, 
 of course." 
 
 "Was Krebs here?" I asked. 
 
 " Sitting in the corner of the balcony. That meeting must 
 have made him feel sick." George bent forward and whis 
 pered in my ear: "I thought Bill 709 was Watling's idea." 
 
 " Oh, I happened to be in the Potts House about that tune," 
 I explained. 
 
 George, of whom it may be gathered that he was not 
 wholly unsophisticated, grinned at me appreciatively. 
 
 " Say, Paret," he replied, putting his hand through my arm, 
 "there's a little legal business in prospect down here that 
 will require some handling, and I wish you'd come down 
 after the campaign and talk it over with us. I've just 
 about made up my mind that you're the man to tackle it." 
 
 "All right, I'll come," I said. 
 
 "And stay with me," said George. . . . 
 
 We went to his yellow-brick house for refreshments, 
 salad and ice-cream and (in the face of the Hutchins tradi 
 tions) champagne. Others had been invited in, some twenty 
 persons. . . . Once in a while, when I looked up, I met 
 Maude's eyes across the room. I walked home with her, 
 slowly, the length of the Hutchinses' block. Floating over 
 the lake was a waning October moon that cast through 
 the thinning maples a lace-work of shadows at our feet; I 
 had the feeling of well-being that comes to heroes, and the 
 presence of Maude Hutchins was an incense, a vestal in 
 cense far from unpleasing. Yet she had reservations which 
 appealed to me. Hers was not a gushing provincialism, 
 like that of Mrs. George. 
 
 "I liked your speech so much, Mr. Paret," she told me. 
 " It seemed so sensible and controlled, compared to the 
 others. I have never thought a great deal about these 
 things, of course, and I never understood before why taking 
 away the tariff caused so much misery. You made that 
 quite plain."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 215 
 
 "If so, I'm glad," I said. 
 
 She was silent a moment. 
 
 "The working people here have had a hard time during 
 the last year," she went on. "Some of the mills had to be 
 shut down, you know. It has troubled me. Indeed, it has 
 troubled all of us. And what has made it more difficult, 
 more painful is that many of them seem actually to dislike us. 
 They think it's father's fault, and that he could run all the 
 mills if he wanted to. I've been around a little with mother 
 and sometimes the women wouldn't accept any help from us ; 
 they said they'd rather starve than take charity, that they 
 had the right to work. But father couldn't run the mills at 
 a loss could he ? " 
 
 " Certainly not," I replied. 
 
 "And then there's Mr. Krebs, of whom we were speaking 
 at supper, and who puts all kinds of queer notions into their 
 heads. Father says he's an anarchist. I heard father say 
 at supper that he was at Harvard with you. Did you like 
 him?" 
 
 "Well," I answered hesitatingly, "I didn't know him very 
 well." 
 
 "Of course not," she put in. "I suppose you couldn't 
 have." 
 
 "He's got these notions," I explained, "that are mischiev 
 ous and crazy but I don't dislike him." 
 
 " I'm glad to hear you say that ! " she answered quietly. 
 "I like him, too he seems so kind, so understanding." 
 
 "Do you know him?" 
 
 " Well, " she hesitated " I feel as though I do. I've 
 only met him once, and that was by accident. It was the 
 day the big strike began, last spring, and I had been shop 
 ping, and started for the mills to get father to walk home 
 with me, as I used to do. I saw the crowds blocking the 
 streets around the canal. At first I paid no attention to 
 them, but after a while I began to be a little uneasy, 
 there were places where I had to squeeze through, and I 
 couldn't help seeing that something was wrong, and that
 
 216 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the people were angry. Men and women were talking in 
 loud voices. One woman stared at me, and called my name, 
 and said something that frightened me terribly. I went 
 into a doorway and then I saw Mr. Krebs. I didn't 
 know who he was. He just said, 'You'd better come with 
 me, Miss Hutchins,' and I went with him. I thought 
 afterwards that it was a very courageous thing for him to do, 
 because 'he was so popular with the mill people, and they had 
 such a feeling against us. Yet they didn't seem to resent it, 
 and made way for us, and Mr. Krebs spoke to many of them 
 as we passed. After we got to State Street, I asked him 
 his name, and when he told me I was speechless. He took off 
 his hat and went away. He had such a nice face not 
 at all ugly when you look at it twice and kind eyes, that 
 I just couldn't believe him to be as bad as father and George 
 think he is. Of course he is mistaken," she added hastily, 
 "but I am sure he is sincere, and honestly thinks he can help 
 those people by telling them what he does." 
 
 The question shot at me during the meeting rankled still ; 
 I wanted to believe that Krebs had inspired it, and her 
 championship of him gave me a twinge of jealousy, the 
 slightest twinge, to be sure, yet a perceptible one. At the 
 same time, the unaccountable liking I had for the man 
 stirred to life. The act she described had been so character 
 istic. 
 
 "He's one of the born rebels against society," I said 
 glibly. "Yet I do think he's sincere." 
 
 Maude was grave. " I should be sorry to think he wasn't," 
 she replied. After I had bidden her good night at the foot 
 of the stairs, and gone to my room, I reflected how absurd 
 it was to be jealous of Krebs. What was Maude Hutchins 
 to me ? And even if she had been something to me, she never 
 could be anything to Krebs. All the forces of our civilization 
 stood between the two; nor was she of a nature to take 
 plunges of that sort. The next day, as I lay back in my 
 seat in the parlour-car and gazed at the autumn landscape, 
 I indulged in a luxurious contemplation of the picture she
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 217 
 
 had made as she stood on the lawn under the trees in the 
 early morning light, when my carriage had driven away ; and 
 I had turned, to perceive that her eyes had followed me. I 
 was not in love with her, of course. I did not wish to re 
 turn at once to Elkington, but I dwelt with a pleasant antici 
 pation upon my visit, when the campaign should be over, 
 with George.
 
 XIII 
 
 \ 
 
 < 
 
 1 
 
 "THE good old days of the Watling campaign," as Colonel 
 Paul Varney is wont to call them, are gone forever. And 
 the Colonel himself, who stuck to his gods, has been through 
 the burning, fiery furnace of Investigation, and has come out 
 unscathed and unrepentant. The flames of investigation, 
 as a matter of fact, passed over his head in their vain attempt 
 to reach the "man higher up," whose feet they licked; but 
 him they did not devour, either. A veteran in retirement, the 
 Colonel is living under his vine and fig tree on the lake at 
 Rossiter; the vine bears Catawba grapes, of which he is 
 passionately fond ; the fig tree, the Bartlett pears he gives 
 to his friends. He has saved something from the spoils of 
 war, but other veterans I could mention are not so fortunate. 
 The old warriors have retired, and many are dead ; the good 
 old methods are becoming obsolete. We never bothered 
 about those mischievous things called primaries. Our county 
 committees, our state committees chose the candidates for 
 the conventions, which turned around and chose the commit 
 tees. Both the committees and the conventions under , 
 advice chose the candidates. Why, pray, should the i 
 people complain, when they had everything done for them ? 
 The benevolent parties, both Democratic and Republican, 
 even undertook the expense of printing the ballots ! And 
 generous ballots they were (twenty inches long and five wide !), 
 distributed before election, in order that the voters might 
 have the opportunity of studying and preparing them : in 
 order that Democrats of delicate feelings might take the pains 
 to scratch out all the Democratic candidates, and write in 
 
 218
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 219 
 
 the names of the Republican candidates. Patriotism could 
 go no farther than this. . . . 
 
 I spent the week before election in the city, where I had 
 the opportunity of observing what may be called the chari 
 table side of politics. For a whole month, or more, the 
 burden of existence had been lifted from the shoulders of 
 the homeless. No church or organization looked out for 
 these frowsy, blear-eyed and ragged wanderers who had 
 failed to find a place in the scale of efficiency. For a whole 
 month, I say, Mr. Judd Jason and his lieutenants made them 
 their especial care; supported them in lodging-houses, in 
 duced the night clerks to give them attention; took the 
 greatest pains to ensure them the birth-right which, as 
 American citizens, was theirs, that of voting. They 
 were not only given homes for a period, but they were reg 
 istered ; and in the abundance of good feeling that reigned 
 during this time of cheer, even the foreigners were registered 1 
 On election day they were driven, like visiting notables, in 
 carryalls and carriages to the polls ! Some of them, as though 
 in compensation for ills endured between elections, voted 
 not once, but many times; exercising judicial functions 
 for which they should be given credit. For instance, they 
 were convinced that the Hon. W. W. Trulease had made a 
 good governor ; and they were Watling enthusiasts, in 
 tent on sending men to the legislature who would vote for 
 him for senator ; yet there were cases in which, for the minor 
 offices, the democrat was the better man ! ! 
 
 It was a memorable day. In spite of Mr. Lawler's Pilot, 
 which was as a voice crying in the wilderness, citizens who 
 had wives and homes and responsibilities, business men and 
 clerks went to the voting booths and recorded their choice 
 for Trulease, Watling and Prosperity : and working-men fol 
 lowed suit. Victory was in the air. Even the policemen 
 wore happy smiles, and in some instances the election officers 
 themselves in absent-minded exuberance thrust bunches 
 of ballots into the boxes ! 
 
 In response to an insistent demand from his fellow-citizens
 
 220 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Mr. Watling, the Saturday evening before, had made a 
 speech in the Auditorium, decked with bunting and filled 
 with people. For once the Morning Era did not exaggerate 
 when it declared that the ovation had lasted fully ten minutes. 
 "A remarkable proof" it went on to say, "of the esteem and 
 confidence in which our fellow-citizen is held by those who 
 know him best, his neighbours in the city where he has given 
 so many instances of his public spirit, where he has achieved 
 such distinction in the practice of the law. He holds the 
 sound American conviction that the office should seek the 
 man. His address is printed in another column, and we 
 believe it will appeal to the intelligence and sober judgment 
 of the state. It is replete with modesty and wisdom." 
 
 Mr. Watling was introduced by Mr. Bering of the State 
 Supreme Court (a candidate for reelection), who spoke with 
 deliberation, with owl-like impressiveness. He didn't be 
 lieve in judges meddling in politics, but this was an unusual 
 occasion. (Loud applause.) Most unusual. He had come 
 here as a man, as an American, to pay his tribute to another 
 man, a long-time friend, whom he thought to stand some 
 what aside and above mere party strife, to represent values 
 not merely political. ... So accommodating arid flexible 
 is the human mind, so "practical" may it become through 
 dealing with men and affairs, that in listening to Judge 
 Bering I was able to ignore the little anomalies such a sit 
 uation might have suggested to the theorist, to the mere 
 student of the institutions of democracy. The friendly 
 glasses of rye and water Mr. Bering had taken in Monahan's 
 saloon, the cases he had "arranged" for the firm of Watling, 
 Fowndes and Ripon were forgotten. Forgotten, too, 
 when Theodore Watling stood up and men began to throw 
 their hats in the air, were the cavilling charges of Mr. 
 Lawler's Pilot that, far from the office seeking the man, our 
 candidate had spent over a hundred thousand dollars of 
 his own money, to say nothing of the contributions of Mr. 
 Scherer, Mr. Dickinson and the Railroad ! If I had been 
 troubled with any weak, ethical doubts, Mr. Watling
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 221 
 
 have dispelled them ; he had red blood in his veins, a creed 
 in which he believed, a rare power of expressing himself 
 in plain, everyday language that was often colloquial, but 
 never as the saying goes "cheap." The dinner-pail 
 predicament was real to him. He would present a policy 
 of our opponents charmingly, even persuasively, and then 
 add, after a moment's pause : " There is only one objection 
 to this, my friends that it doesn't work." It was all in 
 the way he said it, of course. The audience would go wild 
 with approval, and shouts of "that's right" could be heard 
 here and there. Then he proceeded to show why it didn't 
 work. He had the faculty of bringing his lessons home, the 
 imagination to put himself into the daily life of those who 
 listened to him, the life of the storekeeper, the clerk, of 
 the labourer and of the housewife. The effect of this can 
 scarcely be overestimated. For the American hugs the de 
 lusion that there are no class distinctions, even though his 
 whole existence may be an effort to rise out of one class into 
 another. "Your wife," he told them once, "needs a dress. 
 Let us admit that the material for the dress is a little cheaper 
 than it was four years ago, but when she comes to look into 
 the family stocking " (Laughter.) " I needn't go on. If 
 we could have things cheaper, and more money to buy them 
 with, we should all be happy, and the Republican party 
 could retire from business." 
 He did not once refer to the United States Senatorship. 
 
 It was appropriate, perhaps, that many of us dined on 
 the evening of election day at the Boyne Club. There was 
 early evidence of a Republican land-slide. And when, at 
 ten o'clock, it was announced that Mr. Trulease was re- 
 elected by a majority which exceeded Mr. Grunewald's 
 most hopeful estimate, that the legislature was " safe," that 
 Theodore Watling would be the next United States Senator, 
 a scene of jubilation ensued within those hallowed walls
 
 222 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 which was unprecedented. Chairs were pushed back, rugs 
 taken up, Gene Hollister played the piano and a Virginia 
 reel started; in a burst of enthusiasm Leonard Dickinson 
 ordered champagne for every member present. The country 
 was returning to its senses. Theodore Watling had pre 
 ferred, on this eventful night, to remain quietly at home. 
 But presently carriages were ordered, and a "delegation" 
 of enthusiastic friends departed to congratulate him ; Dick 
 inson, of course, Grierson, Fowndes, Ogilvy, and Grunewald. 
 We found Judah B. Tallant there, in spite of the fact 
 that it was a busy night for the Era ; and Adolf Scherer him 
 self, in expansive mood, was filling the largest of the library 
 chairs. Mr. Watling was the least excited of them all; 
 remarkably calm, I thought, for a man on the verge of realiz 
 ing his life's high ambition. He had some old brandy, and 
 a box of cigars he had been saving for an occasion. He man 
 aged to convey to everyone his appreciation of the value 
 of their cooperation. . . . 
 
 It was midnight before Mr. Scherer arose to take his 
 departure. He seized Mr. Watling's hand, warmly, in both 
 of his own. 
 
 "I have never," he said, with a relapse into the German 
 fs, "I have never had a happier moment in my life, my friend, 
 than when I congratulate you on your success." His voice 
 shook with emotion. "Alas, we shall not see so much of 
 you now." 
 
 "He'll be on guard, Scherer," said Leonard Dickinson, 
 putting his arm around my chief. 
 
 "Good night, Senator," said Tallant, and all echoed the 
 word, which struck me as peculiarly appropriate. Much as 
 I had admired Mr. Watling before, it seemed indeed as if he 
 had undergone some subtle change in the last few hours, 
 gained in dignity and greatness by the action of the people 
 that day. When it came my turn to bid him good night, he 
 retained my hand in his. 
 
 " Don't go yet, Hugh," he said. 
 
 "But you must be tired," I objected.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 223 
 
 "This sort of thing doesn't make a man tired," he laughed, 
 leading me back to the library, where he began to poke the 
 fire into a blaze. "Sit down awhile. You must be tired, I 
 think, you've worked hard in this campaign, a good deal 
 harder than I have. I haven't said much about it, but I 
 appreciate it, my boy." Mr. Watling had the gift of ex 
 pressing his feelings naturally, without sentimentality. I 
 would have given much for that gift. 
 
 "Oh, I liked it," I replied awkwardly. 
 
 I read a gentle amusement in his eyes, and also the ex 
 pression of something else, difficult to define. He had seated 
 himself, and was absently thrusting at the logs with the 
 poker. 
 
 "You've never regretted going into law?" he asked sud 
 denly, to my surprise. 
 
 "Why, no, sir," I said. 
 
 "I'm glad to hear that. I feel, to a considerable extent, 
 responsible for your choice of a profession." 
 
 "My father intended me to be a lawyer," I told him. 
 "But it's true that you gave me my my first enthus- 
 siasm." 
 
 He looked up at me at the word. 
 
 "I admired your father. He seemed to me to be every 
 thing that a lawyer should be. And years ago, when I came 
 to this city a raw country boy from up state, he represented 
 and embodied for me all the fine traditions of the profession. 
 But the practice of law isn't what it was in his day, Hugh." 
 
 "No," I agreed, "that could scarcely be expected." 
 
 "Yes, I believe you realize that," he said. "I've watched 
 you, I've taken a personal pride in you, and I have an idea 
 that eventually you will succeed me here neither Fowndes 
 nor Ripon have the peculiar ability you have shown. You 
 and I are alike in a great many fespects, and I am inclined to 
 think we are rather rare, as men go. We are able to keep 
 one object vividly in view, so vividly as to be able to work 
 for it day and night. I could mention dozens who had and 
 have more natural talent for the law than I, more talent for
 
 224 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 politics than I. The same thing may be said about you. 1 
 don't regard either of us as natural lawyers, such as your 
 father was. He couldn't help being a lawyer." 
 
 Here was new evidence of his perspicacity. 
 
 "But surely," I ventured, "you don't feel any regrets 
 Concerning your career, Mr. Watling ? " 
 
 "No," he said, "that's just the point. But no two of us 
 ire made wholly alike. I hadn't practised law very long 
 before I began to realize that conditions were changing, that 
 the new forces at work in our industrial life made the older 
 legal ideals impracticable. It was a case of choosing between 
 efficiency and inefficiency, and I chose efficiency. Well, 
 that was my own affair, but when it comes to influencing 
 others " He paused. "I want you to see this as I do, 
 not for the sake of justifying myself, but because I honestly 
 believe there is more to it than expediency, a good deal 
 more. There's a weak way of looking at it, and a strong 
 way. And if I feel sure you understand it, I shall be satisfied. 
 
 " Because things are going to change in this country, Hugh. 
 They are changing, but they are going to change more. A 
 man has got to make up his mind what he believes in, and be 
 ready to fight for it. We'll have to fight for it, sooner per 
 haps than we realize. We are a nation divided against 
 ourselves ; democracy Jacksonian democracy, at all 
 events, is a flat failure, and we may as well acknowledge it. 
 We have a political system we have outgrown, and which, 
 therefore, we have had to nullify. There are certain needs, 
 certain tendencies of development in nations as well as in 
 individuals, needs stronger than the state, stronger than 
 the law or constitution. In order to make our resources 
 effective, combinations of capital are more and more neces 
 sary, and no more to be denied than a chemical process, 
 given the proper ingredients, can be thwarted. The men 
 who control capital must have a free hand, or the structure 
 will be destroyed. This compels us to do many things 
 which we would rather not do, which we might accomplish 
 openly and unopposed if conditions were frankly recognized,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 225 
 
 and met by wise statesmanship which sought to bring about 
 harmony by the reshaping of laws and policies. Do you fol 
 low me?" 
 
 "Yes," I answered. "But I have never heard the situ 
 ation stated so clearly. Do you think the day will come 
 when statesmanship will recognize this need?" 
 
 "Ah," he said, "I'm afraid not in my time, at least. 
 But we shall have to develop that kind of statesmen or go on. 
 the rocks. Public opinion in the old democratic sense is a 
 myth; it must be made by strong individuals who recog 
 nize and represent evolutionary needs, otherwise it's at the 
 mercy of demagogues who play fast and loose with the 
 prejudice and ignorance of the mob. The people don't 
 value the vote, they know nothing about the real problems. 
 So far as I can see, they are as easily swayed to-day as the 
 crowd that listened to Mark Antony's oration about 
 Csesar. You've seen how we have to handle them, in this 
 election and in other matters. It isn't a pleasant prac 
 tice, something we'd indulge in out of choice, but the alter 
 native is unthinkable. We'd have chaos in no time. We've 
 just got to keep hold, you understand we can't leave it to 
 the irresponsible." 
 
 "Yes," I said. In this mood he was more impressive 
 than I had ever known him, and his confidence flattered and 
 thrilled me. 
 
 " In the meantime, we're criminals," he continued. " From 
 now on we'll have to stand more and more denunciation from 
 the visionaries, the dissatisfied, the trouble makers. We 
 may as well make up our minds to it. But we've got some 
 thing on our side worth fighting for, and the man who is able 
 to make that clear will be great." 
 
 "But you you are going to the Senate," I reminded 
 him. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 "The time has not yet come," he said. "Confusion and 
 misunderstanding must increase before they can diminish. 
 But I have hopes of you, Hugh, or I shouldn't have spoken.
 
 226 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I shan't be here now of course I'll keep in touch with you. 
 I wanted to be sure that you had the right view of this 
 thing." 
 
 j& "I see it now," I said. "I had thought of it, but never 
 never as a whole not in the large sense in which you have 
 expressed it." To attempt to acknowledge or deprecate 
 the compliment he had paid me was impossible ; I felt that 
 he must have read my gratitude and appreciation in my 
 manner. 
 
 " I mustn't keep you up until morning." He glanced at the 
 clock, and went with me through the hall into the open air. 
 A meteor darted through the November night. "We're 
 like that," he observed, staring after it, a "flash across the 
 darkness, and we're gone." 
 
 " Only there are many who haven't the satisfaction of 
 a flash," I was moved to reply. 
 
 He laughed and put his hand on my shoulder as he bade 
 me good night. 
 
 " Hugh, you ought to get married. I'll have to find a nice 
 girl for you," he said. With an elation not unmingled with 
 awe I made my way homeward. 
 
 Theodore Watling had given me a creed. 
 
 A week or so after the election I received a letter from 
 George Hutchins asking me to come to Elkington. I shall 
 not enter into the details of the legal matter involved. 
 Many tunes that winter I was a guest at the yellow-brick 
 house, and I have to confess, as spring came on, that I 
 made several trips to Elkington which business necessity did 
 not absolutely demand. 
 
 I considered Maude Hutchins, and found the consider 
 ation rather a delightful process. As became an eligible and 
 successful young man, I was careful not to betray too much 
 interest; and I occupied myself at first with a review of 
 what I deemed her shortcomings. Not that I was thinking
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 227 
 
 of marriage but I had imagined the future Mrs. Paret as 
 tall ; Maude was up to my chin : again, the hair of the 
 fortunate lady was to be dark, and Maude's was golden red : 
 my ideal had esprit, lightness of touch, the faculty of seizing 
 just the aspect of a subject that delighted me, and a knowl 
 edge of the world ; Maude was simple, direct, and in a word 
 provincial. Her provinciality, however, was negative rather 
 than positive, she had no disagreeable mannerisms, her voice 
 was not nasal ; her plasticity appealed to me. I suppose I 
 was lost without knowing it when I began to think of mould 
 ing her. 
 
 All of this went on at frequent intervals during the winter, 
 and while I was organizing the Elkington Power and Trac 
 tion Company for George I found time to dine and sup at 
 Maude's house, and to take walks with her. I thought I 
 detected an incense deliciously sweet; by no means over 
 powering, like the lily's, but more like the shy fragrance of 
 the wood flower. I recall her kind welcomes, the faint 
 deepening of colour in her cheeks when she greeted me, and 
 while I suspected that she looked up to me she had a surpris 
 ing and tantalizing self-command. 
 
 There came moments when I grew slightly alarmed, as, for 
 instance, one Sunday in the early spring when I was dining at 
 the Ezra Hutchins's house and surprised Mrs. Hutchins's 
 glance on me, suspecting her of seeking to divine what man 
 ner of man I was. I became self-conscious ; I dared not look 
 at Maude, who sat across the table ; thereafter I began to 
 feel that the Hutchins connection regarded me as a suitor. 
 I had grown intimate with George and his wife, who did not 
 refrain from sly allusions; and George himself once re 
 marked, with characteristic tact, that I was most conscien 
 tious in my attention to the traction affair ; I have reason to 
 believe they were even less delicate with Maude. This was 
 the logical time to withdraw but I dallied. The expe 
 rience was becoming more engrossing, if I may so describe 
 it, and spring was approaching. The stars in their courses 
 were conspiring. I was by no means as yet a self-acknowl-
 
 228 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 edged wooer, and we discussed love in its lighter phases 
 through the medium of literature. Heaven forgive me for 
 calling it so! About that period, it will be remembered, a 
 mushroom growth of volumes of a certain kind sprang into 
 existence; little books with "artistic" bindings and wide 
 margins, sweetened essays, some of them written in beautiful 
 English by dilettante authors for drawing-room consump 
 tion; and collections of short stories, no doubt chiefly 
 bought by philanderers like myself, who were thus enabled 
 to skate on thin ice over deep water. It was a most delightful 
 relationship that these helped to support, and I fondly be 
 lieved I could reach shore again whenever I chose. 
 
 There came a Sunday in early May, one of those days 
 when the feminine assumes a large importance. I had been to 
 the Hutchinses' church ; and Maude, as she sat and prayed 
 decorously in the pew beside me, suddenly increased in 
 attractiveness and desirability. Her voice was very sweet, 
 and I felt a delicious and languorous thrill which I identified 
 not only with love, but also with a reviving spirituality. 
 How often the two seem to go hand in hand ! 
 
 She wore a dress of a filmy material, mauve, with a design 
 in gold thread running through it. Of late, it seemed, she 
 had had more new dresses: and their modes seemed more 
 cosmopolitan; at least to the masculine eye. How deli 
 cately her hair grew, in little, shining wisps, around her 
 white neck ! I could have reached out my hand and touched 
 her. And it was this desire, although by no means over 
 whelming, that startled me. Did I really want her ? 
 The consideration of this vital question occupied the whole 
 time of the sermon ; made me distrait at dinner, a large 
 family gathering. Later I found myself alone with her on a 
 bench in the Hutchinses' garden where we had walked the 
 day of my arrival, during the campaign. 
 
 The gardens were very different, now. The trees had 
 burst forth again into leaf, the spiraea bushes seemed 
 weighted down with snow, and with a note like that of the 
 quivering bass string of a 'cello the bees hummed among the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 229 
 
 fruit blossoms. And there beside me in her filmy dress was 
 Maude, a part of it all the meaning of all that set my 
 being clamouring. She was like some ripened, delicious 
 flower ready to be picked. . . . One of those pernicious, 
 make-believe volumes had fallen on the bench between us, 
 for I could not read any more ; I could not think ; I touched 
 her hand, and when she drew it gently away I glanced at her. 
 Reason made a valiant but hopeless effort to assert itself. 
 Was I sure that I wanted her for life ? No use 1 I 
 wanted her now, no matter what price that future might 
 demand. An awkward silence fell between us awkward to 
 me, at least and I, her guide and mentor, became banal, 
 apologetic, confused. I made some idiotic remark about 
 being together in the Garden of Eden. 
 
 "I remember Mr. Doddridge saying in Bible class that it 
 was supposed to be on the Euphrates," she replied. "But 
 it's been destroyed by the flood." 
 
 " Let's make another one of our own," I suggested. 
 
 "Why, how silly you are this afternoon." 
 
 "What's to prevent us Maude?" I demanded, with a 
 dry throat. 
 
 " Nonsense ! " she laughed. In proportion as I lost poise 
 she seemed to gain it. 
 
 "It's not nonsense," I faltered. "If we were married." 
 
 At last the fateful words were pronounced irrevocably. 
 And, instead of qualms, I felt nothing but relief, joy that I 
 had been swept along by the flood of feeling. She did not 
 look at me, but gazed straight ahead of her. 
 
 "If I love you, Maude?" I stammered, after a moment. 
 
 "But I don't love you," she replied, steadily. 
 
 Never in my life had I been so utterly taken aback. 
 
 "Do you mean," I managed to say, "that after all these 
 months you don't like me a little?" 
 
 "'Liking' isn't loving." She looked me full in the face. 
 "I like you very much." 
 
 "But " there I stopped, paralyzed by what appeared to 
 me the quintessence of feminine inconsistency and caprice.
 
 230 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Yet, as I stared at her, she certainly did not appear capri< 
 cious. It is not too much to say that I was fairly astounded 
 at this evidence of self-command and decision, of the strength 
 of mind to refuse me. Was it possible that she had felt 
 nothing and I all ? I got to my feet. 
 
 "I hate to hurt your feelings," I heard her say. "I'm 
 very sorry." . . . She looked up at me. Afterwards, when 
 reflecting on the scene, I seemed to remember that there were 
 tears in her eyes. I was not in a condition to appreciate her 
 splendid sincerity. I was overwhelmed and inarticulate. I 
 left her there, on the bench, and went back to George's, 
 announcing my intention of taking the five o'clock train. . . . 
 
 Maude Hutchins had become, at a stroke, the most desir 
 able of women. I have often wondered how I should have 
 felt on that five-hour journey back to the city if she had 
 fallen into my arms ! I should have persuaded myself, no 
 doubt, that I had not done a foolish thing in yielding to an 
 impulse and proposing to an inexperienced and provincial 
 young woman, yet there would have been regrets in the 
 background. Too deeply chagrined to see any humour in 
 the situation, I settled down in a Pullman seat and went over 
 and over again the event of that afternoon until the train 
 reached the city. 
 
 As the days wore on, and I attended to my cases, I thought 
 of Maude a great deal, and in those moments when the pres 
 sure of business was relaxed, she obsessed me. She must 
 love me, only she did not realize it. That was the secret ! 
 Her value had risen amazingly, become supreme ; the very 
 act of refusing me had emphasized her qualifications as a 
 wife, and I now desired her with all the intensity of a nature 
 which had been permitted always to achieve its objects. The 
 inevitable process of idealization began. In dusty offices I 
 recalled her freshness as she had sat beside me in the garden, 
 the freshness of a flower; with Berkeleyan subjectivism I
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 231 
 
 clothed the flower with colour, bestowed it with fragrance. 
 I conferred on Maude all the gifts and graces that woman 
 had possessed since the creation. And I recalled, with min 
 gled bitterness and tenderness, the turn of her head, the 
 down on her neck, the half-revealed curve of her arm. . . . 
 
 In spite of the growing sordidness of Lyme Street, my 
 mother and I still lived in the old house, for which she very 
 naturally had a sentiment. In vain I had urged her from 
 tune to time to move out into a brighter and fresher neigh 
 bourhood. It would be time enough, she said, when I was 
 married. 
 
 "If you wait for that, mother," I answered, "we shall 
 spend the rest of our lives here." 
 
 " I shall spend the rest of my life here," she would declare. 
 " But you you have your life before you, my dear. You 
 would be so much more contented if if you could find 
 some nice girl. I think you live too feverishly." 
 
 I do not know whether or not she suspected me of being in 
 love, nor indeed how much she read of me in other ways. I 
 did not confide in her, nor did it strike me that she might 
 have yearned for confidences; though sometimes, when I 
 dined at home, I surprised her gentle face framed now 
 with white hair lifted wistfully toward me across the 
 table. Our relationship, indeed, was a pathetic projection 
 of that which had existed in my childhood ; we had never 
 been confidants then. The world in which I lived and fought, 
 of great transactions and merciless consequences frightened 
 her ; her own world was more limited than ever. She heard 
 disquieting things, I am sure, from Cousin Robert Breck, 
 who had become more and more querulous since the time- 
 honoured firm of Breck and Company had been forced to 
 close its doors and the home at Claremore had been sold. 
 My mother often spent the day in the scrolled suburban 
 cottage with the coloured glass front door where he lived 
 with the Kinleys and Helen. . . . 
 
 If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage, 
 and said nothing, Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out.
 
 232 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and sur 
 prises that I record here without comment the fact that I 
 was seeing much more of Nancy since her marriage than I 
 had in the years preceding it. A comradeship existed be 
 tween us. I often dined at her house and had fallen into the 
 habit of stopping there frequently on my way home in the 
 evening. Ham did not seem to mind. What was clear, at 
 any rate, was that Nancy, before marriage, had exacted some 
 sort of an understanding by which her "freedom" was not 
 to be interfered with. She was the first among us of the 
 "modern wives." 
 
 Ham, whose heartstrings and purse-strings were oddly 
 intertwined, had stipulated that they were to occupy the 
 old Durrett mansion; but when Nancy had made it "liv 
 able," as she expressed it, he is said to have remarked that 
 he might as well have built a new house and been done with 
 it. Not even old Nathaniel himself would have recognized 
 his home when Nancy finished what she termed furnishing : 
 out went the horsehair, the hideous chandeliers, the stuffy 
 books, the R6camier statuary, and an army of upholsterers, 
 woodworkers, etc., from Boston and New York invaded 
 the place. The old mahogany doors were spared, but 
 matched now by Chippendale and Sheraton; the new, 
 polished floors were covered with Oriental rugs, the dreary 
 Durrett pictures replaced by good canvases and tapestries. 
 Nancy had what amounted to a genius for interior effects, 
 and she was the first to introduce among us the luxury that 
 was to grow more and more prevalent as our wealth increased 
 by leaps and bounds. Only Nancy's luxury, though lavish, 
 was never vulgar, and her house when completed had rather 
 marvellously the fine distinction of some old London man 
 sion filled with the best that generations could contribute. 
 It left Mrs. Frederick Grierson whose residence on the 
 Heights had hitherto been our "grandest" breathless with 
 despair. 
 
 With characteristic audacity Nancy had chosen old 
 Nathaniel's sanctum for her particular salon, into which
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 233 
 
 Ham himself did not dare to venture without invitation. 
 It was hung in Pompeiian red and had a little wrought-iron 
 balcony projecting over the yard, now transformed by an 
 expert into a garden. When I had first entered this room 
 after the metamorphosis had taken place I inquired after the 
 tombstone mantel. 
 
 "Oh, I've pulled it up by the roots," she said. 
 
 "Aren't you afraid of ghosts?" I inquired. 
 
 "Do I look it?" she asked. And I confessed that she 
 didn't. Indeed, all ghosts were laid, nor was there about 
 her the slightest evidence of mourning or regret. One was 
 forced to acknowledge her perfection in the part she had 
 chosen as the arbitress of social honours. The candidates 
 were rapidly increasing; almost every month, it seemed, 
 someone turned up with a fortune and the aspirations that 
 go with it, and it was Mrs. Durrett who decided the delicate 
 question of fitness. With these, and with the world at large, 
 her manner might best be described as difficult ; and I was 
 often amused at the way in which she contrived to keep them 
 at arm's length and make them uncomfortable. With her 
 intimates of whom there were few she was frank. 
 
 " I suppose you enjoy it," I said to her once. 
 
 "Of course I enjoy it, or I shouldn't do it," she retorted. 
 "It isn't the real thing, as I told you once. But none of 
 us gets the real thing. It's power. . . . Just as you enjoy 
 what you're doing sorting out the unfit. It's a game, it 
 keeps us from brooding over things we can't help. And 
 after all, when we have good appetites and are fairly happy, 
 why should we complain?" 
 
 "I'm not complaining," I said, taking up a cigarette, 
 "since I still enjoy your favour." 
 
 She regarded me curiously. 
 
 "And when you get married, Hugh?" 
 
 "Sufficient unto the day," I replied. 
 
 "How shall I get along, I wonder, with that simple and 
 unsophisticated lady when she appears ? " 
 
 "Well," I said, "you wouldn't marry me."
 
 234 A FAR. COUNTRY 
 
 She shook her head at me, and smiled. . . . 
 
 "No," she corrected me, "you like me better as Hams' 
 wife than you would have as your own." 
 
 I merely laughed at this remark. ... It would indeed 
 have been difficult to analyze the new relationship that had 
 sprung up between us, to say what elements composed it. 
 The roots of it went back to the beginning of our lives ; and 
 there was much of sentiment in it, no doubt. She under 
 stood me as no one else in the world understood me, and she 
 was fond of me in spite of it. 
 
 Hence, when I became infatuated with Maude Hutchins, 
 after that Sunday when she so unexpectedly had refused 
 me, I might have known that Nancy's suspicions would be 
 aroused. She startled me by accusing me, out of a clear 
 sky, of being in love. I denied it a little too emphatically. 
 
 "Why shouldn't you tell me, Hugh, if it's so?" she asked. 
 "I didn't hesitate to tell you." 
 
 It was just before her departure for the East to spend the 
 summer. We were on the balcony, shaded by the big maple 
 that grew at the end of the garden. 
 
 "But there's nothing to tell," I insisted. 
 
 She lay back in her chair, regarding me. 
 
 "Did you think that I'd be jealous?" 
 
 "There's nothing to be jealous about." 
 
 "I've always expected you to get married, Hugh. I've 
 even predicted the type." 
 
 She had, in truth, with an accuracy almost uncanny. 
 
 "The only thing I'm afraid of is that she won't like me. 
 She lives in that place you've been going to so much, lately, 
 doesn't she?" 
 
 Of course she had put two and two together, my visits 
 to Elkington and my manner, which I had flattered myself 
 had not been distrait. On the chance that she knew more, 
 from some source, I changed my tactics. 
 
 " I suppose you mean Maude Hutchins," I said. 
 
 Nancy laughed. 
 
 "So that's her namel"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 235 
 
 "It's the name of a girl in Elkington. I've been doing 
 legal work for the Hutchinses, and I imagine some idiot has 
 been gossiping. She's just a young girl much too young 
 for me." 
 
 "Men are queer creatures," she declared. "Did you 
 think I should be jealous?" 
 
 It was exactly what I had thought, but I denied it. 
 
 " Why should you be even if there were anything to 
 be jealous about? You didn't consult me when you got 
 married. You merely announced an irrevocable decision." 
 
 Nancy leaned forward and laid her hand on my arm. 
 
 "My dear," she said, "strange as it may seem, I want you 
 to be happy. I don't want you to make a mistake, Hugh, 
 too great a mistake." 
 
 I was surprised and moved. Once more I had a momen 
 tary glimpse of the real Nancy. . . . 
 
 Our conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Ralph 
 Hambleton.
 
 XIV 
 
 HOWEVER, thoughts of Maude continued to possess me. 
 She still appeared the most desirable of beings, and a fort 
 night after my repulse, without any excuse at all, I tele 
 graphed the George Hutchinses that I was coming to pay 
 them a visit. Mrs. George, wearing a knowing smile, met 
 me at the station in a light buck-board. 
 
 "I've asked Maude to dinner," she said. . . . 
 
 Thus with masculine directness I returned to the charge, 
 and Maude's continued resistance but increased my ardour ; 
 I could not see why she continued to resist me. 
 
 "Because I don't love you," she said. 
 
 This was incredible. I suggested that she didn't know 
 what love was, and she admitted it was possible: she 
 liked me very, very much. I told her, sagely, that this was 
 the best foundation for matrimony. That might be, but 
 she had had other ideas. For one thing, she felt that she 
 did not know me. ... In short, she was charming and 
 maddening in her defensive ruses, in her advances and re 
 treats, for I pressed her hard during the four weeks which 
 followed, and in them made four visits. Flinging caution 
 to the winds, I did not even pretend to George that I was 
 coming to see him on business. I had the Hutchins family 
 on my side, for they had the sense to see that the match would 
 be an advantageous one; I even summoned up enough 
 courage to talk to Ezra Hutchins on the subject. 
 
 " I'll not attempt to influence Maude, Mr. Paret I've 
 always said I wouldn't interfere with her choice. But as 
 you are a young man of sound habits, sir, successful in your 
 profession, I should raise no objection. I suppose we can't 
 keep her always." 
 
 236
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 237 
 
 To conceal his emotion, he pulled out the watch he lived by. 
 
 "Why, it's church time!" he said. ... I attended 
 church regularly at Elkington. . . . 
 
 On a Sunday night in June, following a day during which 
 victory seemed more distant than ever, with startling un 
 expectedness Maude capitulated. She sat beside me on the 
 bench, obscured, yet the warm night quivered with her pres 
 ence. I felt her tremble. ... I remember the first ex 
 quisite touch of her soft cheek. How strange it was that in 
 conquest the tumult of my being should be stilled, that my 
 passion should be transmuted into awe that thrilled yet 
 disquieted ! What had I done ? It was as though I had 
 suddenly entered an unimagined sanctuary filled with holy 
 flame. . . . 
 
 Presently, when we began to talk, I found myself seeking 
 more familiar levels. I asked her why she had so long resisted 
 me, accusing her of having loved me all the time. 
 
 "Yes, I think I did, Hugh. Only I didn't know it." 
 
 "You must have felt something, that afternoon when I 
 first proposed to you ! " 
 
 "You didn't really want me, Hugh. Not then." 
 
 Surprised, and a little uncomfortable at this evidence of 
 intuition, I started to protest. It seemed to me then as 
 though I had always wanted her. 
 
 "No, no," she exclaimed, "you didn't. You were carried 
 away by your feelings you hadn't made up your mind. 
 Indeed, I can't see why you want me now." 
 
 "You believe I do," I said, and drew her toward me. 
 
 "Yes, I I believe it, now. But I can't see why. There 
 must be so many attractive girls in the city, who know so 
 much more than I do." 
 
 I sought fervidly to reassure her on this point. ... At 
 length when we went into the house she drew away from me 
 at arm's length and gave me one long searching look, as 
 though seeking to read my soul. 
 
 "Hugh, you will always love me to the very end, won't 
 you?"
 
 238 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Yes," I whispered, "always." 
 
 In the library, one on each side of the table, under the 
 lamp, Ezra Hutchins and his wife sat reading. Mrs. Hutch- 
 ins looked up, and I saw that she had divined. 
 
 "Mother, I am engaged to Hugh," Maude said, and bent 
 over and kissed her. Ezra and I stood gazing at them. Then 
 he turned to me and pressed my hand. 
 
 " Well, I never saw the man who was good enough for her, 
 Hugh. But God bless you, my son. I hope you will prize 
 her as we prize her." 
 
 Mrs. Hutchins embraced me. And through her tears 
 she, too, looked long into my face. When she had released 
 me Ezra had his watch in his hand. 
 
 "If you're going on the ten o'clock train, Hugh " 
 
 "Father!" Maude protested, laughing, "I must say I 
 don't call that very polite." . . . 
 
 In the train I slept but fitfully, awakening again and again 
 to recall the extraordinary fact that I was now engaged to 
 be married, to go over the incidents of the evening. In 
 different to the backings and the bumpings of the car, the 
 voices in the stations, the clanging of locomotive bells and 
 all the incomprehensible startings and stoppings, exalted yet 
 troubled I beheld Maude luminous with the love I had 
 amazingly awakened, a love somewhere beyond my compre 
 hension. For her indeed marriage was made in heaven. 
 But for me ? Could I rise now to the ideal that had once 
 been mine, thrust henceforth evil out of my life? Love 
 forever, live always in this sanctuary she had made for me? 
 Would the tune come when I should feel a sense of bondage ? 
 
 
 
 The wedding was set for the end of September. I con 
 tinued to go every week to Elkington, and in August Maude 
 and I spent a fortnight at the sea. There could be no doubt 
 as to my mother's happiness, as to her approval of Maude ; 
 they loved each other from the beginning. I can picture 
 them now, sitting together with their sewing on the porch 
 of the cottage at Mattapoisett. Out on the bay little white-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 239 
 
 caps danced in the sunlight, sail-boats tacked hither and 
 thither, the strong cape breeze, laden with invigorating salt, 
 stirred Maude's hair, and occasionally played havoc with 
 my papers. 
 
 "She is just the wife for you, Hugh," my mother confided 
 to me. "If I had chosen her myself I could not have done 
 better," she added, with a smile. 
 
 I was inclined to believe it, but Maude would have none 
 of this illusion. 
 
 "He just stumbled across me," she insisted. . . . 
 
 We went on long sails together, towards Wood's Hole and 
 the open sea, the sprays washing over us. Her cheeks grew 
 tanned. . . . Sometimes, when I praised her and spoke 
 confidently of our future, she wore a troubled expression. 
 
 "What are you thinking about?" I asked her once. 
 
 "You mustn't put me on a pedestal," she said gently. 
 " I want you to see me as I am I don't want you to wake 
 up some day and be disappointed. I'll have to learn a lot 
 of things, and you'll have to teach me. I can't get used to 
 the fact that you, who are so practical and successful in 
 business, should be such a dreamer where I am concerned." 
 
 I laughed, and told her, comfortably, that she was talking 
 nonsense. 
 
 "What did you think of me, when you first knew me?" 
 I inquired. 
 
 "Well," she answered, with the courage that characterized 
 her, "I thought you were rather calculating, that you put 
 too high a price on success. Of course you attracted me. 
 I own it." 
 
 "You hid your opinions rather well," I retorted, some 
 what discomfited. 
 
 She flushed. 
 
 " Have you changed them ? " I demanded. 
 
 "I think you have that side, and I think it a weak side, 
 Hugh. It's hard to tell you this, but it's better to say so 
 now, since you ask me. I do think you set too high a value 
 on success."
 
 240 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Well, now that I know what success really is, perhaps 
 I shall reform," I told her. 
 
 "I don't like to think that you fool yourself," she replied, 
 with a perspicacity I should have found extraordinary. 
 
 Throughout my life there have been days and incidents, 
 some trivial, some important, that linger in my memory 
 because they are saturated with "atmosphere." I recall, 
 for instance, a gala occasion in youth when my mother gave 
 one of her luncheon parties ; on my return from school, the 
 house and its surroundings wore a mysterious, exciting and 
 unfamiliar look, somehow changed by the simple fact that 
 guests sat decorously chatting in a dining-room shining with 
 my mother's best linen and treasured family silver and china. 
 The atmosphere of my wedding-day is no less vivid. The 
 house of Ezra Hutchins was scarcely recognizable : its doors 
 and windows were opened wide, and all the morning people 
 were being escorted upstairs to an all-significant room that 
 contained a collection like a jeweller's exhibit, a bewildering 
 display. There was a massive punch-bowl from which dangled 
 the card of Mr. and Mrs. Adolf Scherer, a really wonderful tea 
 set of old English silver given by Senator and Mrs. Watling, 
 and Nancy Willett, with her certainty of good taste, had sent 
 an old English tankard of the time of the second Charles. 
 The secret was in that room. And it magically transformed 
 for me (as I stood, momentarily alone, in the doorway where 
 I had first beheld Maude) the accustomed scene, and charged 
 with undivined significance the blue shadows under the heavy 
 foliage of the maples. The September sunlight was heavy, 
 tinged with gold. . . . 
 
 So fragmentary and confused are the events of that day 
 that a cubist literature were necessary to convey the im 
 pressions left upon me. I had something of the feeling of a 
 recruit who for the first time is taking part in a brilliant and 
 complicated manoeuvre. Tom and Susan Peters flit across
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 241 
 
 the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the 
 Ewanses, all of whom had come up in a special car ; Ralph 
 Hambleton was "best man," looking preternaturally tall in 
 his frock-coat: and his manner, throughout the whole 
 proceeding, was one of good-natured tolerance toward a 
 folly none but he might escape. 
 
 "If you must do it, Hughie, I suppose you must," he had 
 said to me. "I'll see you through, of course. But don't 
 blame me afterwards." 
 
 Maude was a little afraid of him. . . . 
 
 I dressed at George's ; then, like one of those bewildering 
 shifts of a cinematograph, comes the scene in church, the 
 glimpse of my mother's wistful face in the front pew ; and 
 I found myself in front of the austere Mr. Doddridge stand 
 ing beside Maude or rather beside a woman I tried hard 
 to believe was Maude so veiled and generally encased 
 was she. I was thinking of this all the time I was mechani 
 cally answering Mr. Doddridge, and even when the wedding 
 march burst forth and I led her out of the church. It was 
 as though they had done their best to disguise her, to put 
 our union on the other-worldly plane that was deemed to be 
 its only justification, to neutralize her sex at the very moment 
 it should have been most enhanced. Well, they succeeded. 
 If I had not been as conventional as the rest, I should have 
 preferred to have run away with her in the lavender dress 
 she wore when I first proposed to her. It was only when we 
 had got into the carriage and started for the house and she 
 turned to me her face from which the veil had been thrown 
 back that I realized what a sublime meaning it all had for 
 her. Her eyes were wet. Once more I was acutely con 
 scious of my inability to feel deeply at supreme moments. 
 For months I had looked forward with anticipation and im 
 patience to my wedding-day. 
 
 I kissed her gently. But I felt as though she had gone to 
 heaven, and that the face I beheld enshrouded were merely 
 her effigy. Commonplace words were inappropriate, yet 
 it was to these I resorted.
 
 242 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " Well it wasn't so bad after all ! Was it ? " 
 
 She smiled at me. 
 
 " You don't want to take it back ? " 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " I think it was a beautiful wedding, Hugh. I'm so glad 
 we had a good day." . . . 
 
 She seemed shy, at once very near and very remote. I 
 held her hand awkwardly until the carriage stopped. 
 
 A little later we were standing in a corner of the parlour, 
 the atmosphere of which was heavy with the scent of flowers, 
 submitting to the onslaught of relatives. Then came the 
 wedding breakfast : croquettes, champagne, chicken salad, 
 ice-cream, the wedding-cake, speeches and more kisses. . . . 
 I remember Tom Peters holding on to both my hands. 
 
 "Good-bye, and God bless you, old boy," he was saying. 
 Susan, in view of the occasion, had allowed him a little more 
 champagne than usual enough to betray his feelings, and 
 I knew that these had not changed since our college days. 
 I resolved to see more of him. I had neglected him and 
 undervalued his loyalty. ... He had followed me to my 
 room in George's house where I was dressing for the journey, 
 and he gave it as his deliberate judgment that in Maude 
 I had "struck gold." 
 
 " She's just the girl for you, Hughie," he declared. " Susan 
 thinks so, too." 
 
 Later in the afternoon, as we sat in the state-room of the 
 car that was bearing us eastward, Maude began to cry. I 
 satlooking at her helplessly, unable to enter into her emotion, 
 resenting it a little. Yet I tried awkwardly to comfort her. 
 
 " I can't bear to leave them," she said. 
 
 "But you will see them often, when we come back," I 
 reassured her. It was scarcely the moment for reminding 
 her of what she was getting in return. This peculiar family 
 affection she evinced was beyond me; I had never expe 
 rienced it in any poignant degree since I had gone as a fresh 
 man to Harvard, and yet I was struck by the fact that her 
 emotions were so rightly placed. It was natural to love one's
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 243 
 
 family. I began to feel, vaguely, as I watched her, that the 
 new relationship into which I had entered was to be much 
 more complicated than I had imagined. Twilight was com 
 ing on, the train was winding through the mountain passes, 
 crossing and recrossing a swift little stream whose banks 
 were massed with alder ; here and there, on the steep hill 
 sides, blazed the goldenrod. . . . Presently I turned, to 
 surprise in her eyes a wide, questioning look, the look of a 
 child. Even in this irrevocable hour she sought to grasp 
 what manner of being was this to whom she had confided 
 her life, and with whom she was faring forth into the un 
 known. The experience was utterly unlike my anticipa 
 tion. Yet I responded. The kiss I gave her had no 
 passion in it. 
 
 "I'll take good care of you, Maude," I said. 
 
 Suddenly, in the fading light, she flung her arms around me, 
 pressing me tightly, desperately. 
 
 "Oh, I know you will, Hugh, dear. And you'll forgive 
 me, won't you, for being so horrid to-day, of all days ? I do 
 love you!" 
 
 Neither of us had ever been abroad. And although it 
 was before the days of swimming-pools and gymnasiums and 
 a la carte cafes on ocean liners, the Alaric was imposing 
 enough. Maude had a more lasting capacity for pleasure 
 than I, a keener enjoyment of new experiences, and as she 
 lay beside me in the steamer-chair where I had carefully 
 tucked her she would exclaim : 
 
 "I simply can't believe it, Hugh! It seems so unreal. 
 I'm sure I shall wake up and find myself back in Elkington." 
 
 "Don't speak so loud, my dear," I cautioned her. There 
 were some very formal-looking New Yorkers next us. 
 
 "No, I won't," she whispered. "But I'm so happy I 
 feel as though I should like to tell everyone." 
 
 "There's no need," I answered smiling. 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, I don't want to disgrace you !" she exclaimed,
 
 244 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 in real alarm. "Otherwise, so far as I am concerned, I 
 shouldn't care who knew." 
 
 People smiled at her. Women came up and took her 
 hands. And on the fourth day the formidable New Yorkers 
 unexpectedly thawed. 
 
 I had once thought of Maude as plastic. Then I had dis 
 covered she had a mind and will of her own. Once more she 
 seemed plastic; her love had made her so. Was it not 
 what I had desired? I had only to express a wish, and it 
 became her law. Nay, she appealed to me many times a 
 day to know whether she had made any mistakes, and I be 
 gan to drill her in my silly traditions, gently, very gently. 
 
 "Well, I shouldn't be quite so familiar with people, quite 
 so ready to make acquaintances, Maude. You have no 
 idea who they may be. Some of them, of course, like the 
 Sardells, I know by reputation." 
 
 The Sardells were the New Yorkers who sat next us. 
 
 "I'll try, Hugh, to be more reserved, more like the wife 
 of an important man." She smiled. 
 
 "It isn't that you're not reserved," I replied, ignoring 
 the latter half of her remark. "Nor that I want you to 
 change," I said. "I only want to teach you what little of 
 the world I know myself." 
 
 "And I want to learn, Hugh. You don't know how I 
 want to learn ! " 
 
 The sight of mist-ridden Liverpool is not a cheering one 
 for the American who first puts foot on the mother country's 
 soil, a Liverpool of yellow-browns and dingy blacks, of 
 tilted funnels pouring out smoke into an atmosphere already 
 charged with it. The long wharves and shed roofs glistened 
 with moisture. 
 
 " Just think, Hugh, it's actually England ! " she cried, as 
 we stood on the wet deck. But I felt as though I'd been 
 there before. 
 
 "No wonder they're addicted to cold baths," I replied. 
 "They must feel perfectly at home in them, especially 
 if they put a little lampblack in the water."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 245 
 
 Maude laughed. 
 
 "You grumpy old thing !" she exclaimed. 
 
 Nothing could dampen her ardour, not the sight of the 
 rain-soaked stone houses when we got ashore, nor even the 
 frigid luncheon we ate in the lugubrious hotel. For her it 
 was all quaint and new. Finally we found ourselves es 
 tablished in a compartment upholstered in light grey, with 
 tassels and arm-supporters, on the window of which was 
 pasted a poster with the word reserved in large, red letters. 
 The guard inquired respectfully, as the porter put our new 
 luggage in the racks, whether we had everything we wanted. 
 The toy locomotive blew its toy whistle, and we were off 
 for the north ; past dingy, yellow tenements of the smoking 
 factory towns, and stretches of orderly, hedge-spaced rain 
 swept country. The quaint cottages we glimpsed, the sight 
 of distant, stately mansions on green slopes caused Maude 
 to cry out with rapture : 
 
 " Oh, Hugh, there's a manor-house ! " 
 
 More vivid than were the experiences themselves of that 
 journey are the memories of them. We went to wind 
 swept, Sabbath-keeping Edinburgh, to high Stirling and dark 
 Holyrood, and to Abbotsford. It was through Sir Walter's 
 eyes we beheld Melrose bathed in autumn light, by his aid 
 repeopled it with forgotten monks eating their fast-day kale. 
 And as we sat reading and dreaming in the still, sunny corners 
 I forgot that struggle for power in which I had been so 
 furiously engaged since leaving Cambridge. Legislatures, 
 politicians and capitalists receded into a dim background ; 
 and the gift I had possessed, in youth, of living in a realm of 
 fancy showed astonishing signs of revival. 
 
 "Why, Hugh," Maude exclaimed, "you ought to have 
 been a writer!" 
 
 "You've only just begun to fathom my talents," I replied 
 laughingly. "Did you think you'd married just a dry old 
 lawyer ? " 
 
 "I believe you capable of anything," she said. . . . 
 
 I grew more and more to depend on her for little things.
 
 246 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 She was a born housewife. It was pleasant to have her do 
 all the packing, while I read or sauntered in the queer streets 
 about the inns. And she took complete charge of my ward 
 robe. 
 
 She had a talent for drawing, and as we went southward 
 through England she made sketches of the various houses 
 that took our fancy suggestions for future home-building ; 
 we spent hours in the evenings in the inn sitting-rooms 
 incorporating new features into our residence, continually 
 modifying our plans. Now it was a Tudor house that carried 
 us away, now a Jacobean, v and again an early Georgian with 
 enfolding wings and a wrought-iron grill. A stage of be 
 wilderment succeeded. 
 
 Maude, I knew, loved the cottages best. She said they 
 were more "homelike." But she yielded to my liking for 
 grandeur. 
 
 "My, I should feel lost in a palace like that I" she cried, 
 as we gazed at the Marquis of So-and-So's country-seat. 
 
 " Well, of course we should have to modify it," I admitted. 
 "Perhaps perhaps OUT family will be larger." 
 
 She put her hand on my lips, and blushed a fiery red. . . . 
 
 We examined, with other tourists, at a shilling apiece 
 historic mansions with endless drawing-rooms, halls, libraries, 
 galleries filled with family portraits ; elaborate, formal bed 
 rooms where famous sovereigns had slept, all roped off and 
 carpeted with canvas strips to protect the floors. Through 
 mullioned windows we caught glimpses of gardens and geo 
 metrical parterres, lakes, f ountains, statuary, fantastic topiary 
 and distant stretches of park. Maude sighed with admira 
 tion, but did not covet. She had me. But I was often un 
 comfortable, resenting the vulgar, gaping tourists with 
 whom we were herded and the easy familiarity of the guides. 
 These did not trouble Maude, who often annoyed me by 
 asking nai've questions herself. I would nudge her. 
 
 One afternoon when, with other compatriots, we were being 
 hurried through a famous castle, the guide unwittingly 
 ushered us into a drawing-room where the owner and several
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 247 
 
 guests were seated about a tea-table. I shall never forget 
 the stares they gave us before we had tune precipitately to 
 retreat, nor the feeling of disgust and rebellion that came 
 over me. This was heightened by the remark of a heavy, 
 six-foot Ohioan with an infantile face and a genial manner. 
 
 " I notice that they didn't invite us to sit down and have 
 a bite," he said. "I call that kind of inhospitable." 
 
 "It was 'is lordship himself!" exclaimed the guide, scan 
 dalized. 
 
 "You don't say!" drawled our fellow-countryman. "I 
 guess I owe you another shilling, my friend." 
 
 The guide, utterly bewildered, accepted it. The trans 
 atlantic point of view towards the nobility was beyond 
 him. 
 
 "His lordship could make a nice little income if he set 
 up as a side show," added the Ohioan. 
 
 Maude giggled, but I was furious. And no sooner were 
 we outside the gates than I declared I should never again 
 enter a private residence by the back door. 
 
 "Why, Hugh, how queer you are sometimes," she said. 
 
 "I may be queer, but I have a sense of fitness," I retorted. 
 
 She asserted herself. 
 
 " I can't see what difference it makes. They didn't know 
 us. And if they admit people for money " 
 
 "I can't help it. And as for the man from Ohio " 
 
 "But he was so funny!" she interrupted. "And he was 
 really very nice." 
 
 I was silent. Her point of view, eminently sensible as it 
 was, exasperated me. We were leaning over the parapet of 
 a little stone bridge. Her face was turned away from me, 
 but presently I realized that she was crying. Men and 
 women, villagers, passing across the bridge, looked at us 
 curiously. I was miserable, and somewhat appalled ; re 
 sentful, yet striving to be gentle and conciliatory. I assured 
 her that she was talking nonsense, that I loved her. But I 
 did not really love her at that moment ; nor did she relent 
 as easily as usual. It was not until we were together in our
 
 248 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 sitting-room, a few hours later, that she gave in. I felt 
 a tremendous sense of relief. 
 
 "Hugh, I'll try to be what you want. You know I am 
 trying. But don't kill what is natural in me." 
 
 I was touched by the appeal, and repentant. . . . 
 
 It is impossible to say when the little worries, annoy 
 ances and disagreements began, when I first felt a restless 
 ness creeping over me. I tried to hide these moods from 
 her, but always she divined them. And yet I was sure that 
 I loved Maude ; in a surprisingly short period I had become 
 accustomed to her, dependent on her ministrations and the 
 normal, cosy intimacy of our companionship. I did not like 
 to think that the keen edge of the enjoyment of possession 
 was wearing a little, while at the same time I philosophized 
 that the divine fire, when legalized, settles down to a comfort 
 able glow. The desire to go home that grew upon me I 
 attributed to the irritation aroused by the spectacle of a 
 fixed social order commanding such unquestioned deference 
 from the many who were content to remain resignedly 
 outside of it. Before the setting in of the Liberal movement 
 and the "American invasion" England was a country in 
 which (from my point of view) one must be "somebody" 
 in order to be happy. I was "somebody" at home; or at 
 least rapidly becoming so. ... 
 
 London was shrouded, parliament had risen, and the great 
 houses were closed. Day after day we issued forth from a 
 musty and highly respectable hotel near Piccadilly to a 
 gloomy Tower, a soggy Hampton Court or a mournful 
 British Museum. Our native longing for luxury or rather 
 my native longing impelled me to abandon Smith's Hotel 
 for a huge hostelry where our suite overlooked the Thames, 
 where we ran across a man I had known slightly at Harvard, 
 and other Americans with whom we made excursions and 
 dined and went to the theatre. Maude liked these persons ; 
 I did not find them especially congenial. My life-long habit 
 of unwillingness to accept what life sent in its ordinary course 
 was asserting itself ; but Maude took her friends as she found
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 249 
 
 them, and I was secretly annoyed by her lack of discrimina 
 tion. In addition to this, the sense of having been pulled 
 up by the roots grew upon me. 
 
 "Suppose," Maude surprised me by suggesting one morn 
 ing as we sat at breakfast watching the river craft flit like 
 phantoms through the yellow-green fog " suppose we don't 
 go to France, after all, Hugh ? " 
 
 "Not go to France !" I exclaimed. "Are you tired of the 
 trip?" 
 
 "Oh, Hugh!" Her voice caught. "I could go on, al 
 ways, if you were content." 
 
 " And what makes you think that I'm not content ? " 
 
 Her smile had in it just a touch of wistfulness. 
 
 "I understand you, Hugh, better than you think. You 
 want to get back to your work, and and I should be 
 happier. I'm not so silly and so ignorant as to think that 
 I can satisfy you always. And I'd like to get settled at 
 home, I really should." 
 
 There surged up within me a feeling of relief. I seized 
 her hand as it lay on the table. 
 
 "We'll come abroad another time, and go to France," I 
 said. "Maude, you're splendid 1" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Oh, no, I'm not." 
 
 "You do satisfy me," I insisted. "It isn't that at all. 
 But I think, perhaps, if'would be wiser to go back. It's 
 rather a crucial tune with me, now that Mr. Watling's in 
 Washington. I've just arrived at a position where I 
 shall be able to make a good deal of money, and later 
 on- 
 
 " It isn't the money, Hugh,"> she cried, with a vehemence 
 which struck me as a little odd. "I sometimes think we'd 
 be a great deal happier without without all you are going 
 to make." 
 
 I laughed. 
 
 "Well, I haven't made it yet." 
 
 She possessed the frugality of the Hutchinses. And some-
 
 250 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 times my lavishness had frightened her, as when we had taken 
 the suite of rooms we now occupied. 
 
 " Are you sure you can afford them, Hugh ? " she had asked 
 when we first surveyed them. 
 
 IJbegan married life, and carried it on without giving her 
 any conception of the state of my finances. She had an 
 allowance from the first. 
 
 As the steamer slipped westward my spirits rose, to reach a 
 climax of exhilaration when I saw the towers of New York 
 rise gleaming like huge stalagmites in the early winter sun. 
 Maude likened them more happily to gigantic ivory 
 chessmen. Well, New York was America's chessboard, and 
 the Great Players had already begun to make moves that 
 astonished the world. As we sat at breakfast in a Fifth 
 Avenue hotel I ran my eye eagerly over the stock-market 
 reports and the financial news, and rallied Maude for a lack 
 of spirits. 
 
 "Aren't you glad to be home?" I asked her, as we sat in 
 a hansom. 
 
 "Of course I am, Hugh!" she protested. "But I 
 can't look upon New York as home, somehow. It frightens 
 me." 
 
 I laughed indulgently. , . 
 
 "You'll get used to it," I said. "We'll be coming here a 
 great deal, off and on." 
 
 She was silent. But later, when we took a hansom and 
 entered the streams of traffic, she responded to the stimulus 
 of the place : the movement, the colour, the sight of the 
 well-appointed carriages, of the well-fed, well-groomed people 
 who sat in them, the enticement of the shops in which we 
 made our purchases had their effect, and she became cheer 
 ful again. . . . 
 
 In the evening we took the "Limited" for home. 
 
 We lived for a month with my mother, and then moved
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 251 
 
 into our own house. It was one which I had rented from 
 Howard Ogilvy, and it stood on the corner of Baker and 
 Clinton streets, near that fashionable neighbourhood called 
 "the Heights." Ogilvy, who was some ten years older than 
 I, and who belonged to one of our old families, had embarked 
 on a career then becoming common, but which at first was 
 regarded as somewhat meteoric: gradually abandoning the 
 practice of law, and perceiving the possibilities of the city 
 of his birth, he had "gambled" in real estate and other en 
 terprises, such as our local water company, until he had 
 quadrupled his inheritance. He had built a mansion on 
 Grant Avenue, the wide thoroughfare bisecting the Heights. 
 The house he had vacated was not large, but essentially 
 distinctive; with the oddity characteristic of the revolt 
 against the banal architecture of the 80's. The curves of 
 the tiled roof enfolded the upper windows; the walls were 
 thick, the note one of mystery. I remember Maude's naive 
 delight when we inspected it. 
 
 "You'd never guess what the inside was like, would you, 
 Hugh?" she cried. 
 
 From the panelled box of an entrance hall one went up a 
 few steps to a drawing-room which had a bowed recess like 
 an oriel, and window-seats. The dining-room was an odd 
 shape, and was wainscoted in oak ; it had a tiled fireplace 
 and (according to Maude) the "sweetest" china closet built 
 into the wall. There was a "den" for me, and an octagonal 
 reception-room on the corner. Upstairs, the bedrooms were 
 quite as unusual, the plumbing of the new pattern, heavy and 
 imposing. Maude expressed the air of seclusion when she 
 exclaimed that she could almost imagine herself in one of 
 the mediaeval towns we had seen abroad. 
 
 "It's a dream, Hugh," she sighed. "But do you think 
 we can afford it?" . . . 
 
 " This house," I announced, smiling, "is only a stepping- 
 stone to the palace I intend to build you some day." 
 
 "I don't want a palace 1" she cried. "I'd rather live here, 
 like this, always."
 
 252 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 A certain vehemence in her manner troubled me. I was 
 charmed by this disposition for domesticity, and yet I shrank 
 from the contemplation of its permanency. I felt vaguely, 
 at the time, the possibility of a future conflict of tempera 
 ments. Maude was docile, now. But would she remain 
 docile ? and was it in her nature to take ultimately the posi 
 tion that was desirable for my wife? Well, she must be 
 i moulded, before it were too late. Her ultra-domestic ten 
 dencies must be halted. As yet blissfully unaware of the 
 inability of the masculine mind to fathom the subtleties of 
 feminine relationships, I was particularly desirous that 
 Maude and Nancy Durrett should be intimates. The very 
 day after our arrival, and while we were still at my mother's, 
 Nancy called on Maude, and took her out for a drive. 
 Maude told me of it when I came home from the office. 
 
 "Dear old Nancy!" I said. "I know you liked her." 
 
 "Of course, Hugh. I should like her for your sake, any 
 way. She's she's one of your oldest and best friends." 
 
 "But I want you to like her for her own sake." 
 
 "I think I shall," said Maude. She was so scrupulously 
 truthful ! " I was a little afraid of her, at first." 
 
 "Afraid of Nancy!" I exclaimed. 
 
 "Well, you know, she's much older than I. I think she 
 is sweet. But she knows so much about the world so 
 much that she doesn't say. I can't describe it." 
 
 I smiled. 
 
 "It's only her manner. You'll get used to that, when 
 you know what she really is." 
 
 "Oh, I hope so," answered Maude. "I'm very anxious 
 to like her I do like her. But it takes me such a lot of 
 time to get to know people." 
 
 Nancy asked us to dinner. 
 
 "I want to help Maude all I can, if she'll let me," 
 Nancy said. 
 
 "Why shouldn't she let you?" I asked. 
 
 "She may not like me," Nancy replied. 
 
 " Nonsense !" I exclaimed.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 253 
 
 Nancy smiled. 
 
 "It won't be my fault, at any rate, if she doesn't," she 
 said. " I wanted her to meet at first just the right people 
 your old friends and a few others. It is hard for a woman 
 especially a young woman coming among strangers." 
 She glanced down the table to where Maude sat talking to 
 Ham. "She has an air about her, a great deal of self- 
 possession." 
 
 I, too, had noticed this, with pride and relief. For I 
 knew Maude had been nervous. 
 
 "You are luckier than you deserve to be," Nancy re 
 minded me. " But I hope you realize that she has a mind 
 of her own, that she will form her own opinions of people, 
 independently of you." 
 
 I must have betrayed the fact that I was a little startled, 
 for the remark came as a confirmation of what I had dimly 
 felt. 
 
 "Of course she has," I agreed, somewhat lamely. "Every 
 woman has, who is worth her salt." 
 
 Nancy's smile bespoke a knowledge that seemed to tran 
 scend my own. 
 
 "You do like her?" I demanded. 
 
 " I like her very much indeed," said Nancy, a little gravely. 
 "She's simple, she's real, she has that which so few of us 
 possess nowadays character. But I've got to be pre 
 pared for the possibility that she may not get along with 
 me." 
 
 "Why not?" I demanded. 
 
 "There you are again, with your old unwillingness to 
 analyze a situation and face it. For heaven's sake, now 
 that you have married her, study her. Don't take her for 
 granted. Can't you see that she doesn't care for the things 
 that amuse me, that make my life ? " 
 
 " Of course, if you insist on making yourself out a hardened, 
 sophisticated woman " I protested. But she shook her 
 head. 
 
 "Her roots are deeper, she is in touch, though she may
 
 254 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 not realize it, with the fundamentals. She is one of those 
 women who are race-makers." 
 
 Though somewhat perturbed, I was struck by the phrase. 
 And I lost sight of Nancy's generosity. She looked me full 
 in the face. 
 
 "I wonder whether you can rise to her," she said. "If 
 I were you, I should try. You will be happier far happier 
 than if you attempt to use her for your own ends, as a con 
 tributor to your comfort and an auxiliary to your career. I 
 was afraid I confess it that you had married an as 
 piring, simpering and empty-headed provincial like that 
 Mrs. George Hutchins, whom I met once, and who would 
 sell her soul to be at my table. Well, you escaped that, 
 and you may thank God for it. You've got a chance, think 
 it over." 
 
 "A chance!" I repeated, though I gathered something of 
 her meaning. 
 
 "Think it over," said Nancy again. And she smiled. 
 
 "But do you want me to bury myself in domesticity?" 
 I demanded, without grasping the significance of my words. 
 
 "You'll find her reasonable, I think. You've got a chance 
 now, Hugh. Don't spoil it." 
 
 She turned to Leonard Dickinson, who sat on her other 
 side. . . . 
 
 When we got home I tried to conceal my anxiety as to 
 Maude's impressions of the evening. I lit a cigarette, and 
 remarked that the dinner had been a success. 
 
 "Do you know what I've been wondering all evening?" 
 Maude asked. "Why you didn't marry Nancy instead of 
 me." 
 
 "Well," I replied, "it just didn't come off. And Nancy 
 was telling me at dinner how fortunate I was to have married 
 
 you." 
 
 Maude passed this. 
 
 "I can't see why she accepted Hambleton Durrett. It 
 seems horrible that such a woman as she is could have mar 
 ried just for money."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 255 
 
 "Nancy has an odd streak in her," I said. "But then 
 we all have odd streaks. She's the best friend in the world, 
 when she is your friend." 
 
 "I'm sure of it," Maude agreed, with a little note of 
 penitence. 
 
 "You enjoyed it," I ventured cautiously. 
 
 "Oh, yes," she agreed. "And everyone was so nice to 
 me for your sake of course." 
 
 "Don't be ridiculous 1" I said. "I shan't tell you what 
 Nancy and the others said about you." 
 
 Maude had the gift of silence. 
 
 "What a beautiful house!" she sighed presently. "I 
 know you'll think me silly, but so much luxury as that 
 frightens me a little. In England, in those places we saw, 
 it seemed natural enough, but in America ! And they 
 all your friends seem to take it as a matter of course." 
 
 "There's no reason why we shouldn't have beautiful 
 things and well served dinners, too, if we have the money 
 to pay for them." 
 
 "I suppose not," she agreed, absently.
 
 XV 
 
 THAT winter many other entertainments were given in our 
 honour. But the conviction grew upon me that Maude had 
 no real liking for the social side of life, that she acquiesced in 
 it only on my account. Thus, at the very outset of our 
 married career, an irritant developed : signs of it, indeed, 
 were apparent from the first, when we were preparing the 
 house we had rented for occupancy. Hurrying away from 
 my office at odd times to furniture and department stores 
 to help decide such momentous questions as curtains, carpets, 
 chairs and tables I would often spy the tall, uncompromising 
 figure of Susan Peters standing beside Maude's, while an 
 obliging clerk spread out, anxiously, rugs or wall-papers for 
 their inspection. 
 
 "Why don't you get Nancy to help you, too?" I ventured 
 to ask her once. 
 
 "Ours is such a little house compared to Nancy's, 
 Hugh." 
 
 My attitude towards Susan had hitherto remained unde 
 fined. She was Tom's wife and Tom's affair. In spite of 
 her marked disapproval of the modern trend in business and 
 social life, a prejudice she had communicated to Tom, 
 as a bachelor I had not disliked her ; and it was certain that 
 these views had not mitigated Tom's loyalty and affection 
 for me. Susan had been my friend, as had her brother Perry, 
 and Lucia, Perry's wife: they made no secret of the fact 
 that they deplored in me what they were pleased to call plu 
 tocratic obsessions, nor had their disapproval always been 
 confined to badinage. Nancy, too, they looked upon as a 
 renegade. I was able to bear their reproaches with the supe- 
 
 256
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 257 
 
 rior good nature that springs from success, to point out why 
 the American tradition to which they so fatuously clung was 
 a thingtof the past. The habit of taking dinner with them 
 at least once a week had continued, and their arguments 
 rather amused me. If they chose to dwell in a backwater 
 out of touch with the current of great affairs, this was a 
 matter to be deplored, but I did not feel strongly enough to 
 resent it. So long as I remained a bachelor the relationship 
 had not troubled me, but now that I was married I began to 
 consider with some alarm its power to affect my welfare. 
 
 It had remained for Nancy to inform me that I had mar 
 ried a woman with a mind of her own. I had flattered my 
 self that I should be able to control Maude, to govern her 
 predilections, and now at the very beginning of our married 
 life she was showing a disquieting tendency to choose for 
 herself. To be sure, she had found my intimacy with the 
 Peterses and Blackwoods already formed ; but it was an 
 intimacy from which I was growing away. I should not 
 have quarrelled with her if she had not discriminated : Nancy 
 made overtures, and Maude drew back; Susan presented 
 herself, and with annoying perversity and in an extraordi 
 narily brief time Maude had become her intimate. It seemed 
 to me that she was always at Susan's, lunching or playing 
 with the children, who grew devoted to her ; or with Susan, 
 choosing carpets and clothes; while more and more fre 
 quently we dined with the Peterses and the Blackwoods, or 
 they with us. With Perry's wife Maude was scarcely less 
 intimate than with Susan. This was the more surprising to 
 me since Lucia Blackwood was a dyed-in-the-wool " intellect 
 ual," a graduate of Radcliffe, the daughter of a Harvard 
 professor. Perry had fallen in love with her during her visit 
 to Susan. Lucia was, perhaps, the most influential of the 
 group ; she scorned the world, she held strong views on the 
 higher education of women ; she had long discarded ortho 
 doxy for what may be called a Cambridge stoicism of simple 
 living and high thinking ; while Maude was a strict Presby 
 terian, and not in the least given to theories. When, some
 
 258 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 months after our home-coming, I ventured to warn her gently 
 of the dangers of confining one's self to a coterie especially 
 one of such narrow views her answer was rather bewilder 
 ing. 
 
 "But isn't Tom your best friend?" she asked. 
 
 I admitted that he was. 
 
 "And you always went there such a lot before we were 
 married." 
 
 This, too, was undeniable. "At the same time," I replied, 
 "I have other friends. I'm fond of the Blackwoods and the 
 Peterses, I'm not advocating seeing less of them, but their 
 point of view, if taken without any antidote, is rather nar 
 rowing. We ought to see all kinds," I suggested, with a fine 
 restraint. 
 
 "You mean more worldly people," she said with her 
 disconcerting directness. 
 
 "Not necessarily worldly," I struggled on. "People who 
 know more of the world yes, who understand it better." 
 
 Maude sighed. 
 
 " I do try, Hugh, I return their calls, I do try to be 
 nice to them. But somehow I don't seem to get along with 
 them easily I'm not myself, they make me shy. It's 
 because I'm provincial." 
 
 "Nonsense!" I protested, "you're not a bit provincial." 
 And it was true ; her dignity and self-possession redeemed 
 her. 
 
 Nancy was not once mentioned. But I think she was in 
 both our minds. . . . 
 
 Since my marriage, too, I had begun to resent a little the 
 attitude of Tom and Susan and the Blackwoods of humor 
 ous yet affectionate tolerance toward my professional activ 
 ities and financial creed, though Maude showed no disposi 
 tion to take this seriously. I did suspect, however, that 
 they were more and more determined to rescue Maude from 
 what they would have termed a frivolous career; and on 
 one of these occasions so exasperating in married life 
 when a slight cause for pique tempts husband or wife to try
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 259 
 
 a case before a friendly jury, Maude remarked at the dinner- 
 table that I thought she ought to go out more than she did. 
 I have forgotten the conversation that went before. 
 
 "That's right, don't let him turn you into a society doll," 
 Perry put in. "You were created for something better." 
 
 I was furious, but I repressed my temper until Maude and 
 I were alone. 
 
 "Why, Perry only said that in fun!" she exclaimed in 
 surprise. 
 
 "I don't care to be made an idiot of," I said. "Perry has 
 an idea that all wisdom will die with him. Of course, if you 
 prefer his way of looking at things " 
 
 "But I don't, Hugh. How can you be so cruel and unjust 
 and silly?" 
 
 "Apparently you attach more importance to his views and 
 Susan's and Lucia's than to mine." 
 
 She gazed at me for a moment with widened eyes, a* 
 though I had suddenly become a stranger. And then, falling; 
 into a chair, burst into weeping. 
 
 "Oh, I know I'm a failure !" I heard her cry, convulsively.. 
 " I'm not what you want I can't ever be what you want t 
 You really don't care for me. Why did you marry me?" 
 
 I was appalled, yet for the instant my exasperation wast 
 rather heightened by this enigmatic result. I paced up and 
 down the room, drew aside the curtain and gazed out at the 
 arc-lights on the street, and then back at her. The sobbing 
 continued. Presently I went over and laid my hand on*. her 
 shoulder. For the first tune she shrank from my touch. 
 
 " I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Maude." 
 
 Pressing her handkerchief to her eyes, she fairly ran out 
 of the room and up the stairs. I heard her close the bedroom 
 door after her, and turn the key in the lock. I went to my 
 study, and began to go over some papers I had brought home- 
 with me ; trying, and at first succeeding in exerting a power 
 which for many years I had cultivated of shutting out all 
 disturbing human relationships, of suppressing my feelings. 
 But presently my attention to the work relaxed, and I began
 
 260 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 to ask myself whether this affair were only a squall, some 
 thing to be looked for once in a while on the seas of matrimony, 
 and weathered : or whether Maude had not, after all, been 
 right when she declared that I had made a mistake, and that 
 we were not fitted for one another? In this gloomy view 
 endless years of incompatibility stretched ahead ; and for 
 the first time I began to rehearse with a certain cold detach 
 ment the chain of apparently accidental events which had 
 led up to my marriage : to consider the gradual blindness 
 that had come over my faculties; and finally to wonder 
 whether judgment ever entered into sexual selection. Would 
 Maude have relapsed into this senseless fit if she had realized 
 how fortunate she was? For I was prepared to give her 
 what thousands of women longed for, position and influence. 
 My resentment rose again against Perry and Tom, and I 
 began to attribute their lack of appreciation of my achieve 
 ments to jealousy. They had not my ability ; this was the 
 long and short of it. ... I pondered also, regretfully, on 
 my bachelor days. And for the first time, I, who had worked 
 so hard to achieve freedom, felt the pressure of the yoke I had 
 fitted over my own shoulders. I had voluntarily, though 
 unwittingly, returned to slavery. This was what had 
 happened. And what was to be done about it? I would 
 not consider divorce. 
 
 Well, I should have to make the best of it. Whether 
 this conclusion brought on a mood of reaction, I am unable 
 to say. I was still annoyed by what seemed to the mascu 
 line mind a senseless and dramatic performance on Maude's 
 part, an incomprehensible case of "nerves." Nevertheless, 
 there stole into my mind many recollections of Maude's 
 affection, many passages between us ; and my eye chanced 
 to fall on the ink-well she had bought me out of the allowance 
 I gave her. An unanticipated pity welled up within me for 
 her loneliness, her despair in that room upstairs. I got up 
 and hesitated. A counteracting, inhibiting wave passed 
 through me. I hardened. I began to walk up and down, 
 .a prey to conflicting impulses. Something whispered, "go
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 261 
 
 to her" ; another voice added, "for your own peace of mind, 
 at any rate." I rejected the intrusion of this motive as un 
 worthy, turned out the light and groped my way upstairs. 
 The big clock in the hall struck twelve. 
 
 I listened outside the door of the bedroom, but all was 
 silent within. I knocked. 
 
 "Maude !" I said, in a low voice. 
 
 There was no response. 
 
 "Maude let me in ! I didn't mean to be unkind I'm 
 sorry." 
 
 After an interval I heard her say : " I'd rather stay here, 
 to-night." 
 
 But at length, after more entreaty and self-abasement on 
 my part, she opened the door. The room was dark. We 
 sat down together on the window-seat, and all at once she 
 relaxed and her head fell on my shoulder, and she began 
 weeping again. I held her, the alternating moods still 
 running through me. 
 
 "Hugh," she said at length, "how could you be so cruel? 
 when you know I love you and would do anything for you." 
 
 " I didn't mean to be cruel, Maude," I answered. 
 
 " I know you didn't. But at times you seem so indif 
 ferent, and you can't understand how it hurts. I haven't 
 anybody but you, now, and it's in your power to make me 
 happy or or miserable." 
 
 Later on I tried to explain my point of view, to justify 
 myself. 
 
 " All I mean," I concluded at length, " is that my position 
 is a little different from Perry's and Tom's. They can afford 
 to isolate themselves, but I'm thrown professionally with the 
 men who are building up this city. Some of them, like 
 Ralph Hambleton and Mr. Ogilvy, I've known all my life. 
 Life isn't so simple for us, Maude we can't ignore the 
 social side." 
 
 " I understand," she said contentedly. "You are more of a 
 man of affairs much more than Tom or Perry, and you 
 have greater responsibilities and wider interests. I'm really
 
 262 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 very proud of you. Only don't you think you are a little 
 too sensitive about yourself, when you are teased ? " 
 I let this pass. . . . 
 
 I give a paragraph from a possible biography of Hugh 
 Paret which, as then seemed not improbable, might in the 
 future have been written by some aspiring young worshipper 
 of success. 
 
 "On his return from a brief but delightful honeymoon in 
 England Mr. Paret took up again, with characteristic vigour, 
 the practice of the law. He was entering upon the prune 
 years of manhood ; golden opportunities confronted him 
 as, indeed, they confronted other men but Paret had the 
 foresight to take advantage of them. And his training under 
 Theodore Watling was now to produce results. . . . The 
 reputations had already been made of some of that remark 
 able group of financial geniuses who were chiefly instrumental 
 in bringing about the industrial evolution begun after the 
 Civil War : at the same time, as is well known, a political 
 leadership developed that gave proof of a deplorable blind 
 ness to the logical necessity of combinations in business. 
 The lawyer with initiative and brains became an indispen 
 sable factor," etc., etc. 
 
 The biography might have gone on to relate my association 
 with and important services to Adolf Scherer in connection 
 with his constructive dream. Shortly after my return from 
 abroad, in answer to his summons, I found him at Heinrich's, 
 his napkin tucked into his shirt front, and a dish of his fa 
 vourite sausages before him. 
 
 "So, the honeymoon is over!" he said, and pressed my 
 hand. "You are right to come back to business, and after 
 a while you can have another honeymoon, eh ? I have had 
 many since I married. And how long do you think was my 
 first? A day ! I was a foreman then, and the wedding was 
 at six o'clock in the morning. We went into the country, 
 the wife and I."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 263 
 
 He laid down his knife and fork, possessed by the memory. 
 " I have grown rich since, and we've been to Europe and back 
 to Germany, and travelled on the best ships and stayed at 
 the best hotels, but I never enjoyed a holiday more than that 
 day. It wasn't long afterwards I went to Mr. Durrett and 
 told him how he could save much money. He was always 
 ready to listen, Mr. Durrett, when an employee had any 
 thing to say. He was a big man, an iron-master. Ah, 
 he would be astonished if only he could wake up now!" 
 
 "He would not only have to be an iron-master," I agreed, 
 "but a financier and a railroad man to boot." 
 
 "A jack of all trades," laughed Mr. Scherer. "That's 
 what we are men in my position. Well, it was compara 
 tively simple then, when we had no Sherman law and crazy 
 statutes, such as some of the states are passing, to bother us. 
 What has got into the politicians, that they are indulging in 
 such foolishness?" he exclaimed, more warmly. "We try to 
 build up a trade for this country, and they're doing their 
 best to tie our hands and tear it down. When I was in 
 Washington the other day I was talking with one of those 
 Western senators whose state has passed those laws. He 
 said to me, 'Mr. Scherer, I've been making a study of the 
 Boyne Iron Works. You are clever men, but you are build 
 ing up monopolies which we propose to stop.' 'By what 
 means?' I asked. 'Rebates, for one,' said he, 'you get 
 preferential rates from your railroad which give you advan 
 tages over your competitors.' Foolishness!" Mr. Scherer 
 exclaimed. "I tell him the railroad is a private concern,, 
 built up by private enterprise, and it has a right to make 
 special rates for large shippers. No, railroads are public 
 carriers with no right to make special rates. I ask him what 
 else he objects to, and he says patented processes. As if we 
 don't have a right to our own patents ! We buy them. / 
 buy them, when other steel companies won't touch 'em. 
 What is that but enterprise, and business foresight, and 
 taking risks? And then he begins to talk about the tariff 
 taking money out of the pockets of American consumera
 
 264 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 and making men like me rich. I have come to Washington 
 to get the tariff raised on steel rails ; and Watling and other 
 senators we send down there are raising it for us. We are 
 building up monopolies ! Well, suppose we are. We can't 
 help it, even if we want to. Has he ever made a study of 
 the other side of the question the competition side ? Of 
 course he hasn't." 
 
 He brought down his beer mug heavily on the table. In 
 tunes of excitement his speech suggested the German idiom. 
 Abruptly his air grew mysterious; he glanced around the 
 room, now becoming empty, and lowered his voice. 
 
 "I have been thinking a long time, I have a little scheme," 
 he said, " and I have been to Washington to see Watling, to 
 talk over it. Well, he thinks much of you. Fowndes and 
 Ripon are good lawyers, but they are not smart like you. 
 See Paret, he says, and he can come down and talk to me. 
 So I ask you to come here. That is why I say you are 
 wise to get home. Honeymoons can wait eh?" 
 
 I smiled appreciatively. 
 
 "They talk about monopoly, those Populist senators, but 
 I ask you what is a man in my place to do? If you don't 
 eat, somebody eats you is it not so ? Like the boa-con 
 strictors that is modern business. Look at the Keystone 
 Plate people, over there at Morris. For years we sold them 
 steel billets from which to make their plates, and three months 
 ago they serve notice on us that they are getting ready to make 
 their own billets, they buy mines north of the lakes and are 
 building their plant. Here is a big customer gone. Next 
 year, maybe, the Empire Tube Company goes into the bus 
 iness of making crude steel, and many more thousands of 
 tons go from us. What is left for us, Paret?" 
 
 "Obviously you've got to go into the tube and plate 
 business yourselves," I said. 
 
 "So !" cried Mr. Scherer, triumphantly, " or it is close up. 
 We are not fools, no, we will not lie down and be eaten like 
 lambs for any law. Dickinson can put his hand on the cap 
 ital, and I I have already bought a tract on the lakes, at
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 265 
 
 Bolivar, I have already got a plant designed with the latest 
 modern machinery. I can put the ore right there, I can 
 send the coke back from here in cars which would otherwise 
 be empty, and manufacture tubes at eight dollars a ton less 
 than they are selling. If we can make tubes we can make 
 plates, and if we can make plates we can make boilers, and 
 beams and girders and bridges. ... It is not like it was 
 but where is it all leading, my friend ? The time will come 
 is right on us now, in respect to many products when 
 the market will be flooded with tubes and plates and girders, 
 and then we'll have to find a way to limit production. And 
 the inefficient mills will all be forced to shut down." 
 
 The logic seemed unanswerable, even had I cared to answer 
 it. ... He unfolded his campaign. The Boyne Iron Works 
 was to become the Boyne Iron Works, Ltd., owner of various 
 subsidiary companies, some of which were as yet blissfully ig 
 norant of their fate. All had been thought out as calmly as the 
 partition of Poland only, lawyers were required ; and ulti 
 mately, after the process of acquisition should have been com 
 pleted, a delicate document was to be drawn up which would 
 pass through the meshes of that annoying statutory net, the 
 Sherman Anti-trust Law. New mines were to be purchased, 
 extending over a certain large area; wide coal deposits; 
 little strips of railroad to tap them. The competition of the 
 Keystone Plate people was to be met by acquiring and bring 
 ing up to date the plate mills of King and Son, over the bor 
 ders of a sister state; the Somersworth Bridge and Con 
 struction Company and the Gring Steel and Wire Company 
 were to be absorbed. When all of this should have been 
 accomplished, there would be scarcely a process in the steel 
 industry, from the smelting of the ore to the completion of a 
 bridge, which the Boyne Iron Works could not undertake. 
 Such was the beginning of the "lateral extension" period. 
 
 "Two can play at that game," Mr. Scherer said. "And 
 if those fellows could only be content to let well enough 
 alone, to continue buying their crude steel from us, there 
 wouldn't be any trouble." . . .
 
 266 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 It was evident, however, that he really welcomed the 
 * f trouble," that he was going into battle with enthusiasm. 
 He had already picked out his points of attack and was 
 marching on them. Life, for him, would have been a poor 
 thing without new conflicts to absorb his energy ; and he had 
 already made of the Boyne Iron Works, with its open- 
 hearth furnaces, a marvel of modern efficiency that had 
 opened the eyes of the Steel world, and had drawn the atten 
 tion of a Personality in New York, a Personality who 
 was one of the new and dominant type that had developed 
 with such amazing rapidity, the banker-dinosaur ; preying 
 upon and superseding the industrial-dinosaur, conquering 
 type of the preceding age, builder of the railroads, mills 
 and manufactories. The banker-dinosaurs, the gigantic 
 ones, were in Wall Street, and strove among themselves 
 for the industrial spoils accumulated by their predecessors. 
 It was characteristic of these monsters that they never fought 
 in the open unless they were forced to. Then the earth 
 rocked, huge economic structures tottered and fell, and much 
 <dust arose to obscure the vision of smaller creatures, who were 
 bewildered and terrified. Such disturbances were called 
 "panics," and were blamed by the newspapers on the Dem 
 ocratic party, or on the reformers who had wantonly as 
 sailed established institutions. These dominant bankers 
 had contrived to gain control of the savings of thousands 
 and thousands of fellow-citizens who had deposited them in 
 banks or paid them into insurance companies, and with the 
 power thus accumulated had sallied forth to capture rail 
 roads and industries. The railroads were the strategic 
 links. With these in hand, certain favoured industrial con 
 cerns could be fed, and others starved into submission. 
 
 Adolf Scherer might be said to represent a transitional 
 type. For he was not only an iron-master who knew every 
 detail of his business, who kept it ahead of the times; he 
 was also a strategist, wise in his generation, making friends 
 with the Railroad while there had yet been time, at length 
 securing rebates and favours. And when that Railroad
 
 "REBATES FOR ONE," SAID HE. "You GET PREFERENTIAL RATES FROM YOUR 
 
 RAILROAD WHICH GIVE YOU ADVANTAGES OVER YOUR COMPETITORS."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 267 
 
 (which had been constructed through the enterprise and 
 courage of such men as Nathaniel Durrett) had passed under 
 the control of the banker-personality to whom I have re 
 ferred, and had become part of a system, Adolf Scherer re 
 mained in alliance, and continued to receive favours. ... I 
 can well remember the time when the ultimate authority 
 of our Railroad was transferred, quietly, to Wall Street. 
 Alexander Barbour, its president, had been a great man, 
 but after that he bowed, in certain matters, to a greater one. 
 
 I have digressed. . . . Mr. Scherer unfolded his scheme, 
 talking about " units" as calmly as though they were checkers 
 on a board instead of huge, fiery, reverberating mills where 
 thousands and thousands of human beings toiled day and night 
 beings with families, and hopes and fears, whose destinies 
 were to be dominated by the will of the man who sat opposite 
 me. But did not he in his own person represent the triumph 
 of that American creed of opportunity? He, too, had been 
 through the fire, had sweated beside the blasts, had handled 
 the ingots of steel. He was one of the "fittest" who had 
 survived, and looked it. Had he no memories of the terrors 
 of that struggle? . . . Adolf Scherer had grown to be a 
 giant. And yet without me, without my profession he was 
 a helpless giant, at the mercy of those alert and vindictive 
 lawmakers who sought to restrain and hamper him, to 
 check his growth with their webs. How stimulating the 
 idea of his dependence ! How exhilarating too, the thought 
 that that vision which had first possessed me as an under 
 graduate on my visit to Jerry Kyme was at last to be 
 realized ! I had now become the indispensable associate of 
 the few who divided the spoils, I was to have a share in these 
 myself. 
 
 "You're young, Paret," Mr. Scherer concluded. "But 
 Watling has confidence in you, and you will consult him 
 frequently. I believe in the young men, and I have already 
 seen something of you so ? " . . . 
 
 When I returned to the office I wrote Theodore Watling 
 a letter expressing my gratitude for the position he had, so
 
 268 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 to speak, willed me, of confidential legal adviser to Adolf 
 Scherer. Though the opportunity had thrust itself upon 
 me suddenly, and sooner than I expected it, I was determined 
 to prove myself worthy of it. I worked as I had never 
 worked before, making trips to New York to consult leading 
 members of this new branch of my profession there, trips to 
 Washington to see my former chief. There were, too, numer 
 ous conferences with local personages, with Mr. Dickinson 
 and Mr. Grierson, and Judah B. Tallant, whose newspaper 
 was most useful ; there were consultations and negotiations 
 of a delicate nature with the owners and lawyers of other 
 companies to be "taken in." Nor was it all legal work, 
 in the older and narrower sense. Men who are playing for 
 principalities are making war. Some of our operations had 
 all the excitement of war. There was information to be 
 got, and it was got somehow. Modern war involves 
 a spy system, and a friendly telephone company is not to 
 be despised. And all of this work from first to last had to 
 be done with extreme caution. Moribund distinctions of 
 right and wrong did not trouble me, for the modern man 
 labours religiously when he knows that Evolution is on his 
 side. 
 
 For all of these operations a corps of counsel had been 
 employed, including the firm of Harrington and Bowes: 
 next to Theodore Watling, Joel Harrington was deemed the 
 ablest lawyer in the city. We organized in due time the 
 corporation known as the Boyne Iron Works, Limited; a 
 trust agreement was drawn up that was a masterpiece of 
 its kind, one that caused, first and last, meddling officials 
 in the Department of Justice at Washington no little trouble 
 and perplexity. I was proud of the fact that I had taken 
 no small part in its composition. ... In short, in addition 
 to certain emoluments and opportunities for investment, I 
 emerged from the affair firmly established in the good graces 
 of Adolf Scherer, and with a reputation practically made.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 269 
 
 A year or so after the Boyne Company, Ltd., came into exist 
 ence I chanced one morning to go down to the new Ashuela 
 Hotel to meet a New Yorker of some prominence, and was 
 awaiting him in the lobby, when I overheard a conversation 
 between two commercial travellers who were sitting with 
 their backs to me. 
 
 "Did you notice that fellow who went up to the desk a 
 moment ago?" asked one. 
 
 "The young fellow in the grey suit? Sure. Who is he? 
 He looks as if he was pretty well fixed." 
 
 "I guess he is," replied the first. "That's Paret. He's 
 Scherer's confidential counsel. He used to be Senator 
 Watling's partner, but they say he's even got something on 
 the old man." 
 
 In spite of the feverish life I led, I was still undoubtedly 
 young-looking, and in this I was true to the incoming type 
 of successful man. Our fathers appeared staid at six and 
 thirty. Clothes, of course, made some difference, and my 
 class and generation did not wear the sombre and cumber 
 some kind, with skirts and tails; I patronized a tailor in 
 New York. My chestnut hair, a little darker than my 
 father's had been, showed no signs of turning grey, although 
 it was thinning a little at the crown of the forehead, and I 
 wore a small moustache, clipped in a straight line above 
 the mouth. This made me look less like a college youth. 
 Thanks to a strong pigment in my skin, derived probably 
 from Scotch-Irish ancestors, my colour was fresh. I have 
 spoken of my life as feverish, and yet I am not so sure that 
 this word completely describes it. It was full to over 
 flowing one side of it ; and I did not miss (save vaguely, 
 in rare moments of weariness) any other side that might have 
 been developed. I was busy all day long, engaged in affairs 
 I deemed to be alone of vital importance in the universe. 
 I was convinced that the welfare of the city demanded that 
 supreme financial power should remain in the hands of .the 
 group of men with whom I was associated, and whose 
 battles I fought in the courts, in the legislature, in the city
 
 270 A; FAR COUNTRY 
 
 council, and sometimes in Washington, although they were 
 well cared for there. By every means ingenuity could de 
 vise, their enemies were to be driven from the field, and they 
 were to be protected from blackmail. 
 
 A sense of importance sustained me ; and I remember 
 in that first flush of a success for which I had not waited 
 too long what a secret satisfaction it was to pick up the 
 Era and see my name embedded in certain dignified notices 
 of board meetings, transactions of weight, or cases known 
 to the initiated as significant. "Mr. Scherer's interests 
 were taken care of by Mr. Hugh Paret." The fact that my 
 triumphs were modestly set forth gave me more pleasure 
 than if they had been trumpeted in head-lines. Although I 
 might have started out in practice for myself, my affection 
 and regard for Mr. Watling kept me in the firm, which be 
 came Watling, Fowndes and Paret, and a new arrangement 
 was entered into. Mr. Ripon retired on account of ill 
 health. 
 
 There were instances, however, when a certain amount of 
 annoying publicity was inevitable. Such was the famous 
 Galligan case, which occurred some three or four years after 
 my marriage. Aloysius Galligan was a brakeman, and his 
 legs had become paralyzed as the result of an accident that 
 was the result of defective sills on a freight car. He had 
 sued, and been awarded damages of $15,000. To the amaze 
 ment and indignation of Miller Gorse, the Supreme Court, 
 to which the Railroad had appealed, affirmed the decision. 
 It wasn't the single payment of $15,000 that the Railroad 
 cared about, of course; a precedent might be established 
 for compensating maimed employees which would be expen 
 sive in the long run. Carelessness could not be proved in 
 this instance. Gorse sent for me. I had been away with 
 Maude at the sea for two months, and had not followed the 
 case. 
 
 "You've got to take charge, Paret, and get a rehearing. 
 See Bering, and find out who in the deuce is to blame for 
 this. Chesley's one, of course. We ought never to have
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 271 
 
 permitted his nomination for the Supreme Bench. It was 
 against my judgment, but Varney and Gill assured me that 
 he was all right." 
 
 I saw Judge Bering that evening. We sat on a plush 
 sofa in the parlour of his house in Baker Street. 
 
 "I had a notion Gorse'd be mad," he said, "but it looked 
 to me as if they had it on us, Paret. I didn't see how we 
 could do anything else but affirm without being too rank. 
 Of course, if he feels that way, and you want to make a 
 motion for a rehearing, I'll see what can be done." 
 
 "Something's got to be done," I replied. "Can't you see 
 what such a decision lets them in for?" 
 
 "All right," said the judge, who knew an order when he 
 heard one, "I guess we can find an error." He was not a 
 little frightened by the report of Mr. Gorse's wrath, for 
 election-day was approaching. "Say, you wouldn't take 
 me for a sentimental man, now, would you ? " 
 
 I smiled at the notion of it. 
 
 " Well, I'll own up to you this kind of got under my skin. 
 That Galligan is a fine-looking fellow, if there ever was one, 
 and he'll never be of a bit of use any more. Of course the 
 case was plain sailing, and they ought to have had the ver 
 dict, but that lawyer of his handled it to the queen's taste, 
 if I do say so. He made me feel real bad, by God, as if it 
 was my own son Ed who'd been battered up. Lord, I can't 
 forget the look in that man Galligan's eyes. I hate to go 
 through it again, and reverse it, but I guess I'll have to, 
 now." 
 
 The Judge sat gazing at the flames playing over his gas 
 log. 
 
 "Who was the lawyer?" I asked. 
 
 "A man by the name of Krebs," he replied. "Never 
 heard of him before. He's just moved to the city." 
 
 " This city?" I ejaculated. 
 
 The Judge glanced at me interestedly. 
 
 "This city, of course. What do you know about him?" 
 
 "Well," I answered, when I had recovered a little from
 
 272 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the shock for it was a distinct shock "he lived in Elking- 
 ton. He was the man who stirred up the trouble in the 
 legislature about Bill 709." 
 
 The Judge slapped his knee. 
 
 "That fellow!" he exclaimed, and ruminated. "Why 
 didn't somebody tell me ? " he added, complainingly. " Why 
 didn't Miller Gorse let me know about it, instead of kicking 
 up a fuss after it's all over?" . . . 
 
 Of all men of my acquaintance I had thought the Judge 
 the last to grow maudlin over the misfortunes of those who 
 were weak or unfortunate enough to be defeated and crushed 
 in the struggle for existence, and it was not without food for 
 reflection that I departed from his presence. To make Mr. 
 Bering "feel bad" was no small achievement, and Krebs 
 had been responsible for it, of course, not Galligan. 
 Krebs had turned up once more ! It seemed as though he 
 were destined to haunt me. Well, I made up my mind that 
 he should not disturb me again, at any rate: I, at least, 
 had learned to eliminate sentimentality from business, and 
 it was not without deprecation I remembered my experience 
 with him at the Capital, when he had made me temporarily 
 ashamed of my connection with Bill 709. I had got over 
 that. And when I entered the court room (the tribunal 
 having graciously granted a rehearing on the ground that it 
 had committed an error in the law !) my feelings were of 
 lively curiosity and zest. I had no disposition to underrate 
 his abilities, but I was fortified by the consciousness of a series 
 of triumphs behind me, by a sense of association with pre 
 vailing forces against which he was helpless. I could afford 
 to take a superior attitude in regard to one who was destined 
 always to be dramatic. 
 
 As the case proceeded I was rather disappointed on the 
 whole that he was not dramatic not even as dramatic 
 as he had been when he defied the powers in the Legislature. 
 He had changed but little, he still wore ill-fitting clothes, but 
 I was forced to acknowledge that he seemed to have gained 
 in self-control, in presence. He had nodded at me before
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 273 
 
 the case was called, as he sat beside his maimed client ; and 
 I had been on the alert for a hint of reproach in his glance : 
 there was none. I smiled back at him. . . . 
 
 He did not rant. He seemed to have rather a remarkable 
 knowledge of the law. In a conversational tone he described 
 the sufferings of the man in the flannel shirt beside him, but 
 there could be no question of the fact that he did produce 
 an effect. The spectators were plainly moved, and it was 
 undeniable that some of the judges wore rather a sheepish 
 look as they toyed with their watch chains or moved the 
 stationery in front of them. They had seen manned men 
 before, they had heard impassioned, sentimental lawyers 
 talk about wives and families and God and justice. Krebs 
 did none of this. Just how he managed to bring the thing 
 home to those judges, to make them ashamed of their role, 
 just how he managed in spite of my fortified attitude 
 to revive something of that sense of discomfort I had expe 
 rienced at the State House is difficult to say. It was because, 
 I think, he contrived through the intensity of his own sym 
 pathy to enter into the body of the man whose cause he 
 pleaded, to feel the despair in Galligan's soul an impres 
 sion that was curiously conveyed despite the dignified 
 limits to which he confined his speech. It was strange that 
 I began to be rather sorry for him, that I felt a certain re 
 luctant regret that he should thus squander his powers 
 against overwhelming odds. What was the use of it all ! 
 
 At the end his voice became more vibrant though he 
 did not raise it as he condemned the Railroad for its in 
 difference to human life, for its contention that men were 
 cheaper than rolling-stock. 
 
 I encountered him afterward in the corridor. I had made 
 a point of seeking him out, perhaps from some vague deter 
 mination to prove that our last meeting in the little restaurant 
 at the Capital had left no traces of embarrassment in me : 
 I was, in fact, rather aggressively anxious to reveal myself 
 to him as one who has thriven on the views he condemned, 
 as one in whose unity of mind there is no rift. He was alone,
 
 274 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 apparently waiting for someone, leaning against a steam 
 radiator in one of his awkward, angular poses, looking out 
 of the court-house window. 
 
 "How are you?" I said blithely. "So you've/ left Elking-* 
 ton for a wider field." I wondered whether my alert cousin-/ 
 in-law, George Hutchins, had made it too hot for him. 
 
 He turned to me unexpectedly a face of profound melan 
 choly ; his expression had in it, oddly, a trace of sternness ; 
 and I was somewhat taken aback by this evidence that he 
 was still bearing vicariously the troubles of his client. So 
 deep had been the thought I had apparently interrupted 
 that he did not realize my presence at first. 
 
 "Oh, it's you, Paret. Yes, I've left Elkington," he said. 
 
 " Something of a surprise to run up against you suddenly, 
 like this." 
 
 "I expected to see you," he answered gravely, and the 
 slight emphasis he gave the pronoun implied not only a com 
 plete knowledge of the situation and of the part I had taken 
 in it, but also a greater rebuke than if his accusation had been 
 direct. But I clung to my affability. 
 
 "If I can do anything for you, let me know," I told him. 
 He said nothing, he did not even smile. At this moment 
 he was opportunely joined by a man who had the appear 
 ance of a labour leader, and I walked away. I was resentful ; 
 my mood, in brief, was that of a man who has done some 
 thing foolish and is inclined to talk to himself aloud : but 
 the mood was complicated, made the more irritating by the 
 paradoxical fact that that last look he had given me seemed 
 to have borne the traces of affection. . . . 
 
 It is perhaps needless to add that the court reversed its 
 former decision.
 
 THE Pilot published a series of sensational articles and 
 editorials about the Galligan matter, a picture of Galligan, 
 an account of the destitute state of his wife and family. The 
 time had not yet arrived when such newspapers dared to 
 attack the probity of our courts, but a system of law that 
 permitted such palpable injustice because of technicalities 
 was bitterly denounced. What chance had a poor man 
 against such a moloch as the railroad, even with a lawyer 
 of such ability as had been exhibited by Hermann Krebs? 
 Krebs was praised, and the attention of Mr. Lawler's readers 
 was called to the fact that Krebs was the man who, some 
 years before, had opposed single-handed in the legislature 
 the notorious Bill No. 709. It was well known in certain 
 circles the editorial went on to say that this legislation 
 had been drawn by Theodore Watling in the interests of the 
 Boyne Iron Works, etc., etc. Hugh Paret had learned at 
 the feet of an able master. This first sight of my name thus 
 opprobriously flung to the multitude gave me an unpleasant 
 shock. I had seen Mr. Scherer attacked, Mr. Gorse attacked, 
 and Mr. Watling: I had all along realized, vaguely, that 
 my turn would come, and I thought myself to have acquired 
 a compensating philosophy. I threw the sheet into the 
 waste basket, presently picked it out again and reread the 
 sentence containing my name. Well, there were certain 
 penalties that every career must pay. I had become, at last, 
 a marked man, and I recognized the fact that this assault 
 would be the forerunner of many. 
 
 I tried to derive some comfort and amusement from the 
 thought of certain operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had 
 not discovered, that would have been matters of peculiar 
 
 275
 
 276 A FAR; COUNTRY 
 
 interest to his innocent public : certain extra-legal operations 
 at the time when the Boyne corporation was being formed, 
 for instance. And how they would have licked their chops 
 had they learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed 
 to have one of Mr. Scherer's subsidiary companies in another 
 state, with property and assets amounting to more than 
 twenty millions, reorganized under the laws of New Jersey, 
 and the pending case thus transferred to the Federal court, 
 where we won hands down ! This Galligan affair was nothing 
 to that. Nevertheless, it was annoying. As I sat in the 
 street car on my way homeward, a man beside me was 
 reading the Pilot. I had a queer sensation as he turned 
 the page, and scanned the editorial; and I could not help 
 wondering what he and the thousands like him thought 
 of me ; what he would say if I introduced myself and asked 
 his opinion. Perhaps he did not think at all : undoubtedly 
 he, and the public at large, were used to Mr. Lawler's daily 
 display of "injustices." Nevertheless, like slow acid, they 
 must be eating into the public consciousness. It was an 
 outrage this freedom of the press. 
 
 With renewed exasperation I thought of Krebs, of his 
 disturbing and almost uncanny faculty of following me up. 
 Why couldn't he have remained in Elkington? Why did 
 he have to follow me here, to make capital out of a case that 
 might never have been heard of except for him? ... I 
 was still in this disagreeable frame of mind when I turned 
 the corner by my house and caught sight of Maude, in the 
 front yard, bending bareheaded over a bed of late flowers 
 which the frost had spared. The evening was sharp, the 
 dusk already gathering. 
 
 "You'll catch cold," I called to her. 
 
 She looked up at the sound of my voice. i 
 
 "They'll soon be gone," she sighed, referring to the 
 flowers. "I hate winter." 
 
 She put her hand through my arm, and we went into the 
 house. The curtains were drawn, a fire was crackling on 
 the hearth, the lamps were lighted, and as I dropped into
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 277 
 
 a chair this living-room of ours seemed to take on the air 
 of a refuge from the vague, threatening sinister things of 
 the world without. I felt I had never valued it before. 
 Maude took up her sewing and sat down beside the table. 
 
 "Hugh," she said suddenly, "I read something in the 
 newspaper " 
 ) My exasperation flared up again. 
 
 "Where did you get that disreputable sheet?" I demanded. 
 
 "At the dressmaker's!" she answered. "I I just 
 happened to see the name, Paret." 
 
 "It's just politics," I declared, "stirring up discontent 
 by misrepresentation. Jealousy." 
 
 She leaned forward in her chair, gazing into the flames. 
 
 "Then it isn't true that this poor man, Galligan isn't 
 that his name ? was cheated out of the damages he ought 
 to have to keep himself and his family alive?" 
 
 " You must have been talking to Perry or Susan," I said. 
 "They seem to be convinced that I am an oppressor of the 
 poor." 
 
 " Hugh ! " The tone in which she spoke my name smote 
 me. "How can you say that? How can you doubt their 
 loyalty, and mine? Do you think they would undermine 
 you, and to me, behind your back?" 
 
 " I didn't mean that, of course, Maude. I was annoyed 
 about something else. And Tom and Perry have an air of 
 deprecating most of the enterprises in which I am profession 
 ally engaged. It's very well for them to talk. All Perry 
 has to do is to sit back and take in receipts from the Boyne 
 Street car line, and Tom is content if he gets a few commis 
 sions every week. They're like militiamen criticizing soldiers 
 under fire. I know they're good friends of mine, but some 
 times I lose patience with them." 
 
 I got up and walked to the window, and came back again 
 and stood before her. 
 
 "I'm sorry for this man, Galligan," I went on, "I can't 
 tell you how sorry. But few people who are not on the in 
 side, so to speak, grasp the fact that big corporations, like
 
 278 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the Railroad, are looked upon as fair game for every kind 
 of parasite. Not a day passes in which attempts are not 
 made to bleed them. Some of these cases are pathetic. It 
 had cost the Railroad many times fifteen thousand dollars 
 to fight Galligan's case. But if they had paid it, they would 
 have laid themselves open to thousands of similar demands. 
 Dividends would dwindle. The stockholders have a right 
 to a fair return on their money. Galligan claims that there 
 was a defective sill on the car which is said to have caused 
 the wreck. If damages are paid on that basis, it means the 
 daily inspection of every car which passes over their lines. 
 And more than that: there are certain defects, as in the 
 present case, which an inspection would not reveal. When 
 a man accepts employment on a railroad he assumes a cer 
 tain amount of personal risk, it's not precisely a chamber 
 maid's job. And the lawyer who defends such cases, what 
 ever his personal feelings may be, cannot afford to be swayed 
 by them. He must take the larger view." 
 
 "Why didn't you tell me about it before?" she asked. 
 
 " Well, I didn't think it of enough importance these 
 things are all in the day's work." 
 
 "But Mr. Krebs? How strange that he should be here, 
 connected with the case ! " 
 
 I made an effort to control myself. 
 
 "Your old friend," I said. "I believe you have a senti 
 ment about him." 
 
 She looked up at me. 
 
 "Scarcely that," she replied gravely, with the literalness 
 that often characterized her, " but he isn't a person easily j 
 forgotten. He may be queer, one may not agree with his 
 views, but after the experience I had with him I've never 
 been able to look at him in the way George does, for in 
 stance, or even as father does." 
 
 "Or even as I do," I supplied. 
 
 "Well, perhaps not even as you do," she answered calmly. 
 " I believe you once told me, however, that you thought him 
 a fanatic, but sincere."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 279 
 
 "He's certainly a fanatic!" I exclaimed. 
 
 "But sincere, Hugh you still think him sincere." 
 
 "You seem a good deal concerned about a man you've 
 laid eyes on but once." 
 
 She considered this. 
 
 "Yes, it is surprising," she admitted, "but it's true. I 
 was sorry for him, but I admired him. I was not only im 
 pressed by his courage in taking charge of me, but also by 
 the trust and affection the work-people showed. He must 
 be a good man, however mistaken he may be in the methods 
 he employs. And life is cruel to those people." 
 
 "Life is life," I observed. "Neither you nor I nor 
 Krebs is able to change it." 
 
 "Has he come here to practice?" she asked, after a 
 moment. 
 
 "Yes. Do you want me to invite him to dinner?" and 
 seeing that she did not reply I continued : " In spite of my 
 explanation I suppose you think, because Krebs defended 
 the man Galligan, that a monstrous injustice has been done." 
 
 "That is unworthy of you," she said, bending over her 
 stitch. 
 
 I began to pace the room again, as was my habit when over 
 wrought. 
 
 "Well, I was going to tell you about this affair if you had 
 not forestalled me by mentioning it yourself. It isn't 
 pleasant to be vilified by rascals who make capital out of 
 vilification, and a man has a right to expect some sympathy 
 from his wife." 
 
 " Did I ever deny you that, Hugh ? " she asked. "Only 
 you don't ever seem to need it, to want it." 
 
 "And there are things," I pursued, "things in a man's 
 province that a woman ought to accept from her husband, 
 things which in the very nature of the case she can know 
 nothing about." 
 
 "But a woman must think for herself," she declared. 
 "She shouldn't become a mere automaton, and these 
 questions involve so much! People are discussing them,
 
 280 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the magazines and periodicals are beginning to take them 
 up." 
 
 I stared at her, somewhat appalled by this point of view. 
 There had, indeed, been signs of its development before now, 
 but I had not heeded them. And for the first tune I beheld 
 Maude in a new light. 
 
 " Oh, it's not that I don't trust you," she continued, " I'm 
 open to conviction, but I must be convinced. Your explana 
 tion of this Galligan case seems a sensible one, although it's 
 depressing. But life is hard and depressing sometimes 
 I've come to realize that. I want to think over what you've 
 said, I want to talk over it some more. Why won't you 
 tell me more of what you are doing? If you only would 
 confide in me as you have now ! I can't help seeing that 
 we are growing farther and farther apart, that business, 
 your career, is taking all of you and leaving me nothing." 
 She faltered, and went on again. " It's difficult to tell you this 
 you never give me the chance. And it's not for my sake 
 alone, but for yours, too. You are growing more and more self- 
 centred, surrounding yourself with a hard shell. You don't 
 realize it, but Tom notices it, Perry notices it, it hurts 
 them, it's that they complain of. Hugh!" she cried appeal- 
 ingly, sensing my resentment, forestalling the words of de 
 fence ready on my lips. "I know that you are busy, that 
 many men depend on you, it isn't that I'm not proud of you 
 and your success, but you don't understand what a woman 
 craves, she doesn't want only to be a good housekeeper, 
 a good mother, but she wants to share a little, at any rate, 
 in the life of her husband, in his troubles as well as in his 
 successes. She wants to be of some little use, of some little 
 help to him." 
 
 My feelings were reduced to a medley. 
 
 "But you are a help to me a great help," I protested. 
 
 She shook her head. "I wish I were," she said. 
 
 It suddenly occurred to me that she might be. I was 
 softened, and alarmed by the spectacle she had revealed of the 
 widening breach between us. I laid my hand on her shoulder.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 281 
 
 "Well, I'll try to do better, Maude." 
 
 She looked up at me, questioningly yet gratefully, 
 through a mist of tears. But her reply whatever it 
 might have been was forestalled by the sound of shouts 
 and laughter in the hallway. She sprang up and ran to 
 the door. 
 
 "It's the children," she exclaimed, "they've come home 
 from Susan's party!" 
 
 2 
 
 It begins indeed to look as if I were writing this narrative 
 upside down, for I have said nothing about children. Per 
 haps one reason for this omission is that I did not really 
 appreciate them, that I found it impossible to take the same 
 minute interest in them as Tom, for instance, who was, 
 apparently, not content alone with the six which he possessed, 
 but had adopted mine. One of them, little Sarah, said 
 "Uncle Tom" before "Father." I do not mean to say 
 that I had not occasional moments of tenderness toward 
 them, but they were out of my thoughts much of the tune. 
 I have often wondered, since, how they regarded me ; how, 
 in their little minds, they defined the relationship. Gener 
 ally, when I arrived home in the evening I liked to sit down 
 before my study fire and read the afternoon newspapers or 
 a magazine ; but occasionally I went at once to the nursery 
 for a few moments, to survey with complacency the medley 
 of toys on the floor, and to kiss all three. They received my 
 caresses with a certain shyness the two younger ones, 
 at least, as though they were at a loss to place me as a factor 
 in the establishment. They tumbled over each other to 
 greet Maude, and even Tom. If I were an enigma to them, 
 what must they have thought of him ? Sometimes I would 
 discover him on the nursery floor, with one or two of his own 
 children, building towers and castles and railroad stations, 
 or forts to be attacked and demolished by regiments of lead 
 soldiers. He was growing comfortable-looking, if not exactly 
 stout ; prematurely paternal, oddly willing to renounce the
 
 282 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 fiercer joys of life, the joys of acquisition, of conquest, of 
 youth. 
 
 "You'd better come home with me, Chickabiddy," he 
 would say, "that father of yours doesn't appreciate you. 
 He's too busy getting rich." 
 
 "Chickabiddy," was his name for little Sarah. Half of 
 the name stuck to her, and when she was older we called her 
 Biddy. 
 
 She would gaze at him questioningly, her eyes like blue 
 flower cups, a strange little mixture of solemnity and bubbling 
 mirth, of shyness and impulsiveness. She had fat legs that 
 creased above the tops of the absurd little boots that looked 
 to be too tight; sometimes she rolled and tumbled in an 
 ecstasy of abandon, and again she would sit motionless, as 
 though absorbed in dreams. Her hair was like corn silk 
 in the sun, twisting up into soft curls after her bath, when 
 she sat rosily presiding over her supper table. 
 
 As I look back over her early infancy, I realize that I 
 loved her, although it is impossible for me to say how much 
 of this love is retrospective. Why I was not mad about her 
 every hour of the day is a puzzle to me now. Why, indeed, 
 was I not mad about all three of them ? There were moments 
 when I held and kissed them, when something within me 
 melted : moments when I was away from them, and thought 
 of them. But these moments did not last. The something 
 within me hardened again, I became indifferent, my family 
 was 'wiped out of my consciousness as though it had never 
 existed. 
 
 There was Matthew, for instance, the oldest. When he 
 arrived, he was to Maude a never-ending miracle, she would 
 have his crib brought into her room, and I would find her 
 leaning over the bedside, gazing at him with a rapt expres 
 sion beyond my comprehension. To me he was just a 
 brick-red morsel of humanity, all folds and wrinkles, and 
 not at all remarkable in any way. Maude used to annoy 
 me by getting out of bed in the middle of the night when 
 he cried, and at such tunes I was apt to wonder at the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 283 
 
 odd trick the life-force had played me, and ask myself why 
 I got married at all. It was a queer method of carrying 
 on the race 1 Later on, I began to take a cursory interest 
 in him, to watch for signs in him of certain characteristics 
 of my own youth which, in the philosophy of my manhood, 
 I had come to regard as defects. And it disturbed me 
 somewhat to see these signs appear. I wished him to be 
 what I had become by force of will a fighter. But he 
 was a sensitive child, anxious for approval; not robust, 
 though spiritual rather than delicate ; even in comparative 
 infancy he cared more for books than toys, and his greatest 
 joy was in being read to. In spite of these traits perhaps 
 because of them there was a sympathy between us. 
 From the time that he could talk the child seemed to under 
 stand me. Occasionally I surprised him gazing at me with 
 a certain wistful look that comes back to me as I write. 
 
 Moreton, Tom used to call Alexander the Great because 
 he was a fighter from the cradle, beating his elder brother, 
 too considerate to strike back, and likewise when oppor 
 tunity offered his sister ; and appropriating their toys. 
 A self-sufficient, doughty young man, with the round head 
 that withstands many blows, taking by nature to competi 
 tion and buccaneering in general. I did not love him half 
 so much as I did Matthew if such intermittent emotions 
 as mine may be called love. It was a standing joke of 
 mine which Maude strongly resented that Moreton 
 resembled Cousin George of Elkington. 
 
 Imbued with the highest ambition of my time, I had set 
 my barque on a great circle, and almost before I realized it 
 the barque was burdened with a wife and family and the 
 steering had insensibly become more difficult; for Maude 
 cared nothing about the destination, and when I took my 
 hand off the wheel our ship showed a tendency to make for 
 a quiet harbour. Thus the social initiative, which I believed
 
 284 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 should have been the" Woman's, was thrust back 6ii me. It 
 was almost incredible, yet indisputable, in a day when most 
 American women were credited with a craving for social 
 ambition that I, of all men, should have married a wife in 
 whom the craving was wholly absent ! She might have had 
 what other women would have given their souls for. There 
 were many reasons why I wished her to take what I deemed 
 her proper place in the community as my wife not that 
 I cared for what is called society in the narrow sense ; with 
 me, it was a logical part of a broader scheme of life ; an 
 auxiliary rather than an essential, but a needful auxiliary; 
 :a means of dignifying and adorning the position I was taking. 
 Not only that, but I felt the need of intercourse of inter 
 course of a lighter and more convivial nature with men and 
 women who saw life as I saw it. In the evenings when we 
 did not go out into that world our city afforded ennui took 
 possession of me : I had never learned to care for books, I 
 tad no resources outside of my profession, and when I was 
 not working on some legal problem I dawdled over the news 
 papers and went to bed. I don't mean to imply that our 
 existence, outside of our continued intimacy with the Peterses 
 and the Blackwoods, was socially isolated. We gave little 
 dinners that Maude carried out with skill and taste; but 
 it was I who suggested them ; we went out to other dinners, 
 sometimes to Nancy's though we saw less and less of her 
 sometimes to other houses. But Maude had given evi 
 dence of domestic tastes and a disinclination for gaiety that 
 those who entertained more were not slow to sense. I 
 should have liked to take a larger house, but I felt the futility 
 of suggesting it ; the children were still small, and she was 
 occupied with them. Meanwhile I beheld, and at times with 
 considerable irritation, the social world changing, growing 
 larger and more significant, a more important function of 
 that higher phase of American existence the new century 
 seemed definitely to have initiated. A segregative process 
 was under way to which Maude was wholly indifferent. Our 
 city was throwing -off its social conservatism ; wealth (which
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 285 
 
 Implied ability and superiority) was playing a greater part, 
 entertainments were more luxurious, lines more strictly 
 drawn. We had an elaborate country club for those who 
 could afford expensive amusements. Much of this trans 
 formation had been due to the initiative and leadership of 
 Nancy Durrett. . . . 
 
 Great and sudden wealth, however, if combined with 
 obscure antecedents and questionable qualifications, was 
 still looked upon askance. In spite of the fact that Adolf 
 Scherer had "put us on the map," the family of the great 
 iron-master still remained outside of the social pale. He 
 himself might have entered had it not been for his wife, 
 who was supposed to be " queer, " who remained at home in 
 her house opposite Gallatin Park and made little German 
 cakes, a huge house which an unknown architect had taken 
 unusual pains to make pretentious and hideous, for it was 
 Rhenish, Moorish and Victorian by turns. Its geometric 
 grounds matched those of the park, itself a monument to 
 bad taste in landscape. The neighbourhood was highly 
 respectable, and inhabited by families of German extraction. 
 There were two flaxen-haired daughters who had just 
 graduated from an expensive boarding-school in New York, 
 where they had received the polish needful for future careers. 
 But the careers were not forthcoming. 
 
 I was thrown constantly with Adolf Scherer ; I had earned 
 his gratitude, I had become necessary to him. But after 
 the great coup whereby he had fulfilled Mr. Watling's proph 
 ecy and become the chief factor in our business world he 
 began to show signs of discontent, of an irritability that 
 seemed foreign to his character, and that puzzled me. One 
 day, however, I stumbled upon the cause of this fermenta 
 tion, to wonder that I had not discovered it before. In 
 many ways Adolf Scherer was a child. We were sitting in 
 the Boyne Club. 
 
 " Money yes ! " he exclaimed, apropos of some demand 
 made upon him by a charitable society. "They come to 
 me for my money there is always Scherer, they say. He
 
 286 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 will make up the deficit in the hospitals. But what is it 
 they do for me? Nothing. Do they invite me to their 
 houses, to their parties ? " 
 
 This was what he wanted, then, social recognition. 
 I said nothing, but I saw my opportunity : I had the clew, 
 now, to a certain attitude he had adopted of late toward 
 me, an attitude of reproach; as though, in return for his 
 many favours to me, there were something I had left undone. 
 And when I went home I asked Maude to call on Mrs. Scherer. 
 
 " On Mrs. Scherer ! " she repeated. 
 
 "Yes, I want you to invite them to dinner." The pro 
 posal seemed to take away her breath. " I owe her husband 
 a great deal, and I think he feels hurt that the wives of the 
 men he knows down town haven't taken up his family." 
 I felt that it would not be wise, with Maude, to announce 
 my rather amazing discovery of the iron-master's social am 
 bitions. 
 
 " But, Hugh, they must be very happy, they have their 
 friends. And after all this tune wouldn't it seem like an 
 intrusion ? " 
 
 "I don't think so," I said, "I'm sure it would please him, 
 and them. You know how kind he's been to us, how he 
 sent us East in his private car last year." 
 
 "Of course I'll go if you wish it, if you're sure they feel 
 that way." She did make the call, that very week, and 
 somewhat to my surprise reported that she liked Mrs. 
 Scherer and the daughters: Maude's likes and dislikes, 
 needless to say, were not governed by matters of policy. 
 
 " You were right, Hugh," she informed me, almost with 
 enthusiasm, "they did seem lonely. And they were so glad 
 to see me, it was rather pathetic. Mr. Scherer, it seems, 
 had talked to them a great deal about you. They wanted 
 to know why I hadn't come before. That was rather em 
 barrassing. Fortunately they didn't give me time to talk, 
 I never heard people talk as they do. They all kissed me 
 when I went away, and came down the steps with me. And 
 Mrs. Scherer went into the conservatory and picked a huge
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 287 
 
 bouquet. There it is," she said, laughingly, pointing to 
 several vases. "I separated the colours as well as I could 
 when I got home. We had coffee, and the most delicious 
 German cakes in the Turkish room, or the Moorish room, 
 whichever it is. I'm sure I shan't be able to eat anything 
 more for days. When do you wish to have them for din 
 ner?" 
 
 "Well," I said, "we ought to have time to get the right 
 people to meet them. We'll ask Nancy and Ham." 
 
 Maude opened her eyes. 
 
 "Nancy ! Do you think Nancy would like them?" 
 
 "I'm going to give her a chance, anyway," I replied. . . . 
 
 It was, in some ways, a memorable dinner. I don't know 
 what I expected in Mrs. Scherer from Maude's descrip 
 tion a benevolent and somewhat stupid, blue-eyed German 
 woman, of peasant extraction. There could be no doubt 
 about the peasant extraction, but when she hobbled into our 
 little parlour with the aid of a stout, gold-headed cane she 
 dominated it. Her very lameness added to a distinction 
 that evinced itself in a dozen ways. Her nose was hooked, 
 her colour high, despite the years in Steelville, her 
 peculiar costume heightened the effect of her personality; 
 her firelit black eyes bespoke a spirit accustomed to rule, 
 and instead of being an aspirant for social honours, she 
 seemed to confer them. Conversation ceased at her entrance. 
 
 " I'm sorry we are late, my dear," she said, as she greeted 
 Maude affectionately, " but we have far to come. And this 
 is your husband !" she exclaimed, as I was introduced. She 
 scrutinized me. "I have heard something of you, Mr. 
 Paret. You are smart. Shall I tell you the smartest thing 
 you ever did?" She patted Maude's shoulder. "When 
 you married your wife that was it. I have fallen in love 
 with her. If you do not know it, I tell you." 
 
 Next, Nancy was introduced. 
 
 "So you are Mrs. Hambleton Durrett?" 
 
 Nancy acknowledged her identity with a smile, but the 
 next remark was a bombshell.
 
 288 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "The leader of society." 
 
 * f Alas !" exclaimed Nancy, "I have been accused of many 
 terrible things." 
 
 Their glances met. Nancy's was amused, baffling, like 
 a spark in amber. Each, in its way, was redoubtable. A 
 greater contrast between two women could scarcely have 
 been imagined. It was well said (and not snobbishly) 
 that generations had been required to make Nancy's figure : 
 she wore a dress of blue sheen, the light playing on its ripples ; 
 and as she stood, apparently wholly at ease, looking down 
 at the wife of Adolf Scherer, she reminded me of an expert 
 swordsman who, with remarkable skill, was keeping a too- 
 pressing and determined aspirant at arm's length. I was 
 keenly aware that Maude did not possess this gift, and I 
 realized for the first time something of the similarity be 
 tween Nancy's career and my own. She, too, in her feminine 
 sphere, exercised, and subtly, a power in which human pas 
 sions were deeply involved. 
 
 If Nancy Durrett symbolized aristocracy, established 
 order and prestige, what did Mrs. Scherer represent? Not 
 democracy, mob rule certainly. The stocky German 
 peasant woman with her tightly drawn hair and heavy 
 jewels seemed grotesquely to embody something that ulti 
 mately would have its way, a lusty and terrible force in the 
 interests of which my own services were enlisted ; to which 
 the old American element in business and industry, the male 
 counterpart of Nancy Willett, had already succumbed. And 
 now it was about to storm the feminine fastnesses ! I be 
 held a woman who had come to this country with a shawl 
 over her head transformed into a new species of duchess, 
 sure of herself, scorning the delicate euphemisms in which 
 Nancy's kind were wont to refer to a social realm, that 
 was no less real because its boundaries had not definitely 
 been defined. She held her stick firmly, and gave Nancy 
 .an indomitable look. 
 
 "I want you to meet my daughters. Gretchen, Anna, 
 come here and be introduced to Mrs. Durrett."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 289 
 
 It was not without curiosity I watched these of the second 
 generation as they made their bows, noted the differentiation 
 in the type for which an American environment and a " finish 
 ing school" had been responsible. Gretchen and Anna had 
 learned in crises, such as the present to restrain the 
 superabundant vitality they had inherited. If their cheek 
 bones were a little too high, their Delft blue eyes a little too 
 small, their colour was of the proverbial rose-leaves and 
 cream. Gene Hollister's difficulty was to know which to 
 marry. They were nice girls, of that there could be no 
 doubt ; there was no false modesty in their attitude toward 
 "society"; nor did they pretend as so many silly people 
 did, that they were not attempting to get anywhere in par 
 ticular, that it was less desirable to be in the centre than on 
 the dubious outer walks. They, too, were so glad to meet 
 Mrs. Durrett. 
 
 Nancy's eyes twinkled as they passed on. 
 
 "You see what I have let you in for?" I said. 
 
 "My dear Hugh," she replied, "sooner or later we should 
 have had to face them anyhow. I have recognized that for 
 some time. With their money, and Mr. Scherer's prestige, 
 and the will of that lady with the stick, in a few years we 
 should have had nothing to say. Why, she's a female Napo 
 leon. Hilda's the man of the family." 
 
 After that, Nancy invariably referred to Mrs. Scherer as 
 Hilda. 
 
 If Mrs. Scherer was a surprise to us, her husband was a 
 still greater one; and I had difficulty in recognizing the 
 Adolf Scherer who came to our dinner party as the personage 
 of the business world before whom lesser men were wont to 
 cringe. He seemed rather mysteriously to have shed that 
 personality, become an awkward, ingratiating, rather too- 
 exuberant, ordinary man with a marked German accent. 
 From time to time I found myself speculating uneasily on 
 this phenomenon as I glanced down the table at his great 
 torso, white waistcoated for the occasion. He was plainly 
 "making up" to Nancy, and to Mrs, Ogilvy, who sat op-
 
 290 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 posite him. On the whole, the atmosphere of our enter 
 tainment was rather electric. "Hilda" was chiefly respon 
 sible for this ; her frankness was of the breath-taking kind. 
 Far from attempting to hide or ignore the struggle by which 
 she and her husband had attained their present position, 
 she referred with the utmost naivete to incidents in her career, 
 while the whole table paused to listen. 
 
 " Before we had a carriage, yes, it was hard for me to get 
 about. I had to be helped by the conductors into the street 
 cars. I broke my hip when we lived in Steelville, and the 
 doctor was a numbskull. He should be put in prison, is 
 what I tell Adolf. I was standing on a clothes-horse, when 
 it fell. I had much washing to do in those days." 
 
 "And can nothing be done, Mrs. Scherer?" asked 
 Leonard Dickinson, sympathetically. 
 
 " For an old woman ? I am fifty-five. I have had many 
 doctors. I would put them all in prison. How much was 
 it you paid Dr. Stickney, in New York, Adolf ? Five thou 
 sand dollars ? And he did nothing nothing. I'd rather 
 be poor again, and work. But it is well to make the best 
 of it." . . . 
 
 "Your grandfather was a fine man, Mr. Durrett," she 
 informed Hambleton. "It is a pity for you, I think, that 
 you do not have to work." 
 
 Ham, who sat on her other side, was amused. 
 
 "My grandfather did enough work for both of us," he said. 
 
 "If I had been your grandfather, I would have started 
 you in puddling," she observed, as she eyed with disapproval 
 the filling of his third glass of champagne. "I think there 
 is too much gay life, too much games for rich young men 
 nowadays. You will forgive me for saying what I think to 
 young men?" 
 
 "I'll forgive you for not being my grandfather, at any 
 rate," replied Ham, with unaccustomed wit. 
 
 She gazed at him with grim humour. 
 
 "It is bad for you I am not," she declared. 
 
 There was no gainsaying her. What can be done with a
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 291 
 
 lady who will not recognize that morality is not discussed, 
 and that personalities are tabooed save between intimates. 
 Hilda was a personage as well as a Tartar. Laws, conven 
 tions, usages to all these she would conform when it 
 pleased her. She would have made an admirable inquisi 
 torial judge, and quite as admirable a sick nurse. A rare 
 criminal lawyer, likewise, was wasted in her. She was one 
 of those individuals, I perceived, whose loyalties dominate > 
 them ; and who, in behalf of those loyalties, carry chips on 
 their shoulders. 
 
 "It is a long time that I have been wanting to meet you," 
 she informed me. "You are smart." 
 
 I smiled, yet I was inclined to resent her use of the word, 
 though I was by no means sure of the shade of meaning she 
 meant to put into it. I had, indeed, an uneasy sense of the 
 scantiness of my fund of humour to meet and turn such a 
 situation ; for I was experiencing, now, with her, the same 
 queer feeling I had known in my youth in the presence of 
 Cousin Robert Breck the suspicion that this extraor 
 dinary person saw through me. It was as though she held 
 up a mirror and compelled me to look at my soul features. 
 I tried to assure myself that the mirror was distorted. I 
 lost, nevertheless, the sureness of touch that comes from the 
 conviction of being all of a piece. She contrived to resolve 
 me again into conflicting elements. I was, for the moment, 
 no longer the self-confident and triumphant young attorney 
 accustomed to carry all before him, to command respect and 
 admiration, but a complicated being whose unity had sud 
 denly been split. I glanced around the table at Ogilvy, at 
 Dickinson, at Ralph Hambleton. These men were func 
 tioning truly. But was I ? If I were not, might not this be 
 the reason for the lack of synthesis of which I was abruptly 
 though vaguely aware between my professional life, my 
 domestic relationships, and my relationships with friends 9 
 The loyalty of the woman beside me struck me forcibly as a 
 supreme trait. Where she had given, she did not withdraw. 
 She had conferred it instantly on Maude. Did I feel that
 
 292 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 loyalty towards a single human being? towards Maude 
 herself my wife? or even towards Nancy? I pulled 
 myself together, and resolved to give her credit for using the 
 word "smart" in its unobjectionable sense. After all, 
 Dickens had so used it. 
 
 "A lawyer must needs know something of what he is about, 
 Mrs. Scherer, if he is to be employed by such a man as your 
 husband," I replied. 
 
 Her black eyes snapped with pleasure. 
 
 "Ah, I suppose that is so," she agreed. "I knew he was a 
 great man when I married him, and that was before Mr. 
 Nathaniel Durrett found it out." 
 
 "But surely you did not think, in those days, that he 
 would be as big as he has become ? That he would not only 
 be president of the Boyne Iron Works, but of a Boyne Iron 
 Works that has exceeded Mr. Durrett's wildest dreams." 
 
 She shook her head complacently. 
 
 " Do you know what I told him when he married me ? I 
 said, 'Adolf, it is a pity you are born in Germany.' And 
 when he asked me why, I told him that some day he might 
 have been President of the United States." 
 
 "Well, that won't be a great deprivation to him," I re 
 marked. "Mr. Scherer can do what he wants, and the 
 President cannot." 
 
 "Adolf always does as he wants," she declared, gazing at 
 him as he sat beside the brilliant wife of the grandson of the 
 man whose red-shirted foreman he had been. "He does 
 what he wants, and gets what he wants. He is getting what 
 he wants now," she added, with such obvious meaning that 
 I found no words to reply. " She is pretty, that Mrs. Dur 
 rett, and clever, is it not so ? " 
 
 I agreed. A new and indescribable note had come into Mrs. 
 Scherer's voice, and I realized that she, too, was aware of 
 that flaw in the redoubtable Mr. Scherer which none of his 
 associates had guessed. It would have been strange if she 
 had not discovered it. "She is beautiful, yes," the lady 
 continued critically, "but she is not to compare with your
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 293 
 
 wife. She has not the heart, it is so with all your people 
 of society. For them it is not what you are, but what you 
 have done, and what you have." 
 
 The banality of this observation was mitigated by the 
 feeling she threw into it. 
 
 " I think you misjudge Mrs. Durrett," I said, incautiously, 
 "She has never before had the opportunity of meeting Mr. 
 Scherer, of appreciating him." 
 
 " Mrs. Durrett is an old friend of yours ? " she asked. 
 
 " I was brought up with her." 
 
 "Ah!" she exclaimed, and turned her penetrating glance 
 upon me. I was startled. Could it be that she had dis 
 cerned and interpreted those renascent feelings even then 
 stirring within me, and of which I myself was as yet scarcely 
 conscious ? At this moment, fortunately for me, the women 
 rose; the men remained to smoke; and Scherer, as they 
 discussed matters of finance, became himself again. I joined 
 in the conversation, but I was thinking of those instants 
 when in flashes of understanding my eyes had met Nancy's ; 
 instants in which I was lifted out of my humdrum, deadly 
 serious self and was able to look down objectively upon the 
 life I led, the life we all led and Nancy herself ; to see 
 with her the comic irony of it all. Nancy had the power to 
 give me this exquisite sense of detachment that must sustain 
 her. And was it not just this sustenance she could give that 
 I needed? For want of it I was hardening, crystallizing, 
 growing blind to the joy and variety of existence. Nancy 
 could have saved me; she brought it home to me that I 
 needed salvation. ... I was struck by another thought; 
 in spite of our separation, in spite of her marriage and mine, 
 she was still nearer to me far nearer than any other 
 being. 
 
 Later, I sought her out. She looked up at me amusedly 
 from the window-seat in our living-room, where she had been 
 talking to the Scherer girls. 
 
 "Well, how did you get along with Hilda?" she asked. 
 "I thought I saw you struggling."
 
 294 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "She's somewhat disconcerting," I said. "I felt as if she 
 were turning me inside out." 
 
 Nancy laughed. 
 
 "Hilda's a discovery a genius. I'm going to have 
 them to dinner myself." 
 
 "And Adolf?" I inquired. "I believe she thought you 
 were preparing to run away with him. You seemed to have 
 him hypnotized." 
 
 " I'm afraid your great man won't be able to stand ele 
 vation," she declared. "He'll have vertigo. He's even got 
 it now, at this little height, and when he builds his palace on 
 Grant Avenue, and later moves to New York, I'm afraid 
 he'll wobble even more." 
 , "Is he thinking of doing all that ? " I asked. 
 
 "I merely predict New York it's inevitable," she re 
 plied. "Grant Avenue, yes; he wants me to help him 
 choose a lot. He gave me ten thousand dollars for our 
 Orphans' Home, but on the whole I think I prefer Hilda 
 even if she doesn't approve of me." 
 
 Nancy rose. The Scherers were going. While Mr. 
 Scherer pressed my hand in a manner that convinced me of 
 his gratitude, Hilda was bidding an affectionate good night 
 to Maude. A few moments later she bore her husband and 
 daughters away, and we heard the tap-tap of her cane on 
 the walk outside. ,
 
 XVII 
 
 THE remembrance of that dinner when with my conni 
 vance the Scherers made their social debut is associated in 
 my mind with the coming of the fulness of that era, mad and 
 brief, when gold rained down like manna from our sooty 
 skies. Even the church was prosperous ; the Rev. Carey 
 Heddon, our new minister, was well abreast of the times, 
 typical of the new and efficient Christianity that has 
 finally buried the hatchet with enlightened self-interest. He 
 looked like a young and prosperous man of business, and 
 indeed he was one. 
 
 The fame of our city spread even across the Atlantic, 
 reaching obscure hamlets in Europe, where villagers gathered 
 up their lares and penates, mortgaged their homes, and 
 bought steamship tickets from philanthropists, philan 
 thropists in diamonds. Our Huns began to arrive, their 
 Attilas unrecognized among them : to drive our honest 
 Americans and Irish and Germans out of the mills by " low 
 ering the standard of living." Still according to the 
 learned economists in our universities, enlightened self-in 
 terest triumphed. Had not the honest Americans and Ger 
 mans become foremen and even presidents of corporations? 
 What greater vindication for their philosophy could be 
 desired ? 
 
 The very aspect of the city changed like magic. New 
 buildings sprang high in the air ; the Reliance Trust (Mr. 
 Grierson's), the Scherer Building, the Hambleton Building ; 
 a new hotel, the Ashuela, took proper care of our visitors 
 from the East, a massive, grey stone, thousand-awninged 
 affair on Boyne Street, with a grill where it became the fashion 
 
 295
 
 296 A PAR COUNTRY 
 
 to go for supper after the play, and a head waiter who knew 
 in a few weeks everyone worth knowing. 
 
 To return for a moment to the Huns."? Maude had ex 
 pressed a desire to see a mill, and we went, one afternoon, 
 in Mr. Scherer's carriage to Steelville, with Mr. Scherer 
 himself, a bewildering, educative, almost terrifying ex- 
 ' perience amidst fumes and flames, gigantic forces and titanic 
 weights. It seemed a marvel that we escaped being crushed 
 or burned alive in those huge steel buildings reverberating 
 with sound. They appeared a very bedlam of chaos, instead 
 of the triumph of order, organization and human skill. Mr. 
 Scherer was very proud of it all, and ours was a sort of tri 
 umphal procession, accompanied by superintendents, man 
 agers and other factotums. I thought of my childhood image 
 of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and our progress through 
 the flames seemed no less remarkable and miraculous. 
 
 Maude, with alarm in her eyes, kept very close to me, as 
 I supplemented the explanations they gave her. I had 
 been there many times before. 
 
 "Why, Hugh," she exclaimed, "you seem to know a lot 
 about it!" 
 
 Mr. Scherer laughed. 
 
 " He's had to talk about it once or twice in court eh, 
 Hugh ? You didn't realize how clever your husband was 
 did you, Mrs. Paret?" 
 
 "But this is so complicated," she replied. "It is over 
 whelming." 
 
 "When I found out how much trouble he had taken to 
 learn about my business," added Mr. Scherer, "there was 
 only one thing to do. Make him my lawyer. Hugh, you 
 have the floor, and explain the open-hearth process." 
 
 I had almost forgotten the Huns. I saw Maude gazing 
 at them with a new kind of terror. And when we sat at 
 home that evening they still haunted her. 
 
 "Somehow, I can't bear to think about them," she said. 
 *' I'm sure we'll have to pay for it, some day." 
 
 "Pay for what?" I asked.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 297 
 
 "For making them work that way. And twelve hours! 
 It can't be right, while we have so much, and are so comfort 
 able." -j^ 
 
 "Don't be foolish," I exclaimed. "They're used to it. 
 They think themselves lucky to get the work and they 
 are. Besides, you give them credit for a sensitiveness that 
 they don't possess. They wouldn't know what to do with 
 such a house as this if they had it." 
 
 "I never realized before that our happiness and comfort 
 were built on such foundations," she said, ignoring my 
 remark. 
 
 " You must have seen your father's operatives, in Elking- 
 ton, many times a week." 
 
 " I suppose I was too young to think about such things," 
 she reflected. " Besides, I used to be sorry for them, some 
 times. But these men at the steel mills I can't tell you 
 what I feel about them. The sight of their great bodies and 
 their red, sullen faces brought home to me the cruelty of 
 life. Did you notice how some of them stared at us, as 
 though they were but half awake in the heat, with that glow 
 on their faces ? It made me afraid afraid that they'll 
 wake up some day, and then they will be terrible. I thought 
 of the children. It seems not only wicked, but mad to bring 
 ignorant foreigners over here and make them slaves like 
 that, and so many of them are hurt and maimed. I can't 
 forget them." 
 
 "You're talking Socialism," I said crossly, wondering 
 whether Lucia had taken it up as her latest fad. 
 
 "Oh, no, I'm not," said Maude, "I don't know what 
 Socialism is. I'm talking about something that anyone 
 who is not dazzled by all this luxury we are living in might 
 be able to see, about something which, when it comes, we 
 shan't be able to help." 
 
 I ridiculed this. The prophecy itself did not disturb me 
 half as much as the fact that she had made it, as this new 
 evidence that she was beginning to think for herself, and 
 along lines so different from my own development.
 
 298 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 While it lasted, before novelists, playwrights, professors 
 and ministers of the Gospel abandoned their proper sphere 
 to destroy it, that Golden Age was heaven ; the New Jeru 
 salem in which we had ceased to believe would have been 
 in the nature of an anticlimax to any of our archangels of 
 finance who might have attained it. The streets of our own 
 city turned out to be gold ; gold likewise the acres of unused, 
 scrubby land on our outskirts, as the incident of the River 
 side Franchise which I am about to relate amply 
 proved. 
 
 That scheme originated in the alert mind of Mr. Fred 
 erick Grierson, and in spite of the fact that it has since 
 become notorious in the eyes of a virtue-stricken public, it 
 was entered into with all innocence at the time : most of 
 the men who were present at the "magnate's" table at the 
 Boyne Club the day Mr. Grierson broached it will vouch 
 for this. He casually asked Mr. Dickinson if he had ever 
 noticed a tract lying on the river about two miles beyond 
 the Heights, opposite what used to be in the old days a road 
 house. 
 
 "This city is growing so fast, Leonard," said Grierson, 
 lighting a special cigar the Club kept for him, "that it 
 might pay a few of us to get together and buy that tract, 
 have the city put in streets and sewers and sell it in building 
 lots. I think I can get most of it at less than three hundred 
 dollars an acre." 
 
 Mr. Dickinson was interested. So were Mr. Ogilvy and 
 Ralph Hambleton, and Mr. Scherer, who chanced to be 
 there. Anything Fred Grierson had to say on the question 
 of real estate was always interesting. He went on to de 
 scribe the tract, its size and location. 
 
 "That's all very well, Fred," Dickinson objected pres 
 ently, "but how are your prospective householders going 
 to get out there?" 
 
 "Just what I was coming to," cried Grierson, trium-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 299 
 
 phantly, "we'll get a franchise, and build a street-railroad 
 out Maplewood Avenue, an extension of the Park Street 
 line. We can get the franchise for next to nothing, if we 
 work it right " (Mr. Grierson's eye fell on me), " and sell it 
 out to the public, if you underwrite it, for two million or so." 
 
 "Well, you've got your nerve with you, Fred, as usual," 
 said Dickinson. But he rolled his cigar in his mouth, an 
 indication, to those who knew him well, that he was con 
 sidering the matter. When Leonard Dickinson didn't say 
 "no" at once, there was hope. "What do you think the 
 property holders on Maplewood Avenue would say ? Wasn't 
 it understood, when that avenue was laid out, that it was to 
 form part of the system of boulevards?" 
 
 "What difference does it make what they say?" Ralph 
 interposed. 
 
 Dickinson smiled. He, too, had an exaggerated respect 
 for Ralph. We all thought the proposal daring, but in no 
 way amazing ; the public existed to be sold things to, and 
 what did it matter if the Maplewood residents, as Ralph 
 said, and the City Improvement League protested? 
 
 Perry Blackwood was the Secretary of the City Improve 
 ment League, the object of which was to beautify the city 
 by laying out a system of parkways. 
 
 The next day some of us gathered in Dickinson's office 
 and decided that Grierson should go ahead and get the 
 options. This was done ; not, of course, in Grierson's name. 
 The next move, before the formation of the Riverside Com 
 pany, was to "see" Mr. Judd Jason. The success or failure 
 of the enterprise was in his hands. Mahomet must go to 
 the mountain, and I went to Monahan's saloon, first having 
 made an appointment. It was not the first time I had been 
 there since I had made that first memorable visit, but I 
 never quite got over the feeling of a neophyte before Buddha, 
 though I did not go so far as to analyze the reason, that 
 in Mr. Jason I was brought face to face with the concrete 
 embodiment of the philosophy I had adopted, the logical 
 consequence of enlightened self-interest. If he had ever
 
 300 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 heard of it, he would have made no pretence of being any 
 thing else. Greatness, declares some modern philosopher, 
 has no connection with virtue ; it is the continued, strong 
 and logical expression of some instinct; in Mr. Jason's 
 case, the predatory instinct. And like a true artist, he 
 loved his career for itself not for what its fruits could buy. 
 He might have built a palace on the Heights with the tolls 
 he took from the disreputable houses of the city; he was 
 contented with Monahan's saloon : nor did he seek to pro 
 pitiate a possible God by endowing churches and hospitals 
 with a portion of his income. Try though I might, I never 
 could achieve the perfection of this man's contempt for all 
 other philosophies. The very fact of my going there in 
 secret to that dark place of his from out of the bright, respect 
 able region in which I lived was in itself an acknowledgment 
 of this. I thought him a thief a necessary thief and 
 he knew it : he was indifferent to it ; and it amused him, 
 I think, to see clinging to me, when I entered his presence, 
 shreds of that morality which those of my world who dealt 
 with him thought so needful for the sake of decency. 
 
 He was in bed, reading newspapers, as usual. An empty 
 coffee-cup and a plate were on the littered table. 
 
 "Sit down, sit down, Paret," he said. "What do you 
 hear from the Senator?" 
 
 I sat down, and gave him the news of Mr. Watling. He 
 seemed, as usual, distrait, betraying no curiosity as to the 
 object of my call, his lean, brown fingers playing with the 
 newspapers on his lap. Suddenly, he flashed out at me one 
 of those remarks which produced the uncanny conviction 
 that, so far as affairs in the city were concerned, he was 
 omniscient. 
 
 "I hear somebody has been getting options on that tract 
 of land beyond the Heights, on the river." 
 
 He had "focussed." i 
 
 "How did you hear that?" I asked. 
 
 He smiled. . 
 
 "It's Grierson, ain't it?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 301 
 
 "Yes, it's Grierson," I said. 
 
 "How are you going to get your folks out there?" he 
 demanded. 
 
 "That's what I've come to see you about. We want a 
 franchise for Maplewood Avenue." 
 
 " Maplewood Avenue ! " He lay back with his eyes 
 ; closed, as though trying to visualize such a colossal pro 
 posal. . . . 
 
 When I left him, two hours later, the details were all 
 arranged, down to Mr. Jason's consideration from the 
 Riverside Company and the "fee" which his lawyer, Mr. 
 Bitter, was to have for "presenting the case" before the 
 Board of Aldermen. I went back to lunch at the Boyne 
 Club, and to receive the congratulations of my friends. 
 The next week the Riverside Company was formed, and I 
 made out a petition to the Board of Aldermen for a fran 
 chise; Mr. Bitter appeared and argued: in short, the 
 procedure so familiar to modern students of political affairs 
 was gone through. The Maplewood Avenue residents rose 
 en masse, supported by the City Improvement League. 
 Perry Blackwood, as soon as he heard of the petition, turned 
 up at my office. By this time I was occupying Mr. Wat- 
 ling's room. 
 
 "Look here," he began, as soon as the office-boy had 
 closed the door behind him, "this is going it a little too 
 strong." 
 
 "What is?" I asked, leaning back in my chair and sur 
 veying him. 
 
 "This proposed Maplewood Avenue Franchise. Hugh," 
 he said, "you and I have been friends a good many years. 
 Lucia and I are devoted to Maude." 
 
 I did not reply. 
 
 "I've seen all along that we've been growing apart," he 
 added sadly. " You've got certain ideas about things which 
 I can't share. I suppose I'm old fashioned. I can't trust 
 myself to tell you what I think what Tom and I think 
 about this deal."
 
 302 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Go ahead, Perry," I said. 
 
 He got up, plainly agitated, and walked to the window. 
 Then he turned to me appealingly. I 
 
 " Get out of it, for God's sake get out of it, before it's too 
 late. For your own sake, for Maude's, for the children's. 
 You don't realize what you are doing. You may not believe 
 me, but the time will come when these fellows you are in 
 with will be repudiated by the community, their money 
 won't help them. Tom and I are the best friends you have," 
 he added, a little irrelevantly. 
 
 "And you think I'm going to the dogs." 
 
 "Now don't take it the wrong way," he urged. 
 
 "What is it you object to about the Maplewood fran 
 chise?" I asked. "If you'll look at a map of the city, you'll 
 see that development is bound to come on that side. Maple- 
 wood Avenue is the natural artery, somebody will build a line 
 out there, and if you'd rather have eastern capitalists " 
 
 "Why are you going to get this franchise?" he demanded. 
 "Because we haven't a decent city charter, and a healthy 
 public spirit, you fellows are buying it from a corrupt city 
 boss, and bribing a corrupt board of aldermen. That's the 
 plain language of it. And it's only fair to warn you that I'm 
 going to say so, openly." 
 
 "Be sensible," I answered. "We've got to have street 
 railroads, your family has one. We know what the 
 aldermen are, what political conditions are. If you feel 
 this way about it, the thing to do is to try to change them. 
 But why blame me for getting a franchise for a company in 
 the only manner in which, under present conditions, a fran 
 chise can be got ? Do you want the city to stand still ? If 
 not, we have to provide for the new population." 
 
 "Every time you bribe these rascals for a franchise you 
 entrench them," he cried. "You make it more difficult 
 to oust them. But you mark my words, we shall get rid 
 of them some day, and when that fight comes, I want to be 
 in it." 
 
 He had grown very much excited ; and it was as though
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 303 
 
 this excitement suddenly revealed to me the full extent of 
 the change that had taken place in him since he had left 
 college. As he stood facing me, almost glaring at me through 
 his eye-glasses, I beheld a slim, nervous, fault-finding doc 
 trinaire, incapable of understanding the world as it was, 
 lacking the force of his pioneer forefathers. I rather pitied 
 him. 
 
 "I'm sorry we can't look at this thing alike, Perry," I 
 told him. "You've said some pretty hard things, but I 
 realize that you hold your point of view in good faith, and 
 that you have come to me as an old friend. I hope it won't 
 make any difference in our personal relations." 
 
 "I don't see how it can help making a difference," he 
 answered slowly. His excitement had cooled abruptly: 
 he seemed dazed. At this moment my private stenographer 
 entered to inform me that I was being called up on the tele 
 phone from New York. "Well, you have more important 
 affairs to attend to, I won't bother you any more," he added. 
 
 "Hold on," I exclaimed, "this call can wait. I'd like to 
 talk it over with you." 
 
 "I'm afraid it wouldn't be any use, Hugh," he said, and 
 went out. 
 
 After talking with the New York client whose local in 
 terests I represented I sat thinking over the conversation 
 with Perry. Considering Maude's intimacy with and affec 
 tion for the Blackwoods, the affair was awkward, opening up 
 many uncomfortable possibilities; and it was the prospect 
 of discomfort that bothered me rather than regret for the 
 probable loss of Perry's friendship. I still believed myself 
 to have an affection for him : undoubtedly this was a senti 
 mental remnant. . . . 
 
 That evening after dinner Tom came in alone, and I 
 suspected that Perry had sent him. He was fidgety, ill at 
 ease, and presently asked if I could see him a moment in 
 my study. Maude's glance followed us. 
 
 "Say, Hugh, this is pretty stiff," he blurted out characteris 
 tically, when the door was closed.
 
 304 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "I suppose you mean the Riverside Franchise," I said. 
 
 He looked up at me, miserably, from the chair into which 
 he had sunk, his hands in his pockets. 
 
 "You'll forgive me for talking about it, won't you? You 
 used to lecture me once in a while at Cambridge, you know." 
 
 "That's all right go ahead," I replied, trying to speak 
 amiably. 
 
 "You know I've always admired you, Hugh, I never 
 had your ability," he began painfully, "you've gone ahead 
 pretty fast, the truth is that Perry and I have been worried 
 about you for some time. We've tried not to be too serious 
 in showing it, but we've felt that these modern business 
 methods were getting into your system without your realiz 
 ing it. There are some things a man's friends can tell him, 
 and it's their duty to tell him. Good God, haven't you got 
 enough, Hugh, enough success and enough money, 
 without going into a thing like this Riverside scheme?" 
 
 I was intensely annoyed, if not angry; and I hesitated a 
 moment to calm myself. 
 
 "Tom, you don't understand my position," I said. "I'm 
 willing to discuss it with you, now that you've opened up the 
 subject. Perry's been talking to you, I can see that. I 
 think Perry's got queer ideas, to be plain with you, 
 and they're getting queerer." 
 
 He sat down again while, with what I deemed a rather 
 exemplary patience, I went over the arguments in favour of 
 my position ; and as I talked, it clarified in my own mind. 
 It was impossible to apply to business an individual code of 
 ethics, even to Perry's business, to Tom's business : the 
 two were incompatible, and the sooner one recognized that 
 the better : the whole structure of business was built up on 
 natural, as opposed to ethical law. We had arrived at an 
 era of frankness that was the truth and the sooner we 
 faced this truth the better for our peace of mind. Much 
 as we might deplore the political system that had grown up, 
 we had to acknowledge, if we were consistent, that it was the 
 base on which our prosperity was built. I was rather proud
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 305 
 
 of having evolved this argument ; it fortified my own peace 
 of mind, which had been disturbed by Tom's attitude. I 
 began to pity him. He had not been very successful in life, 
 and with the little he earned, added to Susan's income, I 
 knew that a certain ingenuity was required to make both 
 ends meet. He sat listening with a troubled look. A passing 
 phase of feeling clouded for a brief moment my confidence 
 when there arose in my mind an unbidden memory of my 
 youth, of my father. He, too, had mistrusted my ingenuity. 
 I recalled how I had out-manoeuvred him and gone to col 
 lege ; I remembered the March day so long ago, when Tom 
 and I had stood on the corner debating how to deceive him, 
 and it was I who had suggested the nice distinction between 
 a boat and a raft. Well, my father's illogical attitude 
 towards boyhood nature, towards human nature, had forced 
 me into that lie, just as the senseless attitude of the public 
 to-day forced business into a position of hypocrisy. 
 
 "Well, that's clever," he said, slowly and perplexedly, 
 when I had finished. "It's damned clever, but somehow it 
 looks to me all wrong. I can't pick it to pieces." He got 
 up rather heavily. "I I guess I ought to be going. 
 Susan doesn't know where I am." 
 
 I was exasperated. It was clear, though he did not say 
 so, that he thought me dishonest. The pain in his eyes 
 had deepened. 
 
 "If you feel that way " I said. 
 
 ^ "Oh, God, I don't know how I feel !" he cried. "You're 
 the oldest friend I have, Hugh, I can't forget that. We'll 
 say nothing more about it." He picked up his hat and a 
 moment later I heard the front door close behind him. I 
 stood for a while stock-still, and then went into the living- 
 room, where Maude was sewing. 
 
 "WTiy, where's Tom?" she inquired, looking up. 
 
 "Oh, he went home. He said Susan didn't know where 
 he was." 
 
 "How queer! Hugh, was there anything the matter? 
 Is he in trouble?" she asked anxiously.
 
 306 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I stood toying with a book-mark, reflecting. She must 
 inevitably come to suspect that something had happened, 
 and it would be as well to fortify her. 
 
 "The trouble is," I said after a moment, "that Perry and 
 Tom would like to run modern business on the principle 
 of a charitable institution. Unfortunately, it is not practical. 
 They're upset because I have been retained by a syndicate 
 whose object is to develop some land out beyond Maplewood 
 Avenue. They've bought the land, and we are asking the 
 city to give us a right to build a line out Maplewood Avenue, 
 which is the obvious way to go. Perry says it will spoil 
 the avenue. That's nonsense, in the first place. The 
 avenue is wide, and the tracks will be in a grass plot in the 
 centre. For the sake of keeping tracks off that avenue he 
 would deprive people of attractive homes at a small cost, 
 of the good air they can get beyond the heights: he would 
 stunt the city's development." 
 
 "That does seem a little unreasonable," Maude admitted. 
 "Is that all he objects to?" 
 
 "No, he thinks it an outrage because, in order to get the 
 franchise, we have to deal with the city politicians. Well, 
 it so happens, and always has happened, that politics have 
 been controlled by leaders, whom Perry calls 'bosses,' and 
 they are not particularly attractive men. You wouldn't 
 care to associate with them. My father once refused to be 
 mayor of the city for this reason. But they are necessities. 
 If the people didn't want them, they'd take enough interest 
 in elections to throw them out. But since the people do 
 want them, and they are there, every time a new street-car 
 line or something of that sort needs to be built they have to 
 be consulted, because, without their influence nothing could 
 be done. On the other hand, these politicians cannot afford 
 to ignore men of local importance like Leonard Dickinson and 
 Adolf Scherer and Miller Gorse who represent financial 
 substance and responsibility. If a new street-railroad is 
 'to be built, these are the logical ones to build it. You have 
 just the same situation in Elkington, on a smaller scale.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 307 
 
 Your family, the Hutchinses, own the mills and the street- 
 railroads, and any new enterprise that presents itself is done 
 with their money, because they are reliable and sound." 
 
 "It isn't pleasant to think that there are such people as 
 the politicians, is it?" said Maude, slowly. 
 
 " Unquestionably not," I agreed. "It isn't pleasant to 
 think of some other crude forces in the world. But they 
 exist, and they have to be dealt with. Suppose the United 
 States should refuse to trade with Russia because, from our 
 republican point of view, we regarded her government as 
 tyrannical and oppressive? or to cooperate with England 
 in some undertaking for the world's benefit because we 
 contended that she ruled India with an iron hand ? In such a 
 case, our President and Senate would be scoundrels for mak 
 ing and ratifying a treaty. Yet here are Perry and Tom, 
 and no doubt Susan and Lucia, accusing me, a lifetime friend, 
 of dishonesty because I happen to be counsel for a syndicate 
 that wishes to build a street-railroad for the convenience of 
 the people of the city." 
 
 "Oh, no, not of dishonesty !" she exclaimed. "I can't 
 I won't believe they would do that." 
 
 "Pretty near it," I said. "If I listened to them, I should 
 have to give up the law altogether." 
 
 "Sometimes," she answered in a low voice, "sometimes I 
 wish you would." 
 
 " I might have expected that you would take their point 
 of view." 
 
 As I was turning away she got up quickly and put her hand 
 on my shoulder. 
 
 "Hugh, please don't say such things you've no right 
 to say them." 
 
 "And you?" I asked. 
 
 "Don't you see," she continued pleadingly, "don't you 
 see that we are growing apart? That's the only reason I 
 said what I did. It isn't that I don't trust you, that I don't 
 want you to have your work, that I demand all of you. I 
 know a woman can't ask that, can't have it. But if
 
 308 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 you would only give me give the children just a little, 
 if I could feel that we meant something to you and that 
 this other wasn't gradually becoming everything, wasn't 
 absorbing you more and more, killing the best part of you. 
 It's poisoning our marriage, it's poisoning all your relation 
 ships." 
 
 In that appeal the real Maude, the Maude of the early 
 days of our marriage flashed forth again so vividly that 1 ' 
 was taken aback. I understood that she had had herself 
 under control, had worn a mask a mask I had forced on 
 her; and the revelation of the continued existence of that 
 other Maude was profoundly disturbing. Was it true, as 
 she said, that n*y absorption in the great game of modern 
 business, in the modern American philosophy it implied 
 was poisoning my marriage ? or was it that my marriage had 
 failed to satisfy and absorb me ? I was touched but 
 sentimentally touched : I felt that this was a situation that 
 ought to touch me ; I didn't wish to face it, as usual : I 
 couldn't acknowledge to myself that anything was really 
 wrong. . . I patted her on the shoulder, I bent over and 
 kissed her. 
 
 "A man in my position can't altogether choose just how 
 busy he will be," I said smiling. "Matters are thrust upon 
 me which I have to accept, and I can't help thinking about 
 some of them when I come home. But we'll go off for a 
 real vacation soon, Maude, to Europe and take the chil 
 dren." 
 
 "Oh, I hope so," she said. . . . 
 
 From this time on, as may be supposed, our intercourse 
 with both the Blackwoods began to grow less frequent, 
 although Maude continued to see a great deal of Lucia ; and 
 when we did dine in their company, or they with us, it was 
 quite noticeable that their former raillery was suppressed. 
 Even Tom had ceased to refer to me as the young Napoleon
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 309 
 
 of the Law : he clung to me, but he too kept silent on the 
 subject of business. Maude of course must have noticed 
 this, must have sensed the change of atmosphere, have known 
 that the Blackwoods, at least, were maintaining appearances 
 for her sake. She did not speak to me of the change, nor 
 I to her ; but when I thought of her silence, it was to suspect 
 that she was weighing the question which had led up to the 
 difference between Perry and me, and I had a suspicion that 
 the fact that I was her husband would not affect her ulti 
 mate decision. This faculty of hers of thinking things out 
 instead of accepting my views and decisions was, as the saying 
 goes, getting a little "on my nerves" : that she of all women 
 should have developed it was a recurring and unpleasant 
 surprise. I began at times to pity myself a little, to feel 
 the need of sympathetic companionship feminine com 
 panionship. . . . 
 
 I shall not go into the details of the procurement of what 
 became known as the Riverside Franchise. In spite of the 
 Maplewood residents, of the City Improvement League and 
 individual protests, we obtained it with absurd ease. In 
 deed Perry Blackwood himself appeared before the Public 
 Utilities Committee of the Board of Aldermen, and was 
 listened to with deference and gravity while he discoursed 
 on the defacement of a beautiful boulevard to satisfy the 
 greed of certain private individuals. Mr. Otto Bitter and 
 myself, who appeared for the petitioners, had a similar re 
 ception. That struggle was a tempest in a tea-pot. The 
 reformer raged, but he was feeble in those days, and the 
 great public believed what it read in the respectable news 
 papers. In Mr. Judah B. Tallant's newspaper, for instance, 
 the Morning Era, there were semiplayful editorials about 
 "obstructionists." Mr. Perry Blackwood was a well-mean 
 ing, able gentleman of an old family, etc., but with a sentiment 
 for horse-cars. The Era published also the resolutions which 
 (with interesting spontaneity !) had been passed by our Board 
 of Trade and Chamber of Commerce and other influential 
 bodies in favour of the franchise ; the idea unknown to
 
 310 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 the public of Mr. Hugh Paret, who wrote drafts of the 
 resolutions and suggested privately to Mr. Leonard Dickin 
 son that a little enthusiasm from these organizations might 
 be helpful. Mr. Dickinson accepted the suggestion eagerly, 
 wondering why he hadn't thought of it himself. The reso 
 lutions carried some weight with a public that did not know 
 its right hand from its left. 
 
 After fitting deliberation, one evening in February the 
 Board of Aldermen met and granted the franchise. Not 
 unanimously, oh, no ! Mr. Jason was not so simple as that ! 
 No further visits to Monahan's saloon on my part, in this 
 connection were necessary ; but Mr. Otto Bitter met me one 
 day in the hotel with a significant message from the boss. 
 
 "It's all fixed," he informed me. "Murphy and Scott 
 and Ottheimer and Grady and Loth are the decoys. You 
 understand ? " 
 
 "I think I gather your meaning," I said. 
 
 Mr. Bitter smiled by pulling down one corner of a crooked 
 mouth. 
 
 "They'll vote against it on principle, you know," he added. 
 " We get a little something from the Maple Avenue residents." 
 
 I've forgotten what the Riverside Franchise cost. The 
 sum was paid in a lump sum to Mr. Bitter as his "fee," 
 so, to their chagrin, a grand jury discovered in later years, 
 when they were barking around Mr. Jason's hole with an 
 eager district attorney snapping his whip over them. I 
 remember the cartoon. The municipal geese were gone, 
 but it was impossible to prove that this particular fox had 
 used his enlightened reason in their procurement. Mr. 
 Bitter was a legally authorized fox, and could take fees. 
 How Mr. Jason was to be rewarded by the land company's 
 left hand, unknown to the land company's right hand, be 
 came a problem worthy of a genius. The genius was found, 
 but modesty forbids me to mention his name ; and the prob 
 lem was solved, to wit : the land company bought a piece 
 of down-town property from Mr. Ryerson, who was Mr. 
 Grierson's real estate man and the agent for the land com-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 311 
 
 pany, for a consideration of thirty thousand dollars. An 
 unconfirmed rumour had it that Mr. Ryerson turned over the 
 thirty thousand to Mr. Jason. Then the Riverside Company 
 issued a secret deed of the same property back to Mr. Ryerson, 
 and this deed was not recorded until some years later. 
 
 Such are the elaborate transactions progress and prosperity 
 demand. Nature is the great teacher, and we know that her 
 ways are at tunes complicated and clumsy. Likewise, under 
 the "natural" laws of economics, new enterprises are not 
 born without travail, without the aid of legal physicians well 
 versed in financial obstetrics. One hundred and fifty to 
 two hundred thousand, let us say, for the right to build tracks 
 on Maplewood Avenue, and we sold nearly two million 
 dollars' worth of the securities back to the public whose 
 aldermen had sold us the franchise. Is there a man so dead 
 as not to feel a thrill at this achievement? And let no one 
 who declares that literary talent and imagination are non 
 existent in America pronounce final judgment until he reads 
 that prospectus, in which was combined the best of realism 
 and symbolism, for the labours of Alonzo Cheyne were not 
 to be wasted, after all. Mr. Dickinson, who was a director 
 in the Maplewood line, got a handsome underwriting per 
 centage, and Mr. Berringer, also a director, on the bonds and 
 preferred stock he sold. Mr. Paret, who entered both com 
 panies on the ground floor, likewise got fees. Everybody 
 was satisfied except the trouble makers, who were ignored. 
 In short, the episode of the Riverside Franchise is a trium 
 phant proof of the contention that business men are the 
 best fitted to conduct the politics of their country. 
 
 We had learned to pursue our happiness in packs, we 
 knew that the Happy Hunting-Grounds are here and now, 
 while the Reverend Carey Heddon continued to assure the 
 maimed, the halt and the blind that their kingdom was not 
 of this world, that their time was coming later. Could there 
 have been a more ideal arrangement! Everybody should 
 have been satisfied, but everybody was not. Otherwise 
 these pages would never have been written.
 
 XVIII 
 
 As the name of our city grew to be more and more a by 
 word for sudden and fabulous wealth, not only were the 
 Huns and the Slavs, the Czechs and the Greeks drawn to 
 us, but it became the fashion for distinguished Englishmen 
 and Frenchmen and sometimes Germans and Italians to 
 pay us a visit when they made the grand tour of America. 
 They had been told that they must not miss us ; scarcely a 
 week went by in our community so it was said in which 
 a full-fledged millionaire was not turned out. Our visitors 
 did not always remain a week, since their rapid journey- 
 ings from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the 
 Gulf rarely occupied more than four, but in the books 
 embodying their mature comments on the manners, customs 
 and crudities of American civilization no less than a chapter 
 was usually devoted to us; and most of the adjectives in 
 their various languages were exhausted in the attempt to 
 prove how symptomatic we were of the ambitions and ideals 
 of the Republic. The fact that many of these gentlemen 
 literary and otherwise returned to their own shores better 
 fed and with larger balances in the banks than when they 
 departed is neither here nor there. Egyptians are prover 
 bially created to be spoiled. 
 
 The wiser and more fortunate of these travellers and 
 students of life brought letters to Mr. and Mrs. Hambleton 
 Durrett. That household was symptomatic if they liked 
 of the new order of things ; and it was rare indeed when 
 both members of it were at home to entertain them. If 
 Mr. Durrett were in the city, and they did not happen to be 
 Britons with sporting proclivities, they simply were not 
 
 312
 
 A FAR COUNT RY 813 
 
 entertained: when Mrs. Durrett received them dinners 
 were given in their honour on the Durrett gold plate, and 
 they spent cosey and delightful hours conversing with her 
 in the little salon overlooking the garden, to return to their 
 hotels and jot down paragraphs on the superiority of the 
 American women over the men. These particular foreigners 
 did not lay eyes on Mr. Durrett, who was in Florida or in 
 the East playing polo or engaged in some other pursuit. 
 One result of the lavishne'ss and luxury that amazed them 
 they wrote had been to raise the standard of culture of 
 the women, who were our leisure class. But the travellers 
 did not remain long enough to arrive at any conclusions of 
 value on the effect of luxury and lavishness on the sacred 
 institution of marriage. 
 
 If Mr. Nathaniel Durrett could have returned to his native 
 city after fifteen years or so in the grave, not the least of the 
 phenomena to startle him would have been that which was 
 taking place in his own house. For he would have beheld 
 serenely established in that former abode of Calvinism one 
 of the most reprehensible of exotic abominations, a mariage 
 de convenance ; nor could he have failed to observe, more 
 over, the complacency with which the descendants of his 
 friends, the pew holders in Dr. Pound's church, regarded the 
 matter: and not only these, but the city at large. The 
 stronghold of Scotch Presbyterianism had become a London 
 or a Paris, a Gomorrah ! 
 
 Mrs. Hambleton Durrett went her way, and Mr. Durrett 
 his. The less said about Mr. Durrett's way even in this 
 suddenly advanced age the better. As for Nancy, she 
 seemed to the distant eye to be walking through life in a 
 stately and triumphant manner. I read in the newspapers 
 of her doings, her comings and goings ; sometimes she was 
 away for months together, often abroad ; and when she was 
 at home I saw her, but infrequently, under conditions more 
 or less formal. Not that she was formal, or I : our inter 
 course seemed eloquent of an intimacy in a tantalizing state 
 of suspense. Would that intimacy ever be renewed ? This
 
 314 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 was a question on which I sometimes speculated. The 
 situation that had suspended or put an end to It, as the 
 case might be, was never referred to by either of us. 
 
 One afternoon in the late winter of the year following that 
 in which we had given a dinner to the Scherers (where the 
 Durretts had rather marvellously appeared together) I left 
 my office about three o'clock a most unusual occurrence. 
 I was restless, unable to fix my mind on my work, filled with 
 unsatisfied yearnings the object of which I sought to keep 
 vague, and yet I directed my steps westward along Boyne 
 Street until I came to the Art Museum, where a loan exhibi 
 tion was being held. I entered, bought a catalogue, and 
 presently found myself standing before number 103, desig 
 nated as a portrait of Mrs. Hambleton Durrett, painted 
 in Paris the autumn before by a Polish artist then much in 
 vogue, Stanislaus Czesky. Nancy was it Nancy ? was 
 standing facing me, tall, superb in the maturity of her 
 beauty, with one hand resting on an antique table, a smile 
 upon her lips, a gentle mockery in her eyes as though laugh 
 ing at the world she adorned. With the smile and the mock 
 ery somehow significant, too, of an achieved inaccessi 
 bility went the sheen of her clinging gown and the glint 
 of the heavy pearls drooping from her high throat to her 
 waist. These caught the eye, but failed at length to hold it, 
 for even as I looked the smile faded, the mockery turned to 
 wistfulness. So I thought, and looked again to see the 
 wistfulness : the smile had gone, the pearls seemed heavier. 
 Was it a trick of the artist? had he seen what I saw, or 
 thought I saw ? or was it that imagination which by now I 
 might have learned to suspect and distrust. Wild longings 
 took possession of me, for the portrait had seemed to em 
 phasize at once how distant now she was from me, and yet 
 how near ! I wanted to put that nearness to the test. Had 
 she really changed? did anyone really change? and had I 
 not been a fool to accept the presentment she had given me ? 
 I remembered those moments when our glances had met as 
 across barriers in flashes of understanding. After all, the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 315 
 
 barriers were mere relics of the superstition of the past. 
 What if I went to her now? I felt that I needed her as I 
 never had needed anyone in all my Me. ... I was aroused 
 by the sound of lowered voices beside me. 
 
 "That's Mrs. Hambleton Durrett," I heard a woman say. 
 "Isn't she beautiful?" 
 
 The note of envy struck me sharply horribly. Without 
 waiting to listen to the comment of her companion I hurried 
 out of the building into the cold, white sunlight that threw 
 into bold relief the mediocre houses of the street. Here was 
 everyday life, but the portrait had suggested that which 
 might have been might be yet. What did I mean by 
 this ? I didn't know, I didn't care to define it, a re 
 newal of her friendship, of our intimacy. My being cried 
 out for it, and in the world in which I lived we took 
 what we wanted why not this ? And yet for an instant I 
 stood on the sidewalk to discover that in new situations 
 I was still subject to unaccountable qualms of that thing I 
 had been taught to call "conscience"; whether it were 
 conscience or not must be left to the psychologists. I was 
 married terrible word ! the shadow of that Institution fell 
 athwart me as the sun went under a cloud; but the sun 
 came out again as I found myself walking toward the Durrett 
 house reflecting that numbers of married men called on 
 Nancy, and that what I had in mind in regard to her was 
 nothing that the court would have pronounced an Infringe 
 ment upon the Institution. ... I reached her steps, the 
 long steps still guarded by the curved wrought-iron railings 
 reminiscent of Nathaniel's day, though the "portals" were 
 gone, a modern vestibule having replaced them ; I rang the 
 bell; the butler flung open the doors. He, at any rate, 
 did not seem surprised to see me here, he greeted me with 
 respectful cordiality and led me, as a favoured guest, through 
 the big drawing-room into the salon. 
 
 "Mr. Paret, Madam!" 
 
 Nancy rose quickly from the low chair where she sat 
 cutting the pages of a French novel.
 
 316 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " Hugh ! " she exclaimed. " I'm out if anyone calls. Bring 
 tea," she added to the man, who retired. For a moment 
 we stood gazing at each other, questioningly. "Well, won't 
 you sit down and stay awhile?" she asked. 
 
 I took a chair on the opposite side of the fire. 
 
 "I just thought I'd drop in," I said. 
 
 "I am flattered," said Nancy, "that a person so affaire 
 should find time to call on an old friend. Why, I thought 
 you never left your office until seven o'clock." 
 
 "I don't, as a rule, but to-day I wasn't particularly busy, 
 and I thought I'd go round to the Art Museum and look at 
 your portrait." 
 
 "More flattery! Hugh, you're getting quite human. 
 What do you think of it?" 
 
 "I like it. I think it quite remarkable." 
 
 "Have a cigarette!" 
 
 I took one. 
 
 "So you really like it," she said. 
 
 "Don't you?" 
 
 "Oh, I think it's a trifle romantic," she replied "But 
 that's Czesky. He made me quite cross, the feminine 
 presentation of America, the spoiled woman who has shed 
 responsibilities and is beginning to have a glimpse just 
 a little one of the emptiness of it all." 
 
 I was stirred. 
 
 "Then why do you accept it, if it isn't you?" I demanded. 
 
 "One doesn't refuse Czesky's canvases," she replied. 
 "And what difference does it make? It amused him, and 
 he was fairly subtle about it. Only those who are looking 
 for romance, like you, are able to guess what he meant, 
 and they would think they saw it anyway, even if he had 
 painted me extinct." 
 
 "Extinct!" I repeated. 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "Hugh, you're a silly old goose!" 
 
 "That's why I came here, I think, to be told so," I said. 
 
 Tea was brought in. A sense of at-homeness stole over
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 317 
 
 me, I was more at home here in this room with Nancy, 
 than in any other place in the world ; here, where everything 
 was at once soothing yet stimulating, expressive of her, 
 even the smaller objects that caught my eye, the crystal 
 inkstand tipped with gold, the racks for the table books, 
 her paper-cutter. Nancy's was a discriminating luxury. 
 And her talk! The lightness with which she touched life, 
 the unexplored depths of her, guessed at but never fathomed ! 
 Did she feel a little the need of me as I felt the need of her ? 
 
 "Why, I believe you're incurably romantic, Hugh," she 
 said laughingly, when the men had left the room. "Here 
 you are, what they call a paragon of success, a future senator, 
 Ambassador to England. I hear of those remarkable things 
 you have done even in New York the other day a man was 
 asking me if I knew Mr. Paret, and spoke of you as one of 
 the coming men. I suppose you will be moving there, soon. 
 A practical success ! It always surprises me when I think of 
 it, I find.it difficult to remember what a dreamer you were 
 and here you turn out to be still a dreamer I Have you 
 discovered, too, the emptiness of it all?" she inquired pro- 
 vokingly. "I must say you don't look it" she gave me a 
 critical, quizzical glance " you look quite prosperous and 
 contented, as though you enjoyed your power." 
 
 I laughed uneasily. 
 
 "And then," she continued, "and then one day when your 
 luncheon has disagreed with you you walk into a gallery and 
 see a portrait of of an old friend for whom in youth, when 
 you were a dreamer, you professed a sentimental attachment, 
 and you exclaim that the artist is a discerning man who has 
 discovered the secret that she has guarded so closely. She's 
 sorry that she ever tried to console herself with baubles 
 it's what you've suspected all along. But you'll just run 
 around to see for yourself to be sure of it." And she 
 handed me my tea. " Come now, confess. Where are your 
 wits I hear you don't lack them in court." 
 
 "Well," I said, "if that amuses you" 
 
 "It does amuse me," said Nancy, twining her fingers across
 
 318 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 her knee and regarding me smilingly, with parted lips, "it 
 amuses me a lot it's so characteristic." 
 
 "But it's not true, it's unjust," I protested vigorously, 
 smiling, too, because the attack was so characteristic of her. 
 
 "What then?" she demanded. 
 
 "Well, in the first place, my luncheon didn't disagree with 
 me. It never does." 
 
 She laughed. "But the sentiment come now the 
 sentiment? Do you perceive any hint of emptiness 
 despair ? " 
 
 Our chairs were very close, and she leaned forward a little. 
 
 "Emptiness or no emptiness," I said a little tremulously, 
 "I know that I haven't been so contented, so happy for a 
 long time." 
 
 She sat very still, but turned her gaze on the fire. 
 
 "You really wouldn't want to find that, Hugh," she said 
 in another voice, at which I exclaimed. "No, I'm not 
 being sentimental. But, to be serious, I really shouldn't 
 care to think that of you. I'd like to think of you as a 
 friend a good friend although we don't see very much 
 of one another." 
 
 "But that's why I came, Nancy," I explained. "It 
 wasn't just an impulse that is, I've been thinking of you a 
 great deal, all along. I miss you, I miss the way you look at 
 things your point of view. I can't see any reason why 
 we shouldn't see something of each other now " 
 
 She continued to stare into the fire. 
 
 "No," she said at length, "I suppose there isn't any 
 reason." Her mood seemed suddenly to change as she bent 
 over and extinguished the flame under the kettle. "After 
 all," she added gaily, "we live in a tolerant age, we've 
 reached the years of discretion, and we're both too conven 
 tional to do anything silly even if we wanted to which 
 we don't. We're neither of us likely to quarrel with the 
 world as it is, I think, and we might as well make fun of it 
 together. We'll begin with our friends. What do you think 
 of Mr. Scherer's palace?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 319 
 
 "I hear you're building it for him/' 
 
 "I told him to get Eyre," said Nancy, laughingly, "I 
 was afraid he'd repeat the Gallatin Park monstrosity on 
 a larger scale, and Eyre's the only man in this country 
 who understands the French. It's been rather amusing," 
 she went on, "I've had to fight Hilda, and she's no mean 
 antagonist. How she hates me ! She wanted a monstros 
 ity, of course, a modernized German rock-grotto sort of an 
 affair, I can imagine. She's been so funny when I've met 
 her at dinner. 'I understand you take a great interest 
 in the house, Mrs. Durrett.' Can't you hear her?" 
 
 "Well, you did get ahead of her," I said. 
 
 "I had to. I couldn't let our first citizen build a modern 
 Rhine castle, could I ? I have some public spirit left. And 
 besides, I expect to build on Grant Avenue myself." 
 
 "And leave here?" 
 
 "Oh, it's too grubby, it's in the slums," said Nancy. 
 "But I really owe you a debt of gratitude, Hugh, for the 
 Scherers." 
 
 "I'm told Adolf's lost his head over you." 
 
 "It's not only over me, but over everything. He's so 
 ridiculously proud of being on the board of the Children's 
 Hospital. . . . You ought to hear him talking to old Mrs. 
 Ogilvy, who of course can't get used to him at all, she 
 always has the air of inquiring what he's doing in that 
 galley. She still thinks of him as Mr. Durrett's foreman." 
 
 The time flew. Her presence was like a bracing, tingling 
 atmosphere in which I felt revived and exhilarated, self- 
 restored. For Nancy did not question she took me as I 
 was. We looked out on the world, as it were, from the same 
 window, and I could not help thinking that ours, after all, 
 was a large view. The topics didn't matter our conver 
 sation was fragrant with intimacy; and we were so close 
 to each other it seemed incredible that we ever should be 
 parted again. At last the little clock on the mantel chimed 
 an hour, she started and looked up. 
 
 "Why, it's seven, Hugh!" she exclaimed, rising. "I'd
 
 320 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 no idea it was so late, and I'm dining with the Dickinsons. 
 I've only just time to dress." 
 
 "It's been like a reunion, hasn't it? a reunion after 
 many years," I said. I held her hand unconsciously she 
 seemed to be drawing me to her, I thought she swayed, and a 
 sudden dizziness seized me. Then she drew away abruptly, 
 with a little cry. I couldn't be sure about the cry, 
 whether I heard it or not, a note was struck in the very 
 depths of me. 
 
 "Come in again," she said, "whenever you're not too 
 busy." And a minute later I found myself on the street. 
 
 This was the beginning of a new intimacy with Nancy, 
 resembling the old intimacy yet differing from it. The 
 emotional note of our parting on the occasion I have just 
 related was not again struck, and when I went eagerly to 
 see her again a few days later I was conscious of limitations, 
 not too conscious : the freedom she offered and which I 
 gladly accepted was a large freedom, nor am I quite sure that 
 even I would have wished it larger, though there were 
 naturally moments when I thought so : when I asked my 
 self what I did wish, I found no answer. Though I some 
 times chafed, it would have been absurd of me to object to a 
 certain timidity or caution I began to perceive in her that 
 had been absent in the old Nancy; but the old Nancy had 
 ceased to exist, and here instead was a highly developed, 
 highly specialized creature in whom I delighted; and after 
 taking thought I would not have robbed her of one acquired 
 attribute. As she had truly observed, we were both con 
 ventional ; conventionality was part of the price we had will 
 ingly paid for membership in that rarer world we had both 
 achieved. It was a world, to be sure, in which we were 
 rapidly learning to take the law into our own hands without 
 seeming to defy it, in order that the fear of it might remain 
 in those less fortunately placed and endowed : we had
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 321 
 
 begun with the appropriation of the material property of our 
 fellow-citizens, which we took legally; from this point it 
 was, of course, merely a logical step to take legally, too 
 other gentlemen's human property their wives, in short : 
 the more progressive East had set us our example, but as 
 yet we had been chary to follow it. 
 
 About this time rebellious voices were beginning to make 
 themselves heard in the literary wilderness proclaiming 
 liberty liberty of the sexes. There were Russian novels 
 and French novels, and pioneer English novels preaching 
 liberty with Nietzschean stridency, or taking it for granted. 
 I picked these up on Nancy's table. 
 
 "Reading them?" she said, in answer to my query. "Of 
 course I'm reading them. I want to know what these clever 
 people are thinking, even if I don't always agree with them, 
 and you ought to read them too. It's quite true what 
 foreigners say about our men, that they live in a groove, 
 that they haven't any range of conversation." 
 
 " I'm quite willing to be educated," I replied. " I haven't 
 a doubt that I need it." 
 
 She was leaning back in her chair, her hands behind her 
 head, a posture she often assumed. She looked up at me 
 amusedly. 
 
 "I'll acknowledge that you're more teachable than most 
 of them," she said. "Do you know, Hugh, sometimes you 
 puzzle me greatly. When you are here and we're talking 
 together I can never think of you as you are out in the 
 world, fighting for power and getting it. I suppose it's 
 part of your charm, that there is that side of you, but I never 
 consciously realize it. You're what they call a dual personal- ' 
 ity." 
 
 " That's a pretty hard name ! " I exclaimed. 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "I can't help it you are. Oh, not disagreeably so, 
 quite normally that's the odd thing about you. Some 
 times I believe that you were made for something different, 
 that in spite of your success you have missed your metier."
 
 322 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "What ought I to have been?" 
 
 "How can I tell? A Goethe, perhaps a Goethe 
 smothered by a twentieth-century environment. Your love 
 of adventure isn't dead, it's been merely misdirected, 
 real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying into unknown 
 paths. Perhaps you haven't yet found yourself." 
 
 "How uncanny!" I said, stirred and startled. 
 
 "You have a taste for literature, you know, though you've 
 buried it. Give me Turgeniev. We'll begin with him. ..." 
 
 Her reading and the talks that followed it were exciting, 
 amazingly stimulating. . . . Once Nancy gave me an 
 amusing account of a debate which had taken place in the 
 newly organized woman's discussion club to which she 
 belonged over a rather daring book by an English novelist. 
 Mrs. Dickinson had revolted. 
 
 " No, she wasn't really shocked, not in the way she thought 
 she was," said Nancy, in answer to a query of mine. 
 
 "How was she shocked, then?" 
 
 "As you and I are skocked." 
 
 "But I'm not shocked," I protested. 
 
 " Oh, yes, you are, and so am I not on the moral side, 
 nor is it the moral aspect that troubles Lula Dickinson. She 
 thinks it's the moral aspect, but it's really the revolutionary 
 aspect, the menace to those precious institutions from which 
 we derive our privileges and comforts." 
 
 I considered this, and laughed. 
 
 "What's the use of being a humbug about it," said Nancy. 
 
 "But you're talking like a revolutionary," I said. 
 
 "I may be talking like one, but I'm not one. I once had 
 the makings of one of a good one, a 'proper' one, as 
 the English would say." She sighed. 
 
 "You regret it?" I asked curiously. 
 
 "Of course I regret it !" she cried. "What woman worth 
 her salt doesn't regret it, doesn't want to live, even if she 
 has to suffer for it? And those people the revolution 
 aries, I mean, the rebels they live, they're the only ones 
 who do live. The rest of us degenerate in a painless paraly-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 323 
 
 sis we think of as pleasure. Look at me! I'm incapable 
 of committing a single original act, even though I might 
 conceive one. Well, there was a time when I should have 
 been equal to anything and wouldn't have cared a _a 
 damn." 
 
 I believed her. 
 
 I fell into the habit of dropping in on Nancy at least 
 twice a week on my way from the office, and I met her 
 occasionally at other houses. I did not tell Maude of that 
 first impulsive visit ; but one evening a few weeks later she 
 asked me where I had been, and when I told, her she made no 
 comment. I came presently to the conclusion that this 
 renewed intimacy did not trouble her which was what I 
 wished to believe. Of course I had gone to Nancy for a 
 stimulation I failed to get at home, and it is the more ex 
 traordinary, therefore, that I did not become more discon 
 tented and restless : I suppose this was because I had grown 
 to regard marriage as most of the world regarded it, as 
 something inevitable and humdrum, as a kind of habit it is 
 useless to try to shake off. But life is so full of complexi 
 ties and anomalies that I still had a real affection for Maude, 
 and I liked her the more because she didn't expect too much 
 of me, and because she didn't complain of my friendship with 
 Nancy although I should vehemently have denied there 
 was anything to complain of. I respected Maude. If she 
 was not a squaw, she performed religiously the traditional 
 squaw duties, and made me comfortable : and the fact that 
 we lived separate mental existences did not trouble me be 
 cause I never thought of hers or even that she had one. 
 She had the children, and they seemed to suffice. She never 
 renewed her appeal for my confidence, and I forgot that she 
 had made it. 
 
 Nevertheless I always felt a tug at my heartstrings when 
 June came around and it was time for her and the children 
 to go to Mattapoisett for the summer ; when I accompanied
 
 324 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 them, on the evening of their departure, to the smoky, noisy 
 station and saw deposited in the sleeping-car their luggage 
 and shawls and bundles. They always took the evening 
 train to Boston; it was the best. Tom and Susan were 
 invariably there with candy and toys to see them off if 
 Susan and her children had not already gone and at such 
 moments my heart warmed to Tom. And I was astonished 
 as I clung to Matthew and Moreton and little Biddy at the 
 affection that welled up within me, saddened when I kissed 
 Maude good-bye. She too was sad, and always seemed to 
 feel compunctions for deserting me. 
 
 "I feel so selfish in leaving you all alone I" she would say. 
 "If it weren't for the children they need the sea air. But 
 I know you don't miss me as I miss you. A man doesn't, 
 I suppose. . . . Please don't work so hard, and promise me 
 you'll come on and stay a long time. You can if you want 
 to. We shan't starve." She smiled. "That nice room, 
 which is yours, at the southeast corner, is always waiting 
 for you. And you do like the sea, and seeing the sail-boats 
 in the morning." 
 
 I felt an emptiness when the train pulled out. I did love 
 my family, after all I I would go back to the deserted house, 
 and I could not bear to look in at the nursery door, at the 
 little beds with covers flung over them. Why couldn't I 
 appreciate these joys when I had them? 
 
 One evening, as we went home in an open street-car to 
 gether, after such a departure, Tom blurted out : 
 
 "Hugh, I believe I care for your family as much as for 
 ' my own. I often wonder if you realize how wonderful these 
 children are ! My boys are just plain ruffians although 
 I think they're pretty decent ruffians, but Matthew has a 
 mind he's thoughtful and an imagination. He'll make 
 a name for himself some day if he's steered properly and 
 allowed to develop naturally. Moreton's more like my 
 boys. And as for Chickabiddy! " words failed him. 
 
 I put my hand on his knee. I actually loved him again 
 as I had loved and yearned for him as a child, he was so
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 325 
 
 human, so dependable. And why couldn't this feeling last ? 
 He disapproved foolishly, I thought of my professional 
 career, and this was only one of his limitations. But I 
 knew that he was loyal. Why hadn't I been able to breathe 
 and be reasonably happy in that atmosphere of friendship 
 and love in which I had been placed or rather in which I 
 had placed myself? . . . Before the summer was a day or 
 two older I had grown accustomed to being alone, and en 
 joyed the liberty; and when Maude and the children re 
 turned in the autumn, similarly, it took me some days to 
 get used to the restrictions imposed by a household. I run 
 the risk of shocking those who read this by declaring that if 
 my family had been taken permanently out of my life, I 
 should not long have missed them. But on the whole, in 
 those years my marriage relation might be called a negative 
 one. There were moments, as I have described, when I 
 warmed to Maude, moments when I felt something akin to 
 a violent antagonism aroused by little mannerisms and tricks 
 she had. The fact that we got along as well as we did was 
 probably due to the orthodox teaching with which we had 
 been inoculated, to the effect that matrimony was a moral 
 trial, a shaking-down process. But moral trials were ceasing 
 to appeal to people, and more and more of them were refusing 
 to be shaken down. We didn't cut the Gordian knot, but 
 we managed to loosen it considerably. 
 
 I have spoken of a new species of titans who inhabited 
 the giant buildings in Wall Street, New York, and fought 
 among themselves for possession of the United States of 
 America. It is interesting to note that in these struggles 
 a certain chivalry was observed among the combatants, no 
 matter how bitter the rivalry : for instance, it was deemed 
 very bad form for one of the groups of combatants to 
 take the public into their confidence ; cities were upset and 
 stirred to the core by these conflicts, and the citizens never
 
 326 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 knew who was doing the fighting, but imagined that some 
 burning issue was at stake that concerned them. As a 
 matter of fact the issue always did concern them, but not 
 in the way they supposed. 
 
 Gradually, out of the chaotic melee in which these titans 
 were engaged had emerged one group more powerful than 
 the rest and more respectable, whose leader was the Person 
 ality to whom I have before referred. He and his group had 
 managed to gain control of certain conservative fortresses 
 in various cities such as the Corn National Bank and the 
 Ashuela Telephone Company to mention two of many : 
 Adolf Scherer was his ally, and the Boyne Iron Works, 
 Limited, was soon to be merged by him into a greater cor 
 poration still. Leonard Dickinson might be called his local 
 governor-general. We manned the parapets and kept our 
 ears constantly to the ground to listen for the rumble of 
 attacks; but sometimes they burst upon us fiercely and 
 suddenly, without warning. Such was the assault on the 
 Ashuela, which for years had exercised an apparently secure 
 monopoly of the city's telephone service, which had been 
 able to ignore with complacency the shrillest protests of 
 unreasonable subscribers. Through the Pilot it was an 
 nounced to the public that certain benevolent "Eastern 
 capitalists" were ready to rescue them from their thraldom 
 if the city would grant them a franchise. Mr. Lawler, the 
 disinterestedness of whose newspaper could not be doubted, 
 fanned the flame day by day, sent his reporters about the 
 city gathering instances of the haughty neglect of the 
 Ashuela, proclaiming its instruments antiquated compared 
 with those used in more progressive cities, as compared with 
 the very latest inventions which the Automatic Company 
 was ready to install provided they could get their fran 
 chise. And the prices ! These, too, would fall under com 
 petition. It was a clever campaign. If the city would 
 give them a franchise, that Automatic Company so well 
 named ! would provide automatic instruments. Each 
 tubscriber, by means of a numerical disk, could call up any
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 327 
 
 other subscriber; there would be no central operator, no 
 listening, no tapping of wires; the number of calls would 
 be unlimited. As a proof of the confidence of these Eastern 
 gentlemen in our city, they were willing to spend five mil 
 lions, and present more than six hundred telephones free to 
 the city departments ! What was fairer, more generous 
 than this ! There could be no doubt that popular enthusiasm 
 was enlisted in behalf of the "Eastern Capitalists," who were 
 made to appear in the light of Crusaders ready to rescue a 
 groaning people from the thrall of monopoly. The excitement 
 approached that of a presidential election, and became the 
 dominant topic at quick-lunch counters and in street-cars. 
 Cheap and efficient service! Down with the Bastille of 
 monopoly ! 
 
 As counsel for the Ashuela, Mr. Ogilvy sent for me, and 
 by certain secret conduits of information at my disposal I 
 was not long in discovering the disquieting fact that a Mr. 
 Orthwein, who was described as a gentleman with fat fingers 
 and a plausible manner, had been in town for a week and had 
 been twice seen entering and emerging from Monahan's 
 saloon. In short, Mr. Jason had already been "seen." 
 Nevertheless I went to him myself, to find him for the first 
 time in my experience absolutely non-committal. 
 
 " What's the Ashuela willing to do ? " he demanded. 
 
 I mentioned a sum, and he shook his head. I mentioned 
 another, and still he shook his head. 
 
 "Come 'round again," he said. . . . 
 
 I was compelled to report this alarming situation to 
 Ogilvy and Dickinson and a few chosen members of a pan 
 icky board of directors. 
 
 " It's that damned Grannis crowd," said Dickinson, men 
 tioning an aggressive gentleman who had migrated from 
 Chicago to Wall Street some five years before in a pink 
 collar. 
 
 "But what's to be done?" demanded Ogilvy, playing 
 nervously with a gold pencil on the polished table. He was 
 one of those Americans who in a commercial atmosphere
 
 328 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 become prematurely white, and to-day his boyish, smooth- 
 shaven face was almost as devoid of colour as his hair. Even 
 Leonard Dickinson showed anxiety, which was unusual for 
 him. 
 
 "You've got .to fix it, Hugh," he said. 
 
 I did not see my way, but I had long ago learned to assume 
 the unruffled air and judicial manner of speaking that in 
 spires the layman with almost superstitious confidence in 
 the lawyer. . . . 
 
 "We'll find a way out," I said. 
 
 Mr. Jason, of course, held the key to the situation, and 
 just how I was to get around him was problematical. In 
 the meantime there was the public: to permit the other 
 fellow to capture that was to be lacking in ordinary pru 
 dence; if its votes counted for nothing, its savings were 
 desirable; and it was fast getting into a state of outrage 
 against monopoly. The chivalry of finance did not permit 
 of a revelation that Mr. Grannis and his buccaneers were 
 behind the Automatic, but it was possible to direct and 
 strengthen the backfire which the Era and other conservative 
 newspapers had already begun. Mr. Tallant for delicate 
 reasons being persona non grata at the Boyne Club, despite 
 the fact that he had so many friends there, we met for lunch 
 in a private room at the new hotel, and as we sipped our 
 coffee and smoked our cigars we planned a series of editorials 
 and articles that duly appeared. They made a strong appeal 
 to the loyalty of our citizens to stand by the home company 
 and home capital that had taken generous risks to give them 
 service at a time when the future of the telephone business 
 was by no means assured ; they belittled the charges made 
 by irresponsible and interested "parties," and finally pointed 
 out, not without effect, that one logical consequence of hav 
 ing two telephone companies would be to compel subscribers 
 in self-defence to install two telephones instead of one. And 
 where was the saving in that ? 
 
 "Say, Paret," said Judah B. when we had finished our 
 labours, "if you ever get sick of the law, I'll give you a job
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 329 
 
 on the Era's staff. This is fine, the way you put it. It'll 
 do a lot of good, but how in hell are you going to handle 
 Judd? . . ." 
 
 For three days the inspiration was withheld. And then, as 
 I was strolling down Boyne Street after lunch gazing into 
 the store windows it came suddenly, without warning. Like 
 most inspirations worth anything, it was very simple. Within 
 half an hour I had reached Monahan's saloon and found Mr. 
 Jason out of bed, but still in his bedroom, seated meditatively 
 at the window that looked over the alley. 
 
 " You know the crowd in New York behind this Automatic 
 company as well as I do, Jason," I said. "Why do you 
 want to deal with them when we've always been straight 
 with you, when we're ready to meet them and go one better ? 
 Name your price." 
 
 "Suppose I do what then," he replied. "This thing's 
 gone pretty far. Under that damned new charter the fran 
 chise has got to be bid for hasn't it ? And the people want 
 this company. There'll be a howl from one end of this town 
 to the other if we throw 'em down." 
 
 "We'll look out for the public," I assured him, smiling. 
 
 "Well," he said, with one of his glances that were like 
 flashes, "what you got up your sleeve?" 
 
 "Suppose another telephone company steps in, and bids 
 a little higher for the franchise. That relieves your aldermen 
 of all responsibility, doesn't it?" 
 
 "Another telephone company !" he repeated. 
 
 I had already named it, on my walk. 
 
 "The Interurban," I said. 
 
 "A dummy company?" said Mr. Jason. 
 
 " Lively enough to bid something over a hundred thousand 
 to the city for its franchise," I replied. 
 
 Judd Jason, with a queer look, got up and went to a desk 
 in a dark corner, and after rummaging for a few moments in 
 one of the pigeon-holes, drew forth a glass cylinder, which 
 he held out as he approached me. 
 
 "You get it, Mr. Paret," he said.
 
 330 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "What is it?" I asked, "a bomb !" 
 
 "That," he announced, as he twisted the tube about in 
 his long fingers, holding it up to the light, "is the finest 
 brand of cigars ever made in Cuba. A gentleman who had 
 every reason to be grateful to me I won't say who he was 
 gave me that once. Well, the Lord made me so's I can't 
 appreciate any better tobacco than those five-cent 'Bob 
 tails' Monahan's got downstairs, and I saved it. I saved 
 it for the man who would put something over me some day, 
 and you get it." 
 
 "Thank you," I said, unconsciously falling in with the 
 semi-ceremony of his manner. "I do not flatter myself 
 that the solution I have suggested did not also occur to you." 
 
 "You'll smoke it?" he asked. 
 
 "Surely." 
 
 " Now ? Here with me ? " 
 
 "Certainly," I agreed, a little puzzled. As I broke the 
 seal, pulled out the cork and unwrapped the cigar from its 
 gold foil he took a stick and rapped loudly on the floor. 
 After a brief interval footsteps were heard on the stairs and 
 Mike Monahan, white aproned and scarlet faced, appeared 
 at the door. 
 
 "Bobtails," said Mr. Jason, laconically. 
 
 "It's them I thought ye'd be wanting," said the saloon 
 keeper, holding out a handful. Judd Jason lighted one, and 
 began smoking reflectively. 
 
 I gazed about the mean room, with its litter of newspapers 
 and reports, its shabby furniture, and these seemed to have 
 become incongruous, out of keeping with the thoughtful 
 figure in the chair facing me. 
 
 "You had a college education, Mr. Paret," he remarked 
 at length. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Life's a queer thing. Now if I'd had a college education, 
 like you, and you'd been thrown on the world, like me, maybe 
 I'd be livin' up there on Grant Avenue and you'd be down 
 here over the saloon."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 331 
 
 "Maybe," I said, wondering uneasily whether he meant 
 to imply a similarity in our gifts. But his manner remained 
 impassive, speculative. 
 
 "Ever read Carlyle's 'French Revolution'?" he asked 
 suddenly. 
 
 "Why, yes, part of it, a good while ago." 
 
 "When you was in college?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I've got a little library here," he said, getting up and 
 raising the shades and opening the glass doors of a bookcase 
 which had escaped my attention. He took down a volume 
 of Carlyle, bound in half calf. 
 
 "Wouldn't think I cared for such things, would you?" 
 he demanded as he handed it to me. 
 
 "Well, you never can tell what a man's real tastes are 
 until you know him," I observed, to conceal my surprise. 
 
 "That's so," he agreed. "I like books some books. 
 If I'd had an education, I'd have liked more of 'em, known 
 more about 'em. Now I can read this one over and over. 
 That feller Carlyle was a genius, he could look right into the 
 bowels of the volcano, and he was on to how men and women 
 feel down there, how they hate, how they square 'emselves 
 when they get a chance." 
 
 He had managed to bring before me vividly that terrible, 
 volcanic flow on Versailles of the Paris mob. He put back 
 the book and resumed his seat. 
 
 "And I know how these people feel down here, below the 
 crust," he went on, waving his cigar out of the window, 
 as though to indicate the whole of that mean district. 
 "They hate, and their hate is molten hell. I've been 
 through it." 
 
 "But you've got on top," I suggested. 
 
 " Sure, I've got on top. Do you know why ? it's because 
 I hated that's why. A man's feelings, if they're strong 
 enough, have a lot to do with what he becomes." 
 
 "But he has to have ability, too," I objected. 
 
 " Sure, he has to have ability, but his feeling is the driving
 
 332 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 power ; if he feels strong enough, he can make a little ability 
 go a long way." 
 
 I was struck by the force of this remark. I scarcely rec 
 ognized Judd Jason. The man, as he revealed himself, had 
 become at once more sinister and more fascinating. 
 
 "I can guess how some of those Jacobins felt when they 
 had the aristocrats in the dock. They'd got on top the 
 Jacobins, I mean. It's human nature to want to get on top 
 ain't it ?" He looked at me and smiled, but he did not 
 seem to expect a reply. " Well, what you call society, rich, 
 respectable society like you belong to would have made a 
 bum and a criminal out of me if I hadn't been too smart for 
 'em, and it's a kind of satisfaction to have 'em coming down 
 here to Monahan's for things they can't have without my 
 leave. I've got a half Nelson on 'em. I wouldn't live up on 
 Grant Avenue if you gave me Scherer's new house." 
 
 I was silent. 
 
 "Instead of starting my career in college, I started in jail," 
 he went on, apparently ignoring any effect he may have pro 
 duced. So subtly, so dispassionately indeed was he delivering 
 himself of these remarks that it was impossible to tell whether 
 he meant their application to be personal, to me, or general, 
 to my associates. "I went to jail when I was fourteen be 
 cause I wanted a knife to make kite sticks, and I stole a razor 
 from a barber. I was bitter when they steered me into a 
 lockup in Hickory Street. It was full of bugs and crooks, 
 and they put me in the same cell with an old-tuner named 
 'Red' Waters, who was one of the slickest safe-blowers 
 around in those days. Red took a shine to me, found out I 
 had a head-piece, and said their gang could use a clever boy. ' 
 If I'd go in with him, I could make all kinds of money. I 
 guess I might have joined the gang if Red hadn't kept talk 
 ing about how the boss of his district named Gallagher would 
 come down and get him out, and sure enough Gallagher 
 did come down and get him out. I thought I'd rather be 
 Gallagher than Red Red had to serve time once in a while. 
 Soon as I got out I went down to Gallagher's saloon, and
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 333 
 
 there was Red leaning over the bar. ' Here's a smart kid ! ' 
 he says, ' He and me were room-mates over in Hickory Street.' 
 He got to gassing me, and telling me I'd better come along 
 with him, when Gallagher came in. * What is it ye'd like to 
 be, my son?' says he. A politician, I told him. I was 
 through going to jail. Gallagher had a laugh you could hear 
 all over the place. He took me on as a kind of handy boy 
 around the establishment, and by and by I began to run er 
 rands and find out things for him. I was boss of that ward my 
 self when I was twenty-six. . . . How'd you like that cigar ? " 
 
 I praised it. 
 
 "It ought to have been a good one," he declared. "Well, 
 I don't want to keep you here all afternoon telling you my 
 life story." 
 
 I assured him I had been deeply interested. 
 
 "Pretty slick idea of yours, that dummy company, Mr. 
 Paret. Go ahead and organize it." He rose, which was 
 contrary to his custom on the departure of a visitor. " Drop 
 in again. We'll talk about the books." . . . 
 
 I walked slowly back reflecting on this conversation, upon 
 the motives impelling Mr. Jason to become thus confiden 
 tial ; nor was it the most comforting thought in the world 
 that the artist in me had appealed to the artist in him, 
 that he had hailed me as a brother. But for the grace of 
 God I might have been Mr. Jason and he Mr. Paret : un 
 doubtedly that was what he had meant to imply. And I 
 was forced to admit that he had succeeded deliberately 
 or no in making the respectable Mr. Paret just a trifle 
 uncomfortable. 
 
 In the marble vestibule of the Corn National Bank I ran 
 into Tallant, holding his brown straw hat in his hand and 
 looking a little more moth-eaten than usual. 
 
 "Hello, Paret," he said, "how is that telephone business 
 getting along?" 
 
 "Is Dickinson in?" I asked. 
 
 Tallant nodded. 
 
 We went through the cool bank, with its shining brass and
 
 334 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 red mahogany, its tiled floor, its busy tellers attending to 
 files of clients, to the president's sanctum in the rear. Leon 
 ard Dickinson, very spruce and dignified in a black cutaway 
 coat, was dictating rapidly to a woman stenographer, whom 
 he dismissed when he saw us. The door was shut. 
 
 " I was just asking Paret about the telephone affair," said 
 Mr. Tallant. 
 
 "Well, have you found a way out?" Leonard Dickinson 
 looked questioningly at me. 
 
 " It's all right," I answered. "I've seen Jason." 
 
 "All right !" they both ejaculated at once. 
 
 "We win," I said. 
 
 They stood gazing at me. Even Dickinson, who was 
 rarely ruffled, seemed excited. 
 
 "Do you mean to say you've fixed it?" he demanded. 
 
 I nodded. They stared at me in amazement. 
 
 " How the deuce did you manage it ? " 
 
 "We organize the Interurban Telephone Company, and 
 bid for the franchise that's all." 
 
 " A dummy company ! " cried Tallant. " Why, it's simple 
 as ABC!" 
 
 Dickinson smiled. He was tremendously relieved, and 
 showed it. 
 
 "That's true about all great ideas, Tallant," he said. 
 " They're simple, only it takes a clever man to think of them." 
 
 " And Jason agrees ? " Tallant demanded. 
 
 I nodded again. "We'll have to outbid the Automatic 
 people. I haven't seen Bitter yet about the about the 
 fee." 
 
 "That's all right," said Leonard Dickinson, quickly. "I 
 take off my hat to you. You've saved us. You can ask 
 any fee you like," he added genially. "Let's go over to 
 to the Ashuela and get some lunch." He had been about to 
 say the Club, but he remembered Mr. Tallant's presence in 
 time. "Nothing's worrying you, Hugh?" he added, as we 
 went out, followed by the glances of his employees. 
 
 "Nothing," I said. . . .
 
 XIX 
 
 MAKING money in those days was so ridiculously easy! 
 The trouble was to know how to spend it. One evening 
 when I got home I told Maude I had a surprise for her. 
 
 "A surprise?" she asked, looking up from a little pink 
 smock she was making for Chickabiddy. 
 
 "I've bought that lot on Grant Avenue, next to the 
 OgilvysV 
 
 She dropped her sewing, and stared at me. 
 
 "Aren't you pleased?" I asked. "At last we are going 
 to have a house of our very own. What's the matter?" 
 
 " I can't bear the thought of leaving here. I'm so used to 
 it. I've grown to love it. It's part of me." 
 
 "But," I exclaimed, a little exasperated, "you didn't 
 expect to live here always, did you? The house has been 
 too small for us for years. I thought you'd be delighted." 
 (This was not strictly true, for I had rather expected some 
 such action on her part.) "Most women would. Of course, 
 if it's going to make such a difference to you as that, I'll 
 sell the lot. That won't be difficult." 
 
 I got up, and started to go into my study. She half 
 rose, and her sewing fell to the floor. 
 
 "Oh, why are we always having misunderstandings? Do 
 sit down a minute, Hugh. Don't think I'm not apprecia 
 tive," she pleaded. "It was such a shock." 
 
 I sat down rather reluctantly. 
 
 "I can't express what I think," she continued, rather 
 breathlessly, " but sometimes I'm actually frightened, 
 we're going through life so fast in these days, and it doesn't 
 seem as if we were getting the real things out of it. I'm 
 
 335
 
 336 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 afraid of your success, and of all the money you're 
 making." 
 
 I smiled. 
 
 "I'm not so rich yet, as riches go in these days, that you 
 need be alarmed," I said. 
 
 She looked at me helplessly a moment. 
 
 "I feel that it isn't right, somehow, that you'll pay 
 for it, that we'll pay for it. Goodness knows, we have 
 everything we want, and more too. This house this 
 house is real, and I'm afraid that won't be a home, won't be 
 real. That we'll be overwhelmed with with things ! " . . . 
 
 She was interrupted by the entrance of the children. But 
 after dinner, when she had seen them to bed, as was her 
 custom, she came downstairs into my study and said 
 quietly : 
 
 "I was wrong, Hugh. If you want to build a house, if 
 you feel that you'd be happier, I have no right to object. 
 Of course my sentiment for this house is natural, the children 
 were born here, but I've realized we couldn't live here al 
 ways." 
 
 "I'm glad you look at it that way," I replied. "Why, 
 we're already getting cramped, Maude, and now you're going 
 to have a governess I don't know where you'd put her." 
 
 "Not too large a house," she pleaded. "I know you 
 think I'm silly, but this extravagance we see everywhere 
 does make me uneasy. Perhaps it's because I'm provincial, 
 and always shall be." 
 
 "Well, we must have a house large enough to be comfort 
 able in," I said. "There's no reason why we shouldn't be 
 comfortable." I thought it as well not to confess my ambi 
 tions, and I was greatly relieved that she did not reproach 
 me for buying the lot without consulting her. Indeed, I 
 was grateful for this unanticipated acquiescence, I felt 
 nearer to her than I had for a long time. I drew up another 
 chair to my desk. 
 
 "Sit down and we'll make a few sketches, just for fun," 
 I urged.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 337 
 
 "Hugh," she said presently, as we were blocking out pro 
 spective rooms, "do you remember all those drawings and 
 plans we made in England, on our wedding trip, and how we 
 knew just what we wanted, and changed our minds every 
 few days? And now we're ready to build, and haven't 
 any ideas at all !" 
 
 " Yes," I answered but I did not look at her. 
 
 "I have the book still it's in the attic somewhere, 
 packed away in a box. I suppose those plans would seem 
 ridiculous now." . . . 
 
 It was quite true, now that we were ready to build the 
 home that had been deferred so long, now that I had the money 
 to spend without stint on its construction, the irony of life 
 had deprived me of those strong desires and predilections I 
 had known on my wedding trip. What a joy it would have 
 been to build then ! But now I found myself wholly lacking 
 in definite ideas as to style and construction. Secretly, I 
 looked forward to certain luxuries, such as a bedroom and 
 dressing-room and warm tiled bathroom all to myself 
 bachelor privacies for which I had longed. Two mornings 
 later at the breakfast table Maude asked me if I had thought 
 of an architect. 
 
 "Why, Archie Lammerton, I suppose. Who else is there ? 
 Have you anyone else in mind?" 
 
 " N-no," said Maude. " But I heard of such a clever man 
 in Boston, who doesn't charge Mr. Lammerton's prices, and 
 who designs such beautiful private houses." 
 
 " But we can afford to pay Lammerton's prices," I replied, 
 smiling. "And why shouldn't we have the best?" 
 
 "Are you sure he is the best, Hugh?" 
 
 "Everybody has him," I said. 
 
 Maude smiled in return. 
 
 "I suppose that's a good reason," she answered. 
 
 "Of course it's a good reason," I assured her. "These 
 people the people we know wouldn't have had Lammer 
 ton unless he was satisfactory. What's the matter with 
 his houses?"
 
 338 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Well," said Maude, "they're not very original. I 
 don't say they're not good, in a way, but they lack a certain 
 imagination. It's difficult for me to express what I mean, 
 'machine made' isn't precisely the idea, but there should 
 be a certain irregularity in art shouldn't there ? I saw a 
 reproduction in one of the architectural journals of a house 
 in Boston by a man named Frey, that seemed to me to have 
 great charm." 
 
 Here was Lucia, unmistakably. 
 
 "That's all very well," I said impatiently, "but when one 
 has to live in a house, one wants something more than artistic 
 irregularity. Lammerton knows how to build for everyday 
 existence ; he's a practical man, as well as a man of taste, 
 he may not be a Christopher Wrenn, but he understands 
 conveniences and comforts. His chimneys don't smoke, his 
 windows are tight, he knows what systems of heating are 
 the best, and whom to go to : he knows what good plumbing 
 is. I'm rather surprised you don't appreciate that, Maude, 
 you're so particular as to what kind of rooms the children 
 shall have, and you want a schoolroom-nursery with all the 
 latest devices, with sun and ventilation. The Berringers 
 wouldn't have had him, the Hollisters and Dickinsons 
 wouldn't have had him if his work lacked taste." 
 
 "And Nancy wouldn't have had him," added Maude, 
 and she smiled once more. 
 
 "Well, I haven't consulted Nancy, or anyone else," I 
 replied a little tartly, perhaps. "You don't seem to 
 realize that some fashions may have a basis of reason. They 
 are not all silly, as Lucia seems to think. If Lammerton 
 builds satisfactory houses, he ought to be forgiven for being 
 the fashion, he ought to have a chance." I got up to leave. 
 "Let's see what kind of a plan he'll draw up, at any rate." 
 
 Her glance was almost indulgent. 
 
 "Of course, Hugh. I want you to be satisfied, to be 
 pleased," she said. 
 
 "And you?" I questioned, "you are to live in the house 
 more than I."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 339 
 
 "Oh, I'm sure it will turn out all right," she replied. 
 " Now you'd better run along, I know you're late." 
 
 "I am late," I admitted, rather lamely. "If you don't 
 care for Lammerton's drawings, we'll get another architect." 
 
 Several years before Mr. Lammerton had arrived among 
 us with a Beaux Arts moustache and letters of introduction 
 to Mrs. Durrett and others. We found him the most adap 
 table, the most accommodating of young men, always ready 
 to donate his talents and his services to private theatricals, 
 tableaux, and fancy-dress balls, to take a place at a table 
 at the last moment. One of his most appealing attributes 
 was his "belief" in our city, a form of patriotism that 
 culminated, in later years, in "million population" clubs. 
 I have often heard him declare, when the ladies had left the 
 dining-room, that there was positively no limit to our future 
 growth; and, incidentally, to our future wealth. Such 
 sentiments as these could not fail to add to any man's popular 
 ity, and his success was a foregone conclusion. Almost be 
 fore we knew it he was building the new Union Station of 
 which he had foreseen the need, to take care of the millions 
 to which our population was to be swelled; building the 
 new Post Office that the unceasing efforts of Theodore 
 Watling finally procured for us: building, indeed, Nancy's 
 new house, the largest of our private mansions save Mr. 
 Scherer's, a commission that had immediately brought about 
 others from the Dickinsons and the Berringers. . . . That 
 very day I called on him in his offices at the top of one of 
 our new buildings, where many young draftsmen were 
 bending over their boards. I was ushered into his private 
 studio. 
 
 "I suppose you want something handsome, Hugh," he 
 said, looking at me over his cigarette, "something commen 
 surate with these fees I hear you are getting." 
 
 "Well, I want to be comfortable," I admitted. 
 
 We lunched at the Club together, where we talked over the 
 requirements.
 
 340 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 When he came to dinner the next week and spread out his 
 sketch on the living-room table Maude drew in her breath. 
 
 "Why, Hugh," she exclaimed in dismay, "it's as big as 
 as big as the White House !" 
 
 "Not quite," I answered, laughing with Archie. "We 
 may as well take our ease in our old age." 
 
 "Take our ease!" echoed Maude. "We'll rattle 'round 
 in it. I'll never get used to it." 
 
 "After a month, Mrs. Paret, I'll wager you'll be wondering 
 how you ever got along without it," said Archie. 
 
 It was not as big as the White House, yet it could not be 
 called small. I had seen to that. The long facade was 
 imposing, dignified, with a touch of conventionality and 
 solidity in keeping with my standing in the city. It was 
 Georgian, of plum-coloured brick with marble trimmings 
 and marble wedges over the ample windows; some years 
 later I saw the house by Ferguson, of New York, from which 
 Archie had cribbed it. At one end, off the dining-room, 
 was a semicircular conservatory. There was a small portico, 
 with marble pillars, and in the ample, swift-sloping roof many 
 dormers; servants' rooms, Archie explained. The look of 
 anxiety on Maude's face deepened as he went over the floor 
 plans, the reception-room, dining-room to seat thirty, the 
 servants' hall, and upstairs Maude's room, boudoir and bath 
 and dress closet, my "apartments" adjoining on one side 
 and the children's on the other, and the guest-rooms with 
 baths. . . . 
 
 Maude surrendered, as one who gives way to the inevitable. 
 When the actual building began we both of us experienced, I 
 think, a certain mild excitement, and walked out there, 
 sometimes with the children, in the spring evenings and on 
 Sunday afternoons. "Excitement" is, perhaps, too strong 
 a word for my feelings : there was a pleasurable anticipation 
 on my part, a looking forward to a more decorous, a more 
 luxurious existence; a certain impatience at the delays 
 inevitable in building. But a new legal-commercial enter 
 prise of magnitude began to absorb me at this time, and some-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 341 
 
 how the building of this home the first that we possessed 
 was not the event it should have been; there were mo 
 ments when I felt cheated, when I wondered what had become 
 of that capacity for enjoyment which in my youth had been 
 so keen. I remember indeed, one grey evening when I went 
 there alone, after the workmen had departed, and stood in 
 the litter of mortar and bricks and boards gazing at the 
 completed front of the house. It was even larger than I 
 had imagined it from the plans ; in the summer twilight there 
 was an air about it, if not precisely menacing, at least 
 portentous, with its gaping windows and towering roof. I 
 was a little tired from a hard day ; I had the odd feeling of 
 having raised up something with which momentarily at 
 least I doubted my ability to cope : something huge, 
 impersonal; something that ought to have represented a 
 fireside, a sanctuary, and yet was the embodiment of an 
 element quite alien to the home, a restless element with which 
 our American atmosphere had, by invisible degrees, become 
 charged. As I stared at it, the odd fancy seized me that the 
 building somehow typified my own career. ... I had 
 gained something, in truth, but had I not also missed some 
 thing? something a different home would have embodied? 
 
 Maude and the children had gone to the seaside. 
 
 With a vague uneasiness I turned away from the contem 
 plation of those walls. The companion mansions were closed, 
 their blinds tightly drawn ; the neighbourhood was as quiet 
 as the country, save for a slight but persistent noise that 
 impressed itself on my consciousness. I walked around the 
 house to spy, in the back yard, a young girl rather stealthily 
 gathering laths and fragments of joists and flooring, and 
 loading them into a child's express-wagon. She started when 
 she saw me. She was little more than a child, and the loose 
 calico dress she wore seemed to emphasize her thinness. She 
 stood stock-still, staring at me with frightened yet defiant 
 eyes. I, too, felt a strange timidity in her presence. 
 
 "Why do you stop?" I asked at length. 
 
 "Say, is this your house?" she demanded.
 
 342 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I acknowledged it. A hint of awe widened her eyes. 
 Then she glanced at the half-filled wagon. 
 
 "This stuff ain't no use to you, is it?" 
 
 "No, I'm glad to have you take it." 
 
 She shifted to the other foot, but did not continue her 
 gathering. An impulse seized me, I put down my walking- 
 stick and began picking up pieces of wood, flinging them into 
 the wagon. I looked at her again, rather furtively ; she had 
 not moved. Her attitude puzzled me, for it was one neither 
 of surprise nor of protest. The spectacle of the " millionaire " 
 owner of the house engaged in this menial occupation 
 gave her no thrills. I finished the loading. 
 
 " There 1" I said, and drew a dollar bill out of my pocket 
 and gave it to her. Even then she did not thank me, but 
 took up the wagon tongue and went off, leaving on me a 
 disheartening impression of numbness, of life crushed out. 
 I glanced up once more at the mansion I had built for myself 
 looming in the dusk, and walked hurriedly away. . . . 
 
 One afternoon some three weeks after we had moved into 
 the new house, I came out of the Club, where I had been 
 lunching in conference with Scherer and two capitalists 
 from New York. It was after four o'clock, the day was 
 fading, the street lamps were beginning to cast sickly streaks 
 of jade-coloured light across the slush of the pavements. 
 It was the sight of this slush (which for a brief half hour that 
 morning had been pure snow, and had sent Matthew and 
 Moreton and Biddy into ecstasies at the notion of a "real 
 Christmas"), that brought to my mind the imminence of 
 the festival, and the fact that I had as yet bought no pres 
 ents. Such was the predicament in which I usually found 
 myself on Christmas eve ; and it was not without a certain 
 sense of annoyance at the task thus abruptly confronting 
 me that I got into my automobile and directed the chauffeur 
 to the shopping district. The crowds surged along the wet
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 343 
 
 sidewalks and overflowed into the street, and over the heads 
 of the people I stared at the blazing shop-windows decked 
 out in Christmas greens. My chauffeur, a bristly-haired 
 Parisian, blew his horn insolently, men and women jostled 
 each other to get out of the way, their holiday mood giving 
 place to resentment as they stared into the windows of the 
 limousine. With the American inability to sit still I shifted 
 from one corner of the seat to another, impatient at the slow 
 progress of the machine : and I felt a certain contempt for 
 human beings, that they should make all this fuss, burden 
 themselves with all these senseless purchases, for a tradition. 
 The automobile stopped, and I fought my way across the 
 sidewalk into the store of that tune-honoured firm, Elgin, 
 Yates and Garner, pausing uncertainly before the very 
 counter where, some ten years before, I had bought an en 
 gagement ring. Young Mr. Garner himself spied me, and 
 handing over a customer to a tired clerk, hurried forward to 
 greet me, his manner implying that my entrance was in some 
 sort an event. I had become used to this aroma of defer 
 ence. 
 
 " What can I show you, Mr. Paret ? " he asked. 
 
 "I don't know I'm looking around," I said, vaguely, 
 bewildered by the glittering baubles by which I was con 
 fronted. What did Maude want ? While I was gazing into 
 the case, Mr. Garner opened a safe behind him, laying before 
 me a large sapphire set with diamonds in a platinum brooch ; 
 a beautiful stone, in the depths of it gleaming a fire like a 
 star in an arctic sky. I had not given Maude anything of 
 value of late. Decidedly, this was of value; Mr. Garner 
 named the price glibly ; if Mrs. Paret didn't care for it, it 
 might be brought back or exchanged. I took it, with a sigh 
 of relief. Leaving the store, I paused on the edge of the rush 
 ing stream of humanity, with the problem of the children's 
 gifts still to be solved. I thought of my own childhood, 
 when at Christmastide I had walked with my mother up and 
 down this very street, so changed and modernized now ; re 
 calling that I had had definite desires, desperate ones ; but
 
 344 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 my imagination failed me when I tried to summon up the 
 emotions connected with them. I had no desires now : I 
 could buy anything in reason in the whole street. What 
 did Matthew and Moreton want ? and little Biddy ? Maude 
 had not "spoiled" them; but they didn't seem to have any 
 definite wants. The children made me think, with a sudden 
 softening, of Tom Peters, and I went into a tobacconist's * 
 and bought him a box of expensive cigars. Then I told the 
 chauffeur to take me to a toy-shop, where I stood staring 
 through a plate-glass window at the elaborate playthings 
 devised for the modern children of luxury. In the centre 
 was a toy man-of-war, three feet in length, with turrets and 
 guns, and propellers and a real steam-engine. As a boy I 
 should have dreamed about it, schemed for it, bartered my 
 immortal soul for it. But if I gave it to Matthew, what 
 was there for Moreton ? A steam locomotive caught my eye, 
 almost as elaborate. Forcing my way through the doors, 
 I captured a salesman, and from a state bordering on nervous 
 collapse he became galvanized into an intense alertness and 
 respect when he understood my desires. He didn't know 
 the price of the objects in question. He brought the pro 
 prietor, an obsequious little German who, on learning my 
 name, repeated it in every sentence. For Biddy I chose a 
 doll that was all but human ; when held by a young woman 
 for my inspection, it elicited murmurs of admiration from the 
 women shoppers by whom we were surrounded. The pro 
 prietor promised to make a special delivery of the three 
 articles before seven o'clock. . . . 
 
 Presently the automobile, after speeding up the asphalt of ^ 
 Grant Avenue, stopped before the new house. In spite of 
 the change that house had made in my life, in three weeks I 
 had become amazingly used to it ; yet I had an odd feeling 
 that Christmas eve as I stood under the portico with my key 
 in the door, the same feeling of the impersonality of the place 
 which I had experienced before. Not that for one moment 
 I would have exchanged it for the smaller house we had left. 
 I opened the door. How often, in that other house, I had
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 345 
 
 come in the evening seeking quiet, my brain occupied with a 
 problem, only to be annoyed by the romping of the children 
 on the landing above. A noise in one end of it echoed to the 
 other. But here, as I entered the hall, all was quiet : a 
 dignified, deep-carpeted stairway swept upward before me, 
 and on either side were wide, empty rooms ; and in the sub 
 dued light of one of them I saw a dark figure moving 
 silently about the butler. He came forward to relieve me, 
 deftly, of my hat and overcoat. Well, I had it at last, this 
 establishment to which I had for so long looked forward. 
 And yet that evening, as I hesitated in the hall, I somehow 
 was unable to grasp that it was real and permanent, the very 
 solidity of the walls and doors paradoxically suggested tran- 
 sientness, the butler a flitting ghost. How still the place 
 was! Almost oppressively still. I recalled oddly a story 
 of a peasant who, yearning for the great life, had stumbled 
 upon an empty palace, its tables set with food in golden 
 dishes. Before two days had passed he had fled from it 
 in horror back to his crowded cottage and his drudgery in 
 the fields. Never once had the sense of possession of the 
 palace been realized. Nor did I feel that I possessed this 
 house, though I had the deeds of it in my safe and the receipted 
 bills in my files. It eluded me ; seemed, in my bizarre mood 
 of that evening, almost to mock me. "You have built me," 
 it seemed to say, " but I am stronger than you, because you 
 have not earned me." Ridiculous, when the years of my 
 labour and the size of my bank account were considered ! 
 Such, however, is the verbal expression of my feeling. Was 
 the house empty, after all ? Had something happened ? 
 With a slight panicky sensation I climbed the stairs, with 
 their endless shallow treads, to hurry through the silent 
 hallway to the schoolroom. Reassuring noises came faintly 
 through the heavy door. I opened it. Little Biddy was 
 careening round and round, crying out : 
 
 "To-morrow's Chris'masI Santa Glaus is coming to 
 night." 
 
 Matthew was regarding her indulgently, sympatheti-
 
 346 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 cally, Moreton rather scornfully. The myth had been 
 exploded for both, but Matthew still hugged it. That was 
 the difference between them. Maude, seated on the floor, 
 perceived me first, and glanced up at me with a smile. 
 
 "It's father!" she said. 
 
 Biddy stopped in the midst of a pirouette. At the age of 
 seven she was still shy with me, and retreated towards 
 Maude. 
 
 "Aren't we going to have a tree, father?" demanded 
 Moreton, aggressively. "Mother won't tell us neither 
 will Miss Allsop." 
 
 Miss Allsop was their governess. 
 
 "Why do you want a tree?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, for Biddy," he said. 
 
 "It wouldn't be Christmas without a tree," Matthew de 
 clared, " and Santa Glaus," he added, for his sister's 
 benefit. 
 
 "Perhaps Santa Glaus, when he sees we've got this big 
 house, will think we don't need anything, and go on to some 
 poorer children," said Maude. "You wouldn't blame him 
 if he did that, would you?" 
 
 The response to this appeal cannot be said to have been 
 enthusiastic. . . . 
 
 After dinner, when at last all of them were in bed, we 
 dressed the tree ; it might better be said that Maude and Miss 
 Allsop dressed it, while I gave a perfunctory aid. Both the 
 women took such a joy in the process, vying with each other 
 in getting effects, and as I watched them eagerly draping 
 the tinsel and pinning on the glittering ornaments I wondered 
 why it was that I was unable to find the same joy as they. 
 Thus it had been every Christmas eve. I was always tired 
 when I got home, and after dinner relaxation set in. 
 
 An electrician had come while we were at the table, and 
 had fastened on the little electric bulbs which did duty as 
 candles. 
 
 "Oh," said Maude, as she stood off to survey the effect, 
 " isn't it beautiful ! Come, Miss Allsop, let's get the presents."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 347 
 
 They flew out of the room, and presently hurried back with 
 their arms full of the usual parcels: parcels from Maude's 
 family in Elkington, from my own relatives, from the Black- 
 woods and the Peterses, from Nancy. In the meantime I 
 had had my own contributions brought up, the man of war, 
 the locomotive, the big doll. Maude stood staring. 
 
 "Hugh, they'll be utterly ruined!" she exclaimed. 
 
 "The boys might as well have something instructive," I 
 replied, "and as for Biddy nothing's too good for her." 
 
 " I might have known you wouldn't forget them, although 
 you are so busy." . . . 
 
 We filled the three stockings hung by the great fireplace. 
 Then, with a last lingering look at the brightness of the tree, 
 she stood in the doorway and turned the electric switch. 
 
 "Not before seven to-morrow morning, Miss Allsop," 
 she said. "Hugh, you will get up, won't you? You 
 mustn't miss seeing them. You can go back to bed again." 
 
 I promised. 
 
 Evidently, this was Reality to Maude. And had it not 
 been one of my dreams of marriage, this preparing for the 
 children's Christmas, remembering the fierce desires of my 
 own childhood? It struck me, after I had kissed her good 
 night and retired to my dressing-room, that fierce desires 
 burned within me still, but the objects towards which their 
 flames leaped out differed. That was all. Had I remained a 
 child, since my idea of pleasure was still that of youth ? The 
 craving for excitement, adventure, was still unslaked ; the 
 craving for freedom as keen as ever. During the whole 
 of my married life, I had been conscious of an inner protest , 
 against "settling down," as Tom Peters had settled down. 
 The smaller house from which we had moved, with its en 
 forced propinquity, had emphasized the bondage of marriage. 
 Now I had two rooms to myself, in the undisputed possession 
 of which I had taken a puerile delight. On one side of my 
 dressing-room Archie Lammerton had provided a huge 
 closet containing the latest devices for the keeping of a 
 multitudinous wardrobe ; there was a reading-lamp, and the
 
 348 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 easiest of easy-chairs, imported from England, while between 
 the windows were shelves of Italian walnut which I had filled 
 with the books I had bought while at Cambridge, and had 
 never since opened. As I sank down in my chair that odd 
 feeling of uneasiness, of transience and unreality, of unsatis- 
 faction I had had ever since we had moved suddenly 
 became intensified, and at the very moment when I had 
 gained everything I had once believed a man could desire ! 
 I was successful, I was rich, my health had not failed, I had 
 a wife who catered to my wishes, lovable children who gave 
 no trouble and yet there was still the void to be filled, 
 the old void I had felt as a boy, the longing for something 
 beyond me, I knew not what ; there was the strange inability 
 to taste any of these things, the need at every turn for excite- 
 ent, for a stimulus. My marriage had been a disappoint 
 ment, though I strove to conceal this from myself; a dis 
 appointment because it had not filled the requirements of 
 my category excitement and mystery : I had provided the 
 setting and lacked the happiness. Another woman 
 Nancy might have given me the needed stimulation; 
 and yet my thoughts did not dwell on Nancy that night, my 
 longings were not directed towards her, but towards the 
 vision of a calm, contented married happiness I had looked 
 forward to in youth, a vision suddenly presented once 
 more by the sight of Maude's simple pleasure in dressing the 
 Christmas tree. What restless, fiendish element in me pre 
 vented my enjoying that? I had something of the fearful 
 feeling of a ghost in my own house and among my own family, 
 of a spirit doomed to wander, unable to share in what should 
 have been my own, in what would have saved me were I 
 able to partake of it. Was it too late to make that effort? 
 . . . Presently the strains of music pervaded my conscious 
 ness, the chimes of Trinity ringing out in the damp night 
 the Christmas hymn, Adeste Fideles. It was midnight 
 it was Christmas. How clear the notes rang through the 
 wet air that came in at my window! Back into the dim 
 centuries that music led me, into candle-lit Gothic chapels
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 349 
 
 of monasteries on wind-swept heights above the firs, and 
 cathedrals in mediaeval cities. Twilight ages of war and 
 scourge and stress and storm and faith. " Oh, come, all 
 ye Faithful !" What a strange thing, that faith whose flame 
 so marvellously persisted, piercing the gloom; the Christ 
 mas myth, as I had heard someone once call it. Did it 
 possess the power to save me? Save me from what? Ah, 
 in this hour I knew. In the darkness the Danger loomed up 
 before me, vague yet terrible, and I trembled. Why was 
 not this Thing ever present, to chasten and sober me ? The 
 Thing was myself. 
 
 Into my remembrance, by what suggestion I know not, 
 came that March evening when I had gone to Holden Chapel 
 at Harvard to listen to a preacher, a personality whose fame 
 and influence had since spread throughout the land. Some 
 dun fear had possessed me then. I recalled vividly the man, 
 and the face of Hermann Krebs as I drew back from the 
 doorway. . . . 
 
 When I awoke my disquieting, retrospective mood had 
 disappeared, and yet there clung to me, minus the sanction 
 of fear or reward or revealed truth, a certain determination 
 to behave, on this day at least, more like a father and a hus 
 band : to make an effort to enter into the spirit of the festi 
 val, and see what happened. I dressed in cheerful haste, 
 took the sapphire pendant from its velvet box, tiptoed into 
 the still silent schoolroom and hung it on the tree, flooding 
 on the electric light that set the tinsel and globes ablaze. 
 No sooner had I done this than I heard the patter of feet in 
 the hallway, and a high-pitched voice Biddy's crying 
 out: 
 
 "It's Santa Glaus!" 
 
 Three small, flannel-wrappered figures stood in the door 
 way. 
 
 "Why, it's father!" exclaimed Moreton. 
 
 "And he's all dressed!" said Matthew.
 
 350 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh-h-h!" cried Biddy, staring at the blazing tree, "isn't 
 it beautiful!" 
 
 Maude was close behind them. She gave an exclamation 
 of delighted surprise when she saw me, and then stood gazing 
 with shining eyes at the children, especially at Biddy, who 
 , stood dazzled by the glory of the constellation confronting 
 her. Matthew, too, wished to prolong the moment of 
 mystery. It was the practical Moreton who cried : 
 
 "Let's see what we've got !" 
 
 The assault and the sacking began. I couldn't help 
 thinking as I watched them of my own wildly riotous, 
 Christmas-morning sensations, when all the gifts had worn 
 the aura of the supernatural ; but the arrival of these toys 
 was looked upon by my children as a part of the natural 
 order of the universe. At Maude's suggestion the night 
 before we had placed my presents, pieces de resistance, at a 
 distance from the tree, in the hope that they would not be 
 spied at once, that they would be in some sort a climax. It 
 was Matthew who first perceived the ship, and identified it, 
 by the card, as his property. To him it was clearly wonder 
 ful, but no miracle. He did not cry out, or call the atten 
 tion of the others to it, but stood with his feet apart, exam 
 ining it, his first remark being a query as to why it didn't fly 
 the American flag. It's ensign was British. Then Moreton 
 saw the locomotive, was told that it was his, and took pos 
 session of it violently. Why wasn't there more track? 
 Wouldn't I get more track? I explained that it would go 
 by steam, and he began unscrewing the cap on the little 
 boiler until he was distracted by the man-of-war, and with 
 natural acquisitiveness started to take possession of that. 
 Biddy was bewildered by the doll, which Maude had taken 
 up and was holding in her lap. She had had talking dolls 
 before, and dolls that closed their eyes; she recognized 
 this one, indeed, as a sort of super-doll, but her little mind 
 was modern, too, and set no limits on what might be accom 
 plished. She patted it, but was more impressed by the 
 raptures of Miss Allsop, who had come in and was admiring
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 351 
 
 it with some extravagance. Suddenly the child caught 
 sight of her stocking, until now forgotten, and darted for 
 the fireplace. 
 
 I turned to Maude, who stood beside me, watching them. 
 
 "But you haven't looked on the tree yourself," I reminded 
 her. 
 
 She gave me an odd, questioning glance, and got up and set 
 down the doll. As she stood for a moment gazing at the 
 lights, she seemed very girlish in her dressing-gown, with her 
 hair in two long plaits down her back. 
 
 "Oh, Hughl" She lifted the pendant from the branch 
 and held it up. Her gratitude, her joy at receiving a present 
 was deeper than the children's ! 
 
 "You chose it for me?" 
 
 I felt something like a pang when I thought how little 
 trouble it had been. 
 
 "If you don't like it," I said, "or wish to have it 
 changed " 
 
 "Changed!" she exclaimed reproachfully. "Do you 
 think I'd change it? Only it's much too valuable " 
 
 I smiled. . . . Miss Allsop deftly undid the clasp and 
 hung it around Maude's neck. 
 
 "How it suits you, Mrs. Paret !" she cried. . . . 
 
 This pendant was by no means the only present I had 
 given Maude in recent years, and though she cared as little 
 for jewels as for dress she seemed to attach to it a peculiar 
 value and significance that disturbed and smote me, for the 
 incident had revealed a love unchanged and unchangeable. 
 Had she taken my gift as a sign that my indifference was 
 melting ? 
 
 As I went downstairs and into the library to read the 
 financial page of the morning newspaper I asked myself, 
 with a certain disquiet, whether, in the formal, complicated, 
 and luxurious conditions in which we now lived it might be 
 possible to build up new ties and common interests. I 
 reflected that this would involve confessions and confidences 
 on my part, since there was a whole side of my life of which
 
 352 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Maude knew nothing. I had convinced myself long ago 
 that a man's business career was no affair of his wife's : I 
 had justified that career to myself : yet I had always had a 
 vague feeling that Maude, had she known the details, would 
 not have approved of it. Impossible, indeed, for a woman 
 to grasp these problems. They were outside of her expe 
 rience. 
 
 Nevertheless, something might be done to improve our 
 relationship, something which would relieve me of that 
 uneasy lack of unity I felt when at home, of the lassitude 
 and ennui I was wont to feel creeping over me on Sundays 
 and holidays. . . .
 
 XX 
 
 I FIND in relating those parts of my experience that seem 
 to be of most significance I have neglected to tell of my 
 mother's death, which occurred the year before we moved 
 to Grant Avenue. She had clung the rest of her days to 
 the house in which I had been born. Of late years she had 
 lived in my 'children, and Maude's devotion to her had been 
 unflagging. Truth compels me to say that she had long 
 ceased to be a factor in my life. I have thought of her in 
 later years. 
 
 Coincident with the unexpected feeling of fruitlessness 
 that came to me with the Grant Avenue house, of things 
 achieved but not realized or appreciated, was the appearance 
 of a cloud on the business horizon ; or rather on the political 
 horizon, since it is hard to separate the two realms. There 
 were signs, for those who could read, of a rising popular storm. 
 During the earliest years of the new century the political 
 atmosphere had changed, the public had shown a tendency 
 to grow restless ; and everybody knows how important it is 
 for financial operations, for prosperity, that the people should 
 mind their own business. In short, our commercial-romantic 
 pilgrimage began to meet with unexpected resistance. It was 
 as though the nation were entering into a senseless conspiracy 
 to kill prosperity. 
 
 In the first place, in regard to the Presidency of the United 
 States, a cog had unwittingly been slipped. It had always 
 been recognized as I have said by responsible financial 
 personages that the impulses of the majority of Americans 
 could not be trusted, that these who had inherited illu 
 sions of freedom must be governed firmly yet with deli- 
 2A 353
 
 354 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 i 
 
 cacy ; unknown to them, their Presidents must be chosen for 
 them, precisely as Mr. Watling had been chosen for the people 
 of our state, and the popular enthusiasm manufactured later. 
 There were informal meetings in New York, in Washington, 
 where candidates were discussed ; not that such and such a 
 man was settled upon, it was a process of elimination. 
 Usually the affair had gone smoothly. For instance, a 
 while before, a benevolent capitalist of the middle west, an 
 intimate of Adolf Scherer, had become obsessed with the 
 idea that a friend of his was the safest and sanest man for 
 the head of the nation, had convinced his fellow-capitalists 
 of this, whereupon he had gone ahead to spend his energy 
 and his money freely to secure the nomination and election 
 of this gentleman. 
 
 The Republican National Committee, the Republican 
 National Convention were allowed to squabble to their 
 hearts' content as to whether Smith, Jones or Brown should 
 be nominated, but it was clearly understood that if Robin 
 son or White were chosen there would be no corporation 
 campaign funds. This applied also to the Democratic party, 
 on the rare occasions when it seemed to have an opportunity 
 of winning. Now, however, through an unpardonable 
 blunder, there had got into the White House a President 
 who was inclined to ignore advice, who appealed over the 
 heads of the "advisers" to the populace; who went about 
 tilting at the industrial structures we had so painfully 
 wrought, and in frequent blasts of presidential messages 
 enunciated new and heretical doctrines; who attacked the 
 railroads, encouraged the brazen treason of labour unions, 
 inspired an army of "muck-rakers" to fill the magazines with 
 the wildest and most violent of language. State legislatures 
 were emboldened to pass mischievous and restrictive laws, 
 and much of my time began to be occupied in inducing, by 
 various means, our courts to declare these unconstitutional. 
 How we sighed for a business man or a lawyer in the White 
 House! The country had gone mad, the stock-market 
 trembled, the cry of "corporation control" resounded every-
 
 A, FAR COUNTRY 355 
 
 where, and everywhere demagogues arose to inaugurate 
 "reform campaigns," in an abortive attempt to "clean up 
 politics." Down with the bosses, who were the tools of 
 the corporations ! 
 
 In our own city, which we fondly believed to be proof 
 against the prevailing madness, a slight epidemic occurred ; 
 slight, yet momentarily alarming. Accidents will happen, 
 even in the best regulated political organizations, and 
 accidents in these days appeared to be the rule. A certain 
 Mr. Edgar Greenhalge, a middle-aged, mild-mannered and 
 inoffensive man who had made a moderate fortune in whole 
 sale drugs, was elected to the School Board. Later on some 
 of us had reason to suspect that Perry Blackwood with 
 more astuteness than he had been given credit for was 
 responsible for Mr. Greenhalge's candidacy. At any rate, 
 he was not a man to oppose, and in his previous life had given 
 no hint that he might become a trouble maker. Nothing 
 happened for several months. But one day on which I had 
 occasion to interview Mr. Jason on a little matter of handing 
 over to the Railroad a piece of land belonging to the city, 
 which was known as Billings' Bowl, he inferred that Mr. 
 Greenhalge might prove a disturber of that profound peace 
 with which the city administration had for many years been 
 blessed. 
 
 "Who the .hell is he?" was Mr. Jason's question. 
 
 It appeared that Mr. G.'s private Me had been investi 
 gated, with disappointingly barren results; he was, seem 
 ingly, an anomalistic being in our Nietzschean age, an un- 
 aggressive man ; he had never sold any drugs to the city ; 
 he was not a church member; nor could it be learned that 
 he had ever wandered into those byways of the town where 
 Mr. Jason might easily have got trace of him : if he had any 
 vices, he kept them locked up in a safe-deposit box that 
 could not be "located." He was very genial, and had a 
 way of conveying disturbing facts when he wished to 
 convey them under cover of the most amusing stories. 
 Mr. Jason was not a man to get panicky. Greenhalge could
 
 356 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 be handled all right, only what was there in it for Green- 
 halge ? a nut difficult for Mr. Jason to crack. The two 
 other members of the School Board were solid. Here again 
 the wisest of men was proved to err, for Mr. Greenhalge 
 turned out to have powers of persuasion ; he made what in 
 religious terms would have been called a conversion in the 
 case of another member of the board, an hitherto staunch 
 old reprobate by the name of Miiller, an ex-saloonkeeper in 
 comfortable circumstances to whom the idea of public office 
 had appealed. 
 
 Mr. Greenhalge, having got wind of certain transactions 
 that interested him extremely, brought them in his good- 
 natured way to the knowledge of Mr. Gregory, the district 
 attorney, suggesting that he investigate. Mr. Gregory 
 smiled; undertook, as delicately as possible, to convey to 
 Mr. Greenhalge the ways of the world, and of the political 
 world in particular, wherein, it seemed, everyone was a 
 good fellow. Mr. Greenhalge was evidently a good fellow, 
 and didn't want to make trouble over little things. No, 
 Mr. Greenhalge didn't want to make trouble; he appre 
 ciated a comfortable life as much as Mr. Gregory ; he told 
 the district attorney a funny story which might or might 
 not have had an application to the affair, and took his 
 leave with the remark that he had been happy to make 
 Mr. Gregory's acquaintance. On his departure the district 
 attorney's countenance changed. He severely rebuked a 
 subordinate for some trivial mistake, and walked as rapidly 
 as he could carry his considerable weight to Monahan's 
 saloon. . . . One of the things Mr. Gregory had pointed 
 out incidentally was that Mr. Greenhalge's evidence was 
 vague, and that a grand jury wanted facts, which might be 
 difficult to obtain. Mr. Greenhalge, thinking over the sug 
 gestion, sent for Krebs. In the course of a nionth or two 
 the investigation was accomplished, Greenhalge went back 
 to Gregory, who repeated his homilies, whereupon he was 
 handed a hundred or so typewritten pages of evidence. 
 
 It was a dramatic moment.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 357 
 
 Mr. Gregory resorted to pleading. He was sure that Mr. 
 Greenhalge didn't want to be disagreeable, it was true and 
 unfortunate that such things were so, but they would be 
 amended : he promised all his influence to amend them. 
 The public conscience, said Mr. Gregory, was being aroused. 
 Now how much better for the party, for the reputation, 
 the fair name of the city if these things could be corrected 
 quietly, and nobody indicted or tried ! Between sensible 
 and humane men, wasn't that the obvious way ? After the 
 election, suit could be brought to recover the money. But 
 Mr. Greenhalge appeared to be one of those hopeless indi 
 viduals without a spark of party loyalty; he merely con 
 tinued to smile, and to suggest that the district attorney 
 prosecute. Mr. Gregory temporized, and presently left 
 the city on a vacation. A day or two after his second visit 
 to the district attorney's office Mr. Greenhalge had a call 
 from the city auditor and the purchasing agent, who talked 
 about their families, which was very painful. It was 
 also intimated to Mr. Greenhalge by others who accosted 
 him that he was just the man for mayor. He smiled, and 
 modestly belittled his qualifications. . . . 
 
 Suddenly, one fine morning, a part of the evidence Krebs 
 had gathered appeared in the columns of the Mail and 
 State, a new and enterprising newspaper for which the growth 
 and prosperity of our city were responsible; the sort of 
 "revelations" that stirred to amazement and wrath inno 
 cent citizens of nearly every city in our country: politics 
 and "graft" infesting our entire educational system, teachers 
 and janitors levied upon, prices that took the breath away 
 paid to favoured firms for supplies, specifications so worded 
 that reasonable bids were barred. The respectable firm of 
 Ellery and Knowles was involved. In spite of our horror, 
 we were Americans and saw the humour of the situation, 
 and laughed at the caricature in the Mail and State repre 
 senting a scholar holding up a pencil and a legend under it, 
 "No, it's not gold, but it ought to be." 
 
 Here I must enter into a little secret history. Any affair
 
 358 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 that threatened the integrity of Mr. Jason's organization 
 was of serious moment to the gentlemen of the financial 
 world who found that organization invaluable and who 
 were also concerned about the fair name of their community ; 
 a conference in the Boyne Club decided that the city officials 
 were being persecuted, and entitled therefore to "the very 
 best of counsel," in this instance, Mr. Hugh Paret. 
 It was also thought wise by Mr. Dickinson, Mr. Gorse, and 
 Mr. Grierson, and by Mr. Paret himself that he should not 
 appear in the matter; an aspiring young attorney, Mr. 
 Arbuthnot, was retained to conduct the case in public. 
 Thus capital came to the assistance of Mr. Jason, a fund was 
 raised, and I was given carte blanche to defend the miser 
 able city auditor and purchasing agent, both of whom 
 elicited my sympathy ; for they were stout men, and rapidly 
 losing weight. Our first care was to create a delay in the 
 trial of the case in order to give the public excitement a 
 chance to die down. For the public is proverbially unable 
 to fix its attention for long on one object, continually de 
 manding the distraction that our newspapers make it 
 their business to supply. Fortunately, a murder was 
 committed in one of our suburbs, creating a mystery that 
 filled the "extras" for some weeks, and this was oppor 
 tunely followed by the embezzlement of a considerable sum 
 by the cashier of one of our state banks. Public interest 
 was divided between baseball and the tracking of this crimi 
 nal to New Zealand. 
 
 Our resentment was directed, not so much against Com 
 missioner Greenhalge as against Krebs. It is curious how 
 keen is the instinct of men like Grierson, Dickinson, Tallant 
 and Scherer for the really dangerous opponent. Who the 
 deuce was this man Krebs? Well, I could supply them 
 with some information : they doubtless recalled the Galligan 
 case ; and Miller Gorse, who forgot nothing, also remembered 
 his opposition in the legislature to House Bill 709. He had 
 continued to be the obscure legal champion of "oppressed" 
 labour, but how he had managed to keep body and soul
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 359 
 
 together I knew not. I had encountered him occasionally 
 in court corridors or on the street ; he did not seem to change 
 much ; nor did he appear in our brief and perfunctory con 
 versations to bear any resentment against me for the part 
 I had taken in the Galligan affair. I avoided him when 
 it was possible. ... I had to admit that he had done a 
 remarkably good piece of work in collecting Greenhalge's 
 evidence, and how the erring city officials were to be 
 rescued became a matter of serious concern. Gregory, the 
 district attorney, was in an abject funk; in any case a 
 mediocre lawyer, after the indictment he was no help at 
 all. I had to do all the work, and after we had selected the 
 particular "Railroad" judge before whom the case was to 
 be tried, I talked it over with him. His name was Netting, 
 he understood perfectly what was required of him, and that 
 he was for the moment the chief bulwark on which depended 
 the logical interests of capital and sane government for their 
 defence; also, his reelection was at stake. It was indi 
 cated to newspapers (such as the Mail and State) showing a 
 desire to keep up public interest in the affair that their 
 advertising matter might decrease; Mr. SherrilTs great 
 department store, for instance, did not approve of this sort 
 of agitation. Certain stationers, booksellers and other 
 business men had got "cold feet," as Mr. Jason put it, the 
 prospect of bankruptcy suddenly looming ahead of them, 
 
 since the Corn National Bank held certain paper. . . . 
 In short, when the case did come to trial, it "blew up," 
 
 as one of our ward leaders dynamically expressed it. Sev 
 eral important witnesses were mysteriously lacking, and two 
 or three school-teachers had suddenly decided to take a 
 trip to Europe. The district attorney was ill, and assigned 
 the prosecution to a mild assistant ; while a sceptical jury 
 
 composed largely of gentlemen who had the business 
 interests of the community, and of themselves, at heart 
 returned a verdict of "not guilty." This was the signal 
 for severely dignified editorials in Mr. Tallant's and 
 other conservative newspapers, hinting that it might
 
 360 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 be well in the future for all well-meaning but misguided 
 reformers to think twice before subjecting the city to the 
 cost of such trials, and uselessly attempting to inflame 
 public opinion and upset legitimate business. The Era ex 
 pressed the opinion that no city in the United States was 
 " more'Jefficiently and economically governed than our own." 
 " Irregularities" might well occur in every large organiza 
 tion; and it would better have become Mr. Greenhalge if, 
 instead of hiring an unknown lawyer thirsting for notoriety 
 to cook up charges, he had called the attention of the proper 
 officials to the matter, etc., etc. The Pilot alone, which 
 relied on sensation for its circulation, kept hammering 
 away for a time with veiled accusations. But our citizens 
 had become weary. . . . 
 
 As a topic, however, this effective suppression of reform 
 was referred to with some delicacy by my friends and my 
 self. Our interference had been necessary and therefore 
 justified, but we were not particularly proud of it, and our 
 triumph had a temporarily sobering effect. It was about 
 this time, if I remember correctly, that Mr. Dickinson gave 
 the beautiful stained-glass window to the church. . . . 
 
 Months passed. One day, having occasion to go over to 
 the Boyne Iron Works to get information at first hand from 
 certain officials, and having finished my business, I boarded 
 a South Side electric car standing at the terminal. Just 
 before it started Krebs came down the aisle of the car and 
 took the seat in front of me. 
 
 "Well," I said, "how are you?" He turned in surprise, 
 and thrust his big, bony hand across the back of the seat. 
 "Come and sit here." He came. "Do you ever get back 
 to Cambridge in these days?" I asked cordially. 
 
 "Not since I graduated from newspaper work in Boston. 
 That's a good many years ago. By the way, our old land 
 lady died this year." 
 
 "Do you mean ?" "Granite Face," I was about to 
 say. I had forgotten her name, but that homesick scene 
 when Tom and I stood before our open trunks, when Krebs
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 361 , 
 
 had paid us a visit, came back to me. "You've kept in 
 touch with her?" I asked, in surprise. 
 
 "Well," said Krebs, "she was one of the few friends I had 
 at Cambridge. I had a letter from the daughter last week. 
 She's done very well, and is an instructor in biology in one 
 of the western universities." 
 
 I was silent a moment. 
 
 "And you, you never married, did you?" I inquired, * 
 somewhat irrelevantly. 
 
 His semi-humorous gesture seemed to deny that such a 
 luxury was for him. The conversation dragged a little; 
 I began to feel the curiosity he invariably inspired. What 
 was his life? What were his beliefs? And I was pos 
 sessed by a certain militancy, a desire to " smoke him out." 
 I did not stop to reflect that mine was in reality a defen 
 sive rather than an aggressive attitude. 
 & "Do you live down here, in this part of the city?" I 
 asked. 
 
 No, he boarded in Fowler Street. I knew it as in a dis 
 trict given over to the small houses of working-men. 
 
 "I suppose you are still a socialist." 
 
 "I suppose I am," he admitted, and added, "at any rate, 
 that is as near as you can get to it." 
 
 "Isn't it fairly definite?" 
 
 "Fairly, if my notions are taken in general as the antith 
 esis of what you fellows believe." 
 
 "The abolition of property, for instance." 
 
 " The abolition of too much property." 
 
 "What do you mean by 'too much' ?" 
 
 "When it ceases to be real to a man, when it represents 
 more than his need, when it drives him and he becomes a 
 slave to it." 
 
 Involuntarily I thought of my new house, not a soothing 
 reflection. 
 
 "But who is going to decree how much property a man 
 should have?" 
 
 "Nobody everybody. That will gradually tend to
 
 362 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 work itself out as we become more sensible and- better 
 educated, and understand more clearly what is good for 
 us." 
 
 I retorted with the stock, common-sense phrase. 
 
 " If we had a division to-morrow, within a few years or so 
 the most efficient would contrive to get the bulk of it back 
 in their hands." 
 
 "That's so," he admitted. "But we're not going to have 
 a division to-morrow." 
 
 "Thank God !" I exclaimed. 
 
 He regarded me. 
 
 "The 'efficient' will have to die or be educated first. 
 That will take time." 
 
 "Educated!" 
 
 "Paret, have you ever read any serious books on what 
 you call socialism?" he asked. 
 
 I threw out an impatient negative. I was going on to 
 protest that I was not ignorant of the doctrine. 
 
 "Oh, what you call socialism is merely what you believe 
 to be the more or less crude and Utopian propaganda of an 
 obscure political party. That isn't socialism. Nor is the 
 anomalistic attempt that the Christian Socialists make 
 to unite modern socialistic philosophy with Christian ortho 
 doxy, socialism." 
 
 "What is socialism, then?" I demanded, somewhat de 
 fiantly. 
 
 "Let's call it education, science," he said smilingly, "eco 
 nomics and government based on human needs and a rational 
 view of religion. It has been taught in German universities, 
 and it will be taught in ours whenever we shall succeed in 
 inducing your friends, by one means or another, not to con 
 tinue endowing them. Socialism, in the proper sense, is 
 merely the application of modern science to government." 
 
 I was puzzled and angry. What he said made sense 
 somehow, but it sounded to me like so much gibberish. 
 
 "But Germany is a monarchy," I objected. 
 
 "It is a modern, scientific system with monarchy as its
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 363 
 
 superstructure. It is anomalous, but frank. The mon 
 archy is there for all men to see, and some day it will be done 
 away with. We are supposedly a democracy, and our super 
 structure is plutocratic. Our people feel the burden, but they 
 have not yet discovered what the burden is." 
 
 "And when they do?" I asked, a little defiantly. 
 
 "When they do," replied Krebs, "they will set about 
 making the plutocrats happy. Now plutocrats are discon 
 tented, and never satisfied ; the more they get, the more they 
 want, the more they are troubled by what other people 
 have." 
 
 I smiled in spite of myself. 
 
 "Your interest in in plutocrats is charitable, then?" 
 
 "Why, yes," he said, "my interest in all kinds of people 
 is charitable. However improbable it may seem, I have 
 no reason to dislike or envy people who have more than 
 they know what to do with." And the worst of it was he 
 looked it. He managed somehow simply by sitting there 
 with his strange eyes fixed upon me in spite of his ridic 
 ulous philosophy to belittle my ambitions, to make 
 of small worth my achievements, to bring home to me the 
 fact that in spite of these I was neither contented nor happy : 
 though he kept his humour and his poise, he implied an 
 experience that was far deeper, more tragic and more signifi 
 cant than mine. I was goaded into making an injudicious 
 remark. 
 
 "Well, your campaign against Ennerly and Jackson fell 
 through, didn't it ? " Ennerly and Jackson were the city 
 officials who had been tried. 
 
 "It wasn't a campaign against them," he answered. 
 "And considering the subordinate part I took in it, it could 
 scarcely be called mine." 
 
 " Greenhalge turned to you to get the evidence." 
 
 "Well, I got it," he said. 
 
 "What became of it?" 
 
 "You ought to know." 
 
 "What do you mean?"
 
 364 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Just what I say, Paret," he answered slowly. "You 
 ought to know, if anyone knows." 
 
 I considered this a moment, more soberly. I thought I 
 might have counted on my fingers the number of men cogni 
 zant of my connection with the case. I decided that he was 
 guessing. " , 
 
 "I think you should explain that/' I told him. 
 
 " The time may come, when you'll have to explain it." 
 
 "Is that a threat?" I demanded. 
 
 u A threat ? " he repeated. " Not at all." 
 
 "But you are accusing me " 
 
 "Of what?" he interrupted suddenly. 
 
 He had made it necessary for me to define the nature of 
 his charges. 
 
 "Of having had some connection with the affair in ques 
 tion." 
 
 "Whatever else I may be, I'm not a fool," he said quietly. 
 " Neither the district attorney's office, nor young Arbuthnot 
 had brains enough to get them out of that scrape. Jason 
 didn't have influence enough with the judiciary, and, as 
 I happen to know, there was a good deal of money spent." 
 
 "You may be called upon to prove it," I retorted, rather 
 hotly. 
 
 "So I may." 
 
 His tone, far from being defiant, had in it a note of sad 
 ness. I looked at him. What were his potentialities? 
 Was it not just possible that I should have to revise my idea 
 of him, acknowledge that he might become more formidable 
 than I had thought ? 
 
 There was an awkward silence. 
 
 "You mustn't imagine, Paret, that I have any personal 
 animus against you, or against any of the men with whom 
 you're associated," he went on, after a moment. "I'm sorry 
 you're on that side, that's all, I told you so once before. 
 I'm not calling you names, I'm not talking about morality 
 and immorality. Immorality, when you come down to it, 
 is often just the opposition to progress that comes from blind-
 
 .A FAR COUNTRY; SGS 
 
 ness. I don't make the mistake of blaming a few individuals 
 for the evils of modern industrial society, and on the other 
 hand you mustn't blame individuals for the discomforts of 
 what you call the reform movement, for that movement is 
 merely a symptom a symptom of a disease due to a change 
 in the structure of society. We'll never have any happiness 
 or real prosperity until we cure that disease. I was inclined 
 to blame you once, at the capital that time, because it seemed 
 to me that a man with all the advantages you have had and 
 a mind like yours didn't have much excuse. But I've 
 thought about it since ; I realize now that I've had a good 
 many more 'advantages' than you, and to tell you the truth, 
 I don't see how you could have come out anywhere else 
 than where you are, all your surroundings and training 
 were against it. That doesn't mean that you won't grasp 
 the situation some day I have an idea you will. It's 
 just an idea. The man who ought to be condemned isn't 
 the man that doesn't understand what's going on, but the 
 man who comes to understand and persists in opposing it." 
 He rose and looked down at me with the queer, disturbing 
 smile I remembered. "I get off at this corner," he added, 
 rather diffidently. "I hope you'll forgive me for being 
 personal. I didn't mean to be, but you rather forced it 
 on me." 
 
 "Oh, that's all right," I replied. The car stopped, and 
 he hurried off. I watched his tall figure as it disappeared 
 among the crowd on the sidewalk. . . . 
 
 I returned to my office in one of those moods that are the 
 more disagreeable because conflicting. To-day in partic 
 ular I had been aroused by what Tom used to call Krebs's 
 "crust," and as I sat at my desk warm waves of resentment 
 went through me at the very notion of his telling me that 
 my view was limited and that therefore my professional 
 conduct was to be forgiven! It was he, the fanatic, who
 
 366 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 saw things in the larger scale! an assumption the more 
 exasperating because at the moment he made it he almost 
 convinced me that he did, and I was unable to achieve for 
 him the measure of contempt I desired, for the incident, 
 the measure of ridicule it deserved. My real animus was due 
 to the fact that he had managed to shake my self-confidence, 
 to take the flavour out of my achievements, a flavour 
 that was in the course of an hour to be completely restored 
 by one of those interesting coincidences occasionally occurring 
 in life. A young member of my staff entered with a tele 
 gram ; I tore it open, and sat staring at it a moment before 
 I realized that it brought to me the greatest honour of my 
 career. 
 
 The Banker-Personality in New York had summoned me 
 for consultation. To be recognized by him conferred indeed 
 an ennoblement, the Star and Garter, so to speak, of the 
 only great realm in America, that of high finance; and 
 the yellow piece of paper I held in my hand instantly re- 
 magnetized me, renewed my energy, and I hurried home to 
 pack my bag in order to catch the seven o'clock train. I 
 announced the news to Maude. 
 
 "I imagine it's because he knows I have made something 
 of a study of the coal roads situation," I added. 
 
 "I'm glad, Hugh," she said. "I suppose it's a great 
 compliment." 
 
 Never had her inadequacy to appreciate my career been 
 more apparent! I looked at her curiously, to realize once 
 more with peculiar sharpness how far we were apart; but 
 now the resolutions I had made and never carried out 
 on that first Christmas in the new home were lacking. In 
 deed, it was the futility of such resolutions that struck me 
 at this moment. If her manner had been merely one of 
 indifference, it would in a way have been easier to bear ; 
 she was simply incapable of grasping the significance of the 
 event, the meaning to me of the years of unceasing, am 
 bitious effort it crowned. 
 
 "Yes, it is something of a recognition," I replied. "Is
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 367 
 
 there anything I can get for you in New York? I don't 
 know how long I shall have to stay I'll telegraph you 
 when I'm getting back." I kissed her and hurried out to 
 the automobile. As I drove off I saw her still standing in 
 the doorway looking after me. ... In the station I had 
 a few minutes to telephone Nancy. 
 
 " If you don't see me for a few days it's because I've gone 
 to New York/' I informed her. 
 
 "Something important, I'm sure." 
 
 "How did you guess?" I demanded, and heard her laugh. 
 
 "Come back soon and tell me about it," she said, and I 
 walked, exhilarated, to the train. ... As I sped through 
 the night, staring out of the window into the darkness, I 
 reflected on the man I was going to see. But at that time, 
 although he represented to me the quintessence of achieve 
 ment and power, I did not by any means grasp the many- 
 sided significance of the phenomenon he presented, though I 
 was keenly aware of his influence, and that men spoke of 
 him with bated breath. Presidents came and went, kings 
 and emperors had responsibilities and were subject daily 
 to annoyances, but this man was a law unto himself. He 
 did exactly what he chose, and compelled other men to do it. 
 Wherever commerce reigned, and where did it not? he 
 was king and head of its Holy Empire, Pope and Emperor 
 at once. For he had his code of ethics, his religion, and 
 those who rebelled, who failed to conform, he excommuni 
 cated ; a code something like the map of Europe, ap 
 parently inconsistent in places. What I did not then 
 comprehend was that he was the American Principle per 
 sonified, the supreme individual assertion of the conviction 
 that government should remain modestly in the back 
 ground while the efficient acquired the supremacy that 
 was theirs by natural right; nor had I grasped at that 
 time the crowning achievement of a unity that fused Chris 
 tianity with those acquisitive dispositions said to be inherent 
 in humanity. In him the Lion and the Lamb, the Eagle 
 and the Dove dwelt together in amity and power.
 
 368 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 New York, always a congenial place to gentlemen of 
 vitality and means and influential connections, had never 
 appeared to me more sparkling, more inspiring. Winter 
 had relented, spring had not as yet begun. And as I sat in a 
 corner of the dining-room of my hotel looking out on the 
 sunlit avenue I was conscious of partaking of the vigour and 
 confidence of the well-dressed, clear-eyed people who walked 
 or drove past my window with the air of a conquering race. 
 What else was there in the world more worth having than 
 this conquering sense? Religion might offer charms to the 
 weak. Yet here religion itself became sensible, and wore the 
 garb of prosperity. The stonework of the tall church on 
 the corner was all lace ; and the very saints in their niches, 
 who had known martyrdom and poverty, seemed to have 
 renounced these as foolish, and to look down complacently on 
 the procession of wealth and power. Across the street, be 
 hind a sheet of glass, was a carrosserie where were displayed 
 the shining yellow and black panels of a closed automobile, 
 the cost of which would have built a farm-house and stocked a 
 barn. 
 
 At eleven o'clock, the appointed hour, I was in Wall Street. 
 Sending in my name, I was speedily ushered into a room 
 containing a table, around which were several men ; but my 
 eyes were drawn at once to the figure of the great banker who 
 sat, massive and preponderant, at one end, smoking a cigar, 
 and listening in silence to the conversation I had interrupted. 
 He rose courteously and gave me his hand, and a glance that 
 is unforgettable. 
 
 "It is good of you to come, Mr. Paret," he said simply, as 
 though his summons had not been a command. "Perhaps 
 you know some of these gentlemen." 
 
 One of them was our United States Senator, Theodore 
 Watling. He, as it turned out, had -been summoned from 
 Washington. Of course I saw him frequently, having from 
 time to time to go to Washington on various errands con-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 369 
 
 nected with legislation. Though spruce and debonnair as 
 ever, in the black morning coat he invariably wore, he 
 appeared older than he had on the day when I had entered 
 his office. He greeted me warmly, as always. 
 
 "Hugh, I'm glad to see you here," he said, with a slight 
 emphasis on the last word. My legal career was reaching 
 its logical climax, the climax he had foreseen. And he added, 
 to the banker, that he had brought me up. 
 
 "Then he was trained in a good school," remarked that 
 personage, affably. 
 
 Mr. Barbour, the president of our Railroad, was present, 
 and nodded to me kindly; also a president of a smaller road. 
 In addition, there were two New York attorneys of great 
 prominence, whom I had met. The banker's own special 
 lieutenant of the law, Mr. Clement T. Grolier, for whom I 
 looked, was absent ; but it was forthwith explained that he 
 was offering, that morning, a resolution of some importance 
 in the Convention of his Church, but that he would be present 
 after lunch. 
 
 "I have asked you to come here, Mr. Paret," said the 
 banker, "not only because I know something personally of 
 your legal ability, but because I have been told by Mr. 
 Scherer and Mr. Barbour that you happen to have con 
 siderable knowledge of the situation we are discussing, as 
 well as some experience with cases involving that statute 
 somewhat hazy to lay minds, the Sherman anti-trust law." 
 
 A smile went around the table. Mr. Watling winked at 
 me ; I nodded, but said nothing. The banker was not a man 
 to listen to superfluous words. The keynote of his character 
 was despatch. . . . 
 
 The subject of the conference, like many questions bitterly 
 debated and fought over in their time, has in the year I write 
 these words come to be of merely academic interest. Indeed, 
 the very situation we discussed that day has been cited in 
 some of our modern text-books as a classic consequence of 
 that archaic school of economics to which the name of Man 
 chester is attached. Some half dozen or so of the railroads 
 
 2B
 
 370 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 running through the anthracite coal region had pooled their 
 interests, an extremely profitable proceeding. The public 
 paid. We deemed it quite logical that the public should pay 
 having been created largely for that purpose ; and very 
 naturally we resented the fact that the meddling Person 
 who had got into the White House without asking anybody's 
 leave, who apparently did not believe in the infallibility 
 of our legal Bible, the Constitution, should maintain that 
 the anthracite roads had formed a combination in restraint 
 of trade, should lay down the preposterous doctrine so 
 subversive of the Rights of Man that railroads should not 
 own coal mines. Congress had passed a law to meet this 
 contention, suit had been brought, and in the lower court 
 the government had won. 
 
 As the day wore on our numbers increased, we were joined 
 by other lawyers of renown, not the least of whom was Mr. 
 Grolier himself, fresh from his triumph over religious heresy 
 in his Church Convention. The note of the conference be 
 came tinged with exasperation, and certain gentlemen seized 
 the opportunity to relieve their pent-up feelings on the sub 
 ject of the President and his slavish advisers, some of 
 whom, before they came under the spell of his sorcery, had 
 once been sound lawyers and sensible men. With the excep 
 tion of the great Banker himself, who made few comments, 
 Theodore Watling was accorded the most deference; as 
 one of the leaders of that indomitable group of senators who 
 had dared to stand up against popular clamour, his opinions 
 were of great value, and his tactical advice was listened to 
 with respect. I felt more pride than ever in my former chief, 
 who had lost none of his charm. While in no way minimizing 
 the seriousness of the situation, his wisdom was tempered, as 
 always, with humour ; he managed, as it were, to neutralize 
 the acid injected into the atmosphere by other gentlemen 
 present; he alone seemed to bear no animus against the 
 Author of our troubles; suave and calm, good natured, he 
 sometimes brought the company into roars of laughter 
 and even succeeded in bringing occasional smiles to the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 371 
 
 face of the man who had summoned us when relating 
 some characteristic story of the queer genius whom the fates 
 (undoubtedly as a practical joke) had made the chief magis 
 trate of the United States of America. All geniuses have 
 weaknesses ; Mr. Watling had made a study of the President's, 
 and more than once had lured him into an impasse. The 
 case had been appealed to the Supreme Court, and Mr. 
 Watling, with remarkable conciseness and penetration, 
 reviewed the characteristics of each and every member of 
 that tribunal, all of whom he knew intimately. They were, 
 of course, not subject to " advice," as were some of the gentle 
 men who sat on our state courts ; no sane and self-respecting 
 American would presume to "approach" them. Neverthe 
 less they were human, and it were wise to take account, in 
 the conduct of the case, of the probable bias of each individual. 
 
 The President, overstepping his constitutional, Newtonian 
 limits, might propose laws, Congress might acquiesce in 
 them, but the Supreme Court, after listening to lawyers like 
 Grolier (and he bowed to the attorney), made them: made 
 them, he might have added, without responsibility to any man 
 in our unique Republic that scorned kings and apotheosized 
 lawyers. A Martian with a sense of humour witnessing a 
 stormy session of Congress would have giggled at the thought 
 of a few tranquil gentlemen in another room of the Capitol 
 waiting to decide what the people's representatives meant 
 or whether they meant anything. . . . 
 
 For the first time since I had known Theodore Watling, 
 however, I saw him in the shadow of another individual; 
 a man who, like a powerful magnet, continually drew our 
 glances. When we spoke, we almost invariably addressed 
 him, his rare words fell like bolts upon the consciousness. 
 There was no apparent rift in that personality. 
 
 When, about five o'clock, the conference was ended and we 
 were dismissed, United States Senator, railroad presidents, 
 field-marshals of the law, the great banker fell into an eager 
 conversation with Grolier over the Canon on Divorce, the 
 subject of warm debate in the convention that day. Grolier,
 
 372 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 it appeared, had led his party against the theological liberals. 
 He believed that law was static, but none knew better its 
 plasticity ; that it was infallible, but none so well as he could 
 find a text on either side. His reputation was not of the 
 popular, newspaper sort, but was known to connoisseurs, 
 editors, financiers, statesmen and judges, to those, in 
 short, whose business it is to make themselves familiar with 
 the instruments of power. He was the banker's chief legal 
 adviser, the banker's rapier of tempered steel, sheathed from 
 the vulgar view save when it flashed forth on a swift errand. 
 
 "I'm glad to be associated with you in this case, Mr. 
 Paret," Mr. Grolier said modestly, as we emerged into the 
 maelstrom of Wall Street. "If you can make it convenient 
 to call at my office in the morning, we'll go over it a little. 
 And I'll see you in a day or two in Washington, Watling. 
 Keep your eye on the bull," he added, with a twinkle, "and 
 don't let him break any more china than you can help. I 
 don't know where we'd be if it weren't for you fellows." 
 
 By "you fellows," he meant Mr. Watling's distinguished 
 associates in the Senate. . . . 
 
 Mr. Watling and I dined together at a New York club. It 
 was not a dinner of herbs. There was something exceedingly 
 comfortable about that club, where the art of catering to 
 those who had earned the right to be catered to came as near 
 perfection as human things attain. From the great, heavily 
 curtained dining-room the noises of the city had been care 
 fully excluded; the dust of the Avenue, the squalour and 
 smells of the brown stone fronts and laddered tenements of 
 those gloomy districts lying a pistol-shot east and west. 
 We had a vintage champagne, and afterwards a cigar of 
 the club's special importation. 
 
 "Well," said Mr. Watling, "now that you're a member of 
 the royal council, what do you think of the King?" 
 
 "I've been thinking a great deal about him," I said, 
 and indeed it was true. He had made, perhaps, his greatest 
 impression when I had shaken his hand in parting. The 
 manner in which he had looked at me then had puzzled me ;
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 373 
 
 It was as though he were seeking to divine something in 
 me that had escaped him. "Why doesn't the government 
 take him over?" I exclaimed. 
 
 Mr. Watling smiled. 
 
 "You mean, instead of his mines and railroads and other 
 properties?" 
 
 "Yes. But that's your idea. Don't you remember you 
 said something of the kind the night of the election, years 
 ago ? It occurred to me to-day, when I was looking at him." 
 
 "Yes," he agreed thoughtfully, "if some American genius 
 could find a way to legalize that power and utilize the men 
 who created it the worst of our problems would be solved. 
 A man with his ability has a right to power, and none would 
 respond more quickly or more splendidly to a call of the 
 government than he. All this fight is waste, Hugh, damned 
 waste of the nation's energy." Mr. Watling seldom swore. 
 "Look at the President! There's a man of remarkable 
 ability, too. And those two oughtn't to be fighting each 
 other. The President's right, in a way. Yes, he is, though 
 I've got to oppose him." 
 
 I smiled at this from Theodore Watling, though I admired 
 him the more for it. And suddenly, oddly, I happened to 
 remember what Krebs had said, that our troubles were not 
 due to individuals, but to a disease that had developed in 
 industrial society. If the day should come when such men 
 as the President and the great banker would be working 
 together, was it not possible, too, that the idea of Mr. Watling 
 and the vision of Krebs might coincide ? I was struck by a 
 certain seeming similarity in their views ; but Mr. Watling 
 interrupted this train of thought by continuing to express his 
 own. 
 
 "Well, they're running right into a gale when they 
 might be sailing with it," he said. 
 
 "You think we'll have more trouble?" I asked, 
 
 "More and more," he replied. "It'll be worse before it's 
 better, I'm afraid." At this moment a club servant an 
 nounced his cab, and he rose. " Well, good-bye, my son," he
 
 374 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 said. "I'll hope to see you in Washington soon. And re 
 member there's no one thinks any more of you than I do." 
 
 I escorted him to the door, and it was with a real pang I 
 saw him wave to me from his cab as he drove away. My 
 affection for him was never more alive than in this hour when, 
 for the first time in my experience, he had given real evidence 
 of an inner anxiety and lack of confidence in the future.
 
 XXI 
 
 IN spite of that unwonted note of pessimism from Mr. 
 Watling, I went home in a day or two flushed with my new 
 honours, and it was impossible not to be conscious of the 
 fact that my aura of prestige was increased tremen 
 dously increased by the recognition I had received. 
 A certain subtle deference in the attitude of the small 
 minority who owed allegiance to the personage by whom 
 I had been summoned was more satisfying than if I 
 had been acclaimed at the station by thousands of my 
 fellow-citizens who knew nothing of my journey and of its 
 significance, even though it might have a concern for them. 
 To men like Berringer, Grierson and Tallant and our lesser 
 great lights the banker was a semi-mythical figure, and many 
 tunes on the day of my return I was stopped on the street 
 to satisfy the curiosity of my friends as to my impressions. 
 Had he, for instance, let fall any opinions, prognostications 
 on the political and financial situation? Dickinson and 
 Scherer were the only other men in the city who had the 
 honour of a personal acquaintance with him, and Scherer was 
 away, abroad, gathering furniture and pictures for the house 
 in New York Nancy had predicted, and which he had al 
 ready begun to build ! With Dickinson I lunched in private, 
 in order to give him a detailed account of the conference. 
 By five o'clock I was ringing the door-bell of Nancy's new 
 mansion on Grant Avenue. It was several blocks below my 
 own. 
 
 "Well, how does it feel to be sent for by the great sultan ? " 
 she asked, as I stood before her fire. "Of course I have 
 always known that ultimately he couldn't get along without 
 you." 
 
 375
 
 376 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 " Even if he has been a little late in realizing it," I retorted. 
 
 "Sit down and tell me all about him," she commanded. 
 " I met him once, when Ham had the yacht at Bar Harbor." 
 
 "And how did he strike you?" 
 
 "As somewhat wrapped up in himself," said Nancy. 
 
 We laughed together. 
 
 "Oh, I fell a victim," she went on. "I might have sailed 
 off with him, if he had asked me." 
 
 "I'm surprised he didn't ask you." 
 
 "I suspect that it was not quite convenient," she said. 
 "Women are secondary considerations to sultans, we're all 
 very well when they haven't anything more serious to occupy 
 them. Of course that's why they fascinate us. What did 
 he want with you, Hugh?" 
 
 " He was evidently afraid that the government would win 
 the coal roads suit unless I was retained." 
 
 "More laurels!" she sighed. "I suppose I ought to be 
 proud to know you." 
 
 "That's exactly what I've been trying to impress on you 
 all these years," I declared. "I've laid the laurels at your 
 feet, in vain." 
 
 She sat with her head back on the cushions, surveying me. 
 
 "Your dress is very becoming," I said irrelevantly. 
 
 "I hoped it would meet your approval," she mocked. 
 
 " I've been trying to identify the shade. It's elusive 
 like you." 
 
 "Don't be banal. . . . What is the colour?" 
 
 "Poinsetta!" 
 
 "Pretty nearly," she agreed, critically. 
 
 I took the soft crepe between my fingers. 
 
 "Poet!" she smiled. "No, it isn't quite poinsetta. It's 
 nearer the red-orange of a tree I remember one autumn, in 
 the White Mountains, with the setting sun on it. But that 
 wasn't what we were talking about. Laurels! Your 
 laurels." 
 
 "My laurels," I repeated. " Such as they are, I fling them 
 into your lap."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 377 
 
 "Do you think they increase your value to me, Hugh? 1 " 
 
 "I don't know," I said thickly. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "No, it's you I like not the laurels." 
 
 " But if you care for me ? " I began. 
 
 She lifted up her hands and folded them behind the knot of 
 her hair. 
 
 "It's extraordinary how little you have changed since we 
 were children, Hugh. You are still sixteen years old, 
 that's why I like you. If you got to be the sultan of sultans 
 yourself, I shouldn't like you any better, or any worse." 
 
 "And yet you have just declared that power appeals to 
 you!" 
 
 "Power yes. But a woman a woman like me 
 wants to be first, or nothing." 
 
 "You are first," I asserted. "You always have been, if 
 you had only realized it." 
 
 She gazed up at me dreamily. 
 
 "If you had only realized it! If you had only realized 
 that all I wanted of you was to be yourself. It wasn't what you 
 achieved. I didn't want you to be like Ralph or the others." 
 
 " Myself ? What are you trying to say ? " 
 
 "Yourself. Yes, that is what I like about you. If you 
 hadn't been in such a hurry if you hadn't misjudged me 
 so. It was the power in you, the craving, the ideal in you 
 that I cared for not the fruits of it. The fruits would 
 have come naturally. But you forced them, Hugh, for 
 quicker results." 
 f "What kind of fruits?" I asked. 
 
 "Ah," she exclaimed, "how can I tell what they might 
 have been! You have striven and striven, you have done 
 extraordinary things, but have they made you any happier ? 
 have you got what you want?" 
 
 I stooped down and seized her wrists from behind her head. 
 
 "I want you, Nancy," I said. "I have always wanted 
 you. You've more wonderful to-day than you have ever 
 been. I could find myself with you."
 
 378 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 She closed her eyes. A dreamy smile was on her face, 
 and she lay unresisting, very still. In that tremendous 
 moment, for which it seemed I had waited a lifetime, I 
 could have taken her in my arms and yet I did not. I 
 could not tell why : perhaps it was because she seemed to 
 have passed beyond me far beyond in realization. 
 And she was so still ! 
 
 "We have missed the way, Hugh," she whispered, at last. 
 
 "But we can find it again, if we seek it together," I urged. 
 
 "Ah, if I only could!" she said. "I could have once. 
 But now I'm afraid afraid of getting lost." Slowly she 
 straightened up, her hands falling into her lap. I seized them 
 again, I was on my knees in front of her, before the fire, 
 and she, intent, looking down at me, into me, through me 
 it seemed at something beyond which yet was me. 
 
 "Hugh," she asked, "what do you believe? Anything?'* 
 
 "What do I believe?" 
 
 "Yes. I don't mean any cant, cut-and-dried morality. 
 The world is getting beyond that. But have you, in your 
 secret soul, any religion at all ? Do you ever think about it ? 
 I'm not speaking about anything orthodox, but some religion 
 even a tiny speck of it, a germ harmonizing with life, 
 with that power we feel in us we seek to express and con 
 tinually violate." 
 
 " Nancy ! " I exclaimed. 
 
 "Answer me answer me truthfully," she said. . . . 
 
 I was silent, my thoughts whirling like dust atoms in a 
 storm. 
 
 "You have always taken things taken what you wanted. 
 But they haven't satisfied you, convinced you that that is 
 all of life." 
 
 "Do you mean that we should renounce?" I faltered. 
 
 "I don't know what I mean. I am askmg, Hugh, 
 asking. Haven't you any clew? Isn't there any voice in 
 you, anywhere, deep down, that can tell me? give me a 
 hint? just a little one? " 
 
 I was wracked. My passion had not left me, it seemed
 
 A FAR COUNTRY c . 379 
 
 to be heightened, and I pressed her hands against her knees. 
 It was incredible that my hands should be there, in hers> 
 feeling her. Her beauty seemed as fresh, as unwasted as 
 the day, long since, when I despaired of her. And yet 
 and yet against the tumult and beating of this passion 
 striving to throb down thought, thought strove. Though I 
 saw her as a woman, my senses and my spirit commingled 
 and swooned together. 
 
 " This is life," I murmured, scarcely knowing what I said. 
 
 "Oh, my dear !" she cried, and her voice pierced me witK 
 pain, " are we to be lost, overpowered, engulfed, swept dojwn 
 its stream, to come up below drifting wreckage ? Where, 
 then, would be your power? I'm not speaking of myself. 
 Isn't life more than that ? Isn't it in us, too, in you ? 
 Think, Hugh. Is there no god, anywhere, hut this force 
 we feel, restlessly creating only to destroy? You must an 
 swer you must find out." 
 
 I cannot describe the pleading passirbn in her voice, as 
 though hell and heaven were wrestling in it. The woman I 
 saw, tortured yet uplifted, did not s<jem to be Nancy, yet it 
 was the woman I loved more than life itself and always had 
 loved. 
 
 "I can't think," I answered desperately, "I can only feel 
 and I can't express what I feel. It's mixed, it's dim, 
 and yet bright and shining -, it's you." 
 
 "No, it's you," she said vehemently. "You must inter 
 pret it." Her voice sanfc. "Could it be God?" she asked. 
 
 "God!" I exclaimed , sharply. 
 
 Her hands fell away from mine. . . . The silence was 
 broken only by the cnackling of the wood fire as a log turned 
 over and fell. Nev<3r before, in all our intercourse that I 
 could remember, haxi she spoken to me about religion. . . . 
 With that appareat snap in continuity incomprehensible to 
 the masculine mi nd her feminine mood had changed. 
 Elements I had never suspected, in Nancy, awe, even a 
 hint of despair, entered into it, and when my hand found hers 
 again, the very quality of its convulsive pressure seemed to
 
 380 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 have changed. I knew then that it was her soul I loved 
 most ; I had been swept all unwittingly to its very altar. 
 
 "I believe it is God," I said. But she continued to gaze 
 at me, her lips parted, her eyes questioning. 
 
 "Why is it," she demanded, "that after all these centuries 
 of certainty we should have to start out to find him again ? 
 Why is it when something happens like like this, that we 
 should suddenly be torn with doubts about him, when 
 we have lived the best part of our lives without so much as 
 hinking of him ? " 
 
 ''Why should you have qualms?" I said. "Isn't this 
 enoug'.h ? and doesn't it promise all ? " 
 
 "I do^'t know. They're not qualms in the old sense." 
 She smileo? down at me a little tearfully. "Hugh, do you 
 remember when we used to go to Sunday-school at Dr. 
 Pound's church, and Mrs. Ewan taught us? I really be 
 lieved something then that Moses brought down the ten 
 commandments of God from the mountain, all written out 
 definitely for ever and ever. And I used to think of mar 
 riage" (I felt a sharp twinge), "of marriage as something 
 sacred and inviolable, something ordained by God him 
 self. It ought to be so ^oughtn't it? That is the ideal." 
 
 "Yes but aren't you confusing ?" I began. 
 
 "I am confusing and confused. I shouldn't be I 
 shouldn't care if there weren't something in you, in me, in 
 our friendship, something I can't explain, something that 
 shines still through the fog and the smoke in which we have 
 lived our lives something which, 1 think, we saw clearer as 
 children. We have lost it in our hasty groping. Oh, Hugh, 
 I couldn't bear to think that we should never find it ! that it 
 doesn't really exist ! Because I seem to feel it. But can 
 we find it this way, my dear ? " Her han d tightened on mine. 
 
 "But if the force drawing us together, that has always 
 drawn us together, is God?" I objected. 
 
 "I asked you," she said. "The time must come when 
 you must answer, Hugh. It may be too late, but you must 
 answer."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 381 
 
 "I believe in taking life in my own hands," I said. 
 
 "It ought to be life," said Nancy. "It it might have 
 been life. ... It is only when a moment, a moment like 
 this comes that the quality of what we have lived seems so 
 tarnished, that the atmosphere which we ourselves have 
 helped to make is so sordid. When I think of the intrigues, 
 and divorces, the self-indulgences, when I think of my own 
 marriage " her voice caught. " How are we going to better 
 it, Hugh, this way? Am I to get that part of you I love, 
 and are you to get what you crave in me? Can we just 
 seize happiness ? Will it not elude us just as much as though 
 we believed firmly in the ten commandments?" 
 
 "No," I declared obstinately. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "What I'm afraid of is that the world isn't made that 
 way for you for me. We're permitted to seize those 
 other things because they're just baubles, we've both found 
 out how worthless they are. And the worst of it is they've 
 made me a coward, Hugh. It isn't that I couldn't do without 
 them, I've come to depend on them in another way. It's 
 because they give me a certain protection, do you see ? 
 they've come to stand in the place of the real convictions 
 we've lost. And well, we've taken the baubles, can we 
 reach out our hands and take this ? Won't we be punished 
 for it, frightfully punished?" 
 
 "I don't care if we are," I said, and surprised myself. 
 
 "But I care. It's weak, it's cowardly, but it's so. And 
 yet I want to face the situation I'm trying to get you ta 
 face it, to realize how terrible it is." 
 
 "I only know that I want you above everything else in 
 the world I'll take care of you " 
 
 I seized her arms, I drew her down to me. 
 
 "Don't!" she cried. "Oh, don't!" and struggled to her 
 feet and stood before me panting. "You must go away now 
 please, Hugh. I can't bear any more I want to think." 
 
 I released her. She sank into the chair and hid her 
 face in her hands. .
 
 382 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 As may be imagined, the incident I have just related threw 
 my life into a tangle that would have floored a less per 
 sistent optimist and romanticist than myself, yet I became 
 fairly accustomed to treading what the old moralists called 
 the devious paths of sin. In my passion I had not hesitated 
 to lay down the doctrine that the courageous and the strong 
 took what they wanted, a doctrine of which I had been a 
 consistent disciple in the professional and business realm. 
 A logical buccaneer, superman, "master of life" would 
 promptly have extended this doctrine to the realm of sex. 
 Nancy was the mate for me, and Nancy and I, our develop 
 ment, was all that mattered, especially my develop 
 ment. Let every man and woman look out for his or her 
 development, and in the end the majority of people would 
 be happy. This was going Adam Smith one better. When 
 it came to putting that theory into practice, however, one 
 needed convictions: Nancy had been right when she had 
 implied that convictions were precisely what we lacked; 
 what our world in general lacked. We had desires, yes: 
 convictions, no. What we wanted we got not by defying 
 the world, but by conforming to it : we were ready to defy 
 only when our desires overcame the resistance of our synapses, 
 and even then not until we should have exhausted every legal 
 and conventional means. 
 
 A superman with a wife and family he had acquired before 
 a great passion has made him a superman is in rather a pre 
 dicament, especially if he be one who has achieved such super- 
 humanity as he possesses not by challenging laws and con 
 ventions, but by getting around them. My wife and family 
 loved me; and paradoxically I still had affection for them, 
 or thought I had. But the superman creed is, " be yourself, 
 realize yourself, no matter how cruel you may have to be in 
 order to do so." One trouble with me was that remnants of 
 the Christian element of pity still clung to me. I would be 
 cruel if I had to, but I hoped I shouldn't have to : something
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 383 
 
 would turn up, something in the nature of an intervening 
 miracle that would make it easy for me. Perhaps Maude 
 would take the initiative and relieve me. . . . Nancy had 
 appealed for a justifying doctrine, and it was just what I 
 didn't have and couldn't evolve. In the meanwhile it was 
 quite in character that I should accommodate myself to a 
 situation that might well be called anomalous. 
 
 This "accommodation" was not unaccompanied by fever. 
 My longing to realize my love for Nancy kept me in a con 
 stant state of tension of "nerves"; for our relationship 
 had merely gone one step farther, we had reached a point 
 where we acknowledged that we loved each other, and para 
 doxically halted there ; Nancy clung to her demand for new 
 sanctions with a tenacity that amazed and puzzled and often 
 irritated me. And yet, when I look back upon it all, I can 
 see that some of the difficulty lay with me : if she had her 
 weakness which she acknowledged I had mine and 
 kept it to myself. It was part of my romantic nature not 
 to want to break her down. Perhaps I loved the ideal 
 better than the woman herself, though that scarcely seems 
 possible. 
 
 We saw each other constantly. And though we had instinc 
 tively begun to be careful, I imagine there was some talk 
 among our acquaintances. It is to be noted that the gossip 
 never became riotous, for we had always been friends, and 
 Nancy had a saving reputation for coldness. It seemed in 
 credible that Maude had not discovered my secret, but if she 
 knew of it, she gave no sign of her knowledge. Often, as I 
 looked at her, I wished she would. I can think of no more 
 expressive sentence in regard to her than the trite one that 
 she pursued the even tenor of her way ; and I found the very 
 perfection of her wifehood exasperating. Our relationship 
 would, I thought, have been more endurable if we had 
 quarrelled. And yet we had grown as far apart, in that big 
 house, as though we had been separated by a continent; 
 I lived in my apartments, she in hers ; she consulted me about 
 dinner parties and invitations ; for, since we had moved to
 
 384 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Grant Avenue, we entertained and went out more than before. 
 It seemed as though she were making every effort consistent 
 with her integrity and self-respect to please me. Outwardly 
 she conformed to the mould ; but I had long been aware that 
 inwardly a person had developed. It had not been a spon 
 taneous development, but one in resistance to pressure; 
 and was probably all the stronger for that reason. At times 
 her will revealed itself in astonishing and unexpected flashes, 
 as when once she announced that she was going to change 
 Matthew's school. 
 
 "He's old enough to go to boarding-school," I said. "I'll 
 look up a place for him." 
 
 "I don't wish him to go to boarding-school yet, Hugh," 
 she said quietly. 
 
 "But that's just what he needs," I objected. "He ought 
 to have the rubbing-up against other boys that boarding- 
 school will give him. Matthew is timid, he should have 
 learned to take care of himself. And he will make friend 
 ships that will help him in a larger school." 
 
 "I don't intend to send him," Maude said. 
 
 "But if I think it wise?" 
 
 "You ought to have begun to consider such things many 
 years ago. You have always been too busy to think of 
 the children. You have left them to me. I am doing the 
 best I can with them." 
 
 "But a man should have something to say about boys. 
 He understands them." 
 
 "You should have thought of that before." 
 
 "They haven't been old enough." 
 
 "If you had taken your share of responsibility for them, 
 I would listen to you." 
 
 "Maude!" I exclaimed reproachfully. 
 
 "No, Hugh," she went on, "you have been too busy 
 making money. You have left them to me. It is my task 
 to see that the money they are to inherit doesn't ruin 
 them." 
 
 "You talk as though it were a great fortune," I said. . . .
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 385 
 
 But I did not press the matter. I had a presentiment that 
 to press it might lead to unpleasant results. 
 
 It was this sense of not being free, of having gained every 
 thing but freedom that was at tunes galling in the extreme : 
 this sense of living with a woman for whom I had long ceased 
 to care, a woman with a baffling will concealed beneath an 
 unruffled and serene exterior. At moments I looked at her 
 across the table ; she did not seem to have aged much : 
 her complexion was as fresh, apparently, as the day when I 
 had first walked with her in the garden at Elkington; her 
 hair the same wonderful colour ; perhaps she had grown a little 
 stouter. There could be no doubt about the fact that her 
 chin was firmer, that certain lines had come into her face 
 indicative of what is called character. Beneath her pliability 
 she was now all firmness; the pliability had become a 
 mockery. It cannot be said that I went so far as to hate her 
 for this, when it was in my mind, but my feelings were 
 of a strong antipathy. And then again there were rare mo 
 ments when I was inexplicably drawn to her, not by love 
 and passion; I melted a little in pity, perhaps, when 
 my eyes were opened and I saw the tragedy, yet I am not 
 referring now to such feelings as these. I am speaking of 
 the times when I beheld her as the blameless companion of 
 the years, the mother of my children, the woman I was used to 
 and should by all canons I had known have loved. . . . 
 
 And there were the children. Days and weeks passed 
 when I scarcely saw them, and then some little incident would 
 happen to give me an unexpected wrench and plunge me into 
 unhappiness. One evening I came home from a long talk 
 with Nancy that had left us both wrought up, and I had 
 entered the library before I heard voices. Maude was 
 seated under the lamp at the end of the big room reading 
 from " Don Quixote" ; Matthew and Biddy were at her feet, 
 and Moreton, less attentive, at a little distance was taking 
 apart a mechanical toy. I would have tiptoed out, but Biddy 
 caught sight of me. 
 
 "It's father!" she cried, getting up and flying to me. 
 2c
 
 386 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, father, do come and listen ! The story's so exciting, isn't 
 it, Matthew?" 
 
 I looked down into the boy's eyes shining with an expression 
 that suddenly pierced my heart with a poignant memory 
 of myself. Matthew was far away among the mountains 
 and castles of Spain. 
 
 "Matthew," demanded his sister, "why did he want to go 
 fighting with all those people?" 
 
 "Because he was dotty," supplied Moreton, who had an 
 interesting habit of picking up slang. 
 
 "It wasn't at all," cried Matthew, indignantly, interrupt 
 ing Maude's rebuke of his brother. 
 
 "What was it, then?" Moreton demanded. 
 
 "You wouldn't understand if I told you," Matthew was 
 retorting, when Maude put her hand on his lips. 
 
 "I think that's enough for to-night," she said, as she closed 
 the book. "There are lessons to do and father wants 
 to read his newspaper in quiet." 
 
 This brought a protest from Biddy. 
 
 "Just a little more, mother ! Can't we go into the school 
 room? We shan't disturb father there." 
 
 "I'll read to them a few minutes," I said. 
 
 As I took the volume from her and sat down Maude shot 
 at me a swift look of surprise. Even Matthew glanced at 
 me curiously ; and in his glance I had, as it were, a sudden 
 revelation of the boy's perplexity concerning me. He was 
 twelve, rather tall for his age, and the delicate modelling of 
 his face resembled my father's. He had begun to think. 
 What did he think of me ? 
 
 Biddy clapped her hands, and began to dance across the 
 carpet. 
 
 "Father's going to read to us, father's going to read to us," 
 she cried, finally clambering up on my knee and snuggling 
 against me. 
 
 "Where is the place?" I asked. 
 
 But Maude had left the room. She had gone swiftly and 
 silently.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 387 
 
 "I'll find it," said Moreton. . . . 
 
 I began to read, but I scarcely knew what I was reading, 
 my fingers tightening over Biddy's little knee. . . . 
 
 Presently Miss Allsop, the governess, came in. She had 
 been sent by Maude. There was wistfulness in Biddy's 
 voice as I kissed her good night. 
 
 "Father, if you would only read oftener!" she said, "I 
 like it when you read better than anyone else." . . . 
 
 Maude and I were alone that night. As we sat in the 
 library after our somewhat formal, perfunctory dinner, I 
 ventured to ask her why she had gone away when I had 
 offered to read. 
 
 "I couldn't bear it, Hugh," she answered. 
 
 "Why?" I asked, intending to justify myself. 
 
 She got up abruptly, and left me. I did not follow her. 
 In my heart I understood why. . . . 
 
 Some years had passed since Ralph's prophecy had come 
 true, and Perry and the remaining Blackwoods had been 
 "relieved" of the Boyne Street line. The process need not 
 be gone into in detail, being the time-honoured one employed 
 in the Ribblevale affair of "running down" the line, or per 
 haps it would be better to say " showing it up." It had not 
 justified its survival in our efficient days, it had held out 
 thanks to Perry with absurd and anachronous per 
 sistence against the inevitable consolidation. Mr. -Tallant's 
 newspaper had published many complaints of the age and 
 scarcity of the cars, etc. ; and alarmed holders of securities, in 
 whose vaults they had lain since tune immemorial, began to 
 sell. ... I saw little of Perry in those days, as I have ex 
 plained, but one day I met him in the Hambleton Building, 
 and he was white. 
 
 "Your friends are doing this, Hugh," he said. 
 
 "Doing what?" 
 
 "Undermining the reputation of a company as sound as
 
 388 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 any in this city, a company that's not overcapitalized, 
 either. And we're giving better service right now than any of 
 your consolidated lines." . . . 
 
 He was in no frame of mind to argue with ; the conversation 
 was distinctly unpleasant. I don't remember what I said 
 something to the effect that he was excited, that his language 
 was extravagant. But after he had walked off and left me 
 I told Dickinson that he ought to be given a chance, and one 
 of our younger financiers, Murphree, went to Perry and 
 pointed out that he had nothing to gain by obstruction; 
 if he were only reasonable, he might come into the new cor 
 poration on the same terms with the others. 
 
 All that Murphree got for his pains was to be ordered out 
 of the office by Perry, who declared that he was being bribed 
 to desert the other stockholders. 
 
 "He utterly failed to see the point of view," Murphree 
 reported in some astonishment to Dickinson. 
 
 "What else did he say?" Mr. Dickinson asked. 
 
 Murphree hesitated. 
 
 "Well what?" the banker insisted. 
 
 "He wasn't quite himself," said Murphree, who was a 
 comparative newcomer in the city and had a respect for the 
 Blackwood name. "He said that that was the custom of 
 thieves : when they were discovered, they offered to divide. 
 ... He swore that he would get justice in the courts." 
 
 Mr. Dickinson smiled. . . . 
 
 Thus Perry, through his obstinacy and inability to adapt 
 himself to new conditions, had gradually lost both caste and 
 money. He resigned from the Boyne Club. I was rather 
 sorry for him. Tom naturally took the matter to heart, but 
 he never spoke of it ; I found that I was seeing less of him, 
 though we continued to dine there at intervals, and he still 
 came to my house to see the children. Maude continued to 
 see Lucia. For me, the situation would have been more 
 awkward had I been less occupied, had my relationship 
 with Maude been a closer one. Neither did she mention 
 Perry in those days. The income that remained to him
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 389 
 
 i 
 
 being sufficient for him and his family to live on comfortably, 
 he began to devote most of his time to various societies of a 
 semipublic nature until in the spring of which I write 
 his activities suddenly became concentrated in the organiza 
 tion of a " Citizens Union," whose avowed object was to make 
 a< campaign against "graft" and political corruption the 
 following autumn. This announcement and the call for a 
 mass-meeting in Kingdon Hall was received by the news 
 papers with a good-natured ridicule, and in influential 
 quarters it was generally hinted that this was Mr. Blackwood's 
 method of "getting square" for having been deprived of the 
 Boyne Street line. It was quite characteristic of Ralph 
 Hambleton that he should go, out of curiosity, to the gather 
 ing at Kingdon Hall, and drop into my office the next morn 
 ing. 
 
 "Well, Hughie, they're after you," he said with a grin. 
 
 "After me? Why not include yourself?" 
 
 He sat down and stretched his long legs and his long arms, 
 and smiled as he gaped. 
 
 "Oh, they'll never get me," he said. And I knew, as I 
 gazed at him, that they never would. 
 
 " What sort of things did they say ? " I asked. 
 
 " Haven't you read the Pilot and the Mail and State f " 
 
 " I just glanced over them. Did they call names ? " 
 
 "Call names! I should say they did. They got drunk 
 on it, worked themselves up like dervishes. They didn't 
 cuss you personally, that'll come later, of course. Judd 
 Jason got the heaviest shot, but they said he couldn't exist 
 a minute if it wasn't for the ' respectable ' crowd capi 
 talists, financiers, millionaires and their legal tools. Fact 
 is, they spoke a good deal of truth, first and last, in a fool kind 
 of way." 
 
 "Truth!" I exclaimed irritatedly. 
 
 Ralph laughed. He was evidently enjoying himself. 
 
 "Is any of it news to you, Hughie, old boy?" 
 
 "It's an outrage." 
 
 "I think it's funny," said Ralph. "We haven't had such
 
 390 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 a circus for years. Never had. Of course I shouldn't like 
 to see you go behind the bars, not that. But you 
 fellows can't expect to go on forever skimming off the cream 
 without having somebody squeal sometime. You ought 
 to be reasonable." 
 
 "You've skimmed as much cream as anybody else." 
 
 " You've skimmed the cream, Hughie, you and Dickinson 
 and Scherer and Grierson and the rest, I've only filled 
 m y J u g- Well, these fellows are going to have a regular 
 roof-raising campaign, take the lid off of everything, dump 
 out the red-light district some of our friends are so 
 fond of." 
 
 "Dump it where?" I asked curiously. 
 
 "Oh," answered Ralph, "they didn't say. Out into the 
 country, anywhere." 
 
 "But that's damned foolishness," I declared. 
 
 "Didn't say it wasn't," Ralph admitted. "They talked 
 a lot of that, too, incidentally. They're going to close the 
 saloons and dance halls and make this city sadder than 
 heaven. When they get through, it'll all be over but the 
 inquest." 
 
 "What did Perry do?" I asked. 
 
 "Well, he opened the meeting, made a nice, precise, 
 gentlemanly speech. Greenhalge and a few young highbrows 
 and a reformed crook named Harrod did most of the hair- 
 raising. They're going to nominate Greenhalge for mayor, 
 and he told 'em something about that little matter of the 
 school board, and said he would talk more later on. If 
 one of the ablest lawyers in the city hadn't been hired by 
 the respectable crowd and a lot of other queer work done, the 
 treasurer and purchasing agent would be doing tune. They 
 seemed to be interested, all right." 
 
 I turned over some papers on my desk, just to show Ralph 
 that he hadn't succeeded in disturbing me. 
 
 "Who was in the audience? anyone you ever heard of?" 
 I asked. 
 
 " Sure thing. Your cousin Robert Breck, and that son-in-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 391 
 
 law of his what's his name ? And some other representa 
 tives of our oldest families, Alec Pound. He's a reformer 
 now, you know. They put him on the resolutions com 
 mittee. Sam Ogilvy was there, he'd be classed as re 
 spectably conservative. And one of the Ewanses. I could 
 name a few others, if you pressed me. That brother of 
 Fowndes who looks like an up-state minister. A lot of 
 women Miller Gorse's sister, Mrs. Datchet, who never 
 approved of Miller. Quite a genteel gathering, I give you 
 my word, and all astonished and mad as hell when the speak 
 ing was over. Mrs. Datchet said she had been living in a 
 den of iniquity and vice, and didn't know it." 
 
 "It must have been amusing," I said. 
 
 "It was," said Ralph. "It'll be more amusing later on. 
 Oh, yes, there was another fellow who spoke I forgot to men 
 tion that queer Dick who was in your class, Krebs, 
 got the school board evidence, looked as if he'd come in 
 by freight. He wasn't as popular as the rest, but he's got 
 more sense than all of them put together." 
 
 "Why wasn't he popular?" 
 
 " Well, he didn't crack up the American people, said 
 they deserved all they got, that they'd have to learn to think 
 straight and be straight before they could expect a square 
 deal. The truth was, they secretly envied these rich men 
 who were exploiting their city, and just as long as they envied 
 them they hadn't any right to complain of them. He was 
 going into this campaign to tell the truth, but to tell all 
 sides of it, and if they wanted reform, they'd have to reform 
 themselves first. I admired his nerve, I must say." 
 
 "He always had that," I remarked. "How did they 
 take it?" 
 
 " Well, they didn't like it much, but I think most of them 
 had a respect for him. I know I did. He has a whole lot 
 of assurance, an air of knowing what he's talking about, and 
 apparently he doesn't give a continental whether he's popular 
 or not. Besides, Greenhalge had cracked him up to the skies 
 for the work he'd done for the school board."
 
 392 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "You talk as if he'd converted you," I said. 
 
 Ralph laughed as he rose and stretched himself. 
 
 "Oh, I'm only the intelligent spectator, you ought to 
 know that by this time, Hughie. But I thought it might 
 interest you, since you'll have to go on the stump and refute 
 it all. That'll be a nice job. So long." 
 
 And he departed. Of course I knew that he had been 
 baiting me, his scent for the weaknesses of his friends being 
 absolutely fiendish. I was angry because he had succeeded, 
 because he knew he had succeeded. All the morning un 
 easiness possessed me, and I found it difficult to concentrate 
 on the affairs I had in hand. I felt premonitions, which I 
 tried in vain to suppress, that the tide of the philosophy of 
 power and might were starting to ebb : I scented vague 
 calamities ahead, calamities I associated with Krebs; and 
 when I went out to the Club for lunch this sense of uneasiness, 
 instead of being dissipated, was increased. Dickinson was 
 there, and Scherer, who had just got back from Europe; 
 the talk fell on the Citizens Union, which Scherer belittled 
 with an ah* of consequence and pompousness that struck me 
 disagreeably, and with an eye newly critical I detected in 
 him a certain disintegration, deterioration . Having dismissed 
 the reformers, he began to tell of his experiences abroad, 
 referring in one way or another to the people of consequence 
 who had entertained him. 
 
 "Hugh," said Leonard Dickinson to me as we walked to 
 the bank together, " Scherer will never be any good any more. 
 Too much prosperity. And he's begun to have his nails 
 manicured." 
 
 After I had left the bank president an uncanny fancy struck 
 me that in Adolf Scherer I had before me a concrete example 
 of the effect of my philosophy on the individual. . . . 
 
 Nothing seemed to go right that spring, and yet nothing 
 was absolutely wrong. At times I became irritated, be 
 wildered, out of tune, and unable to understand why. The 
 weather itself was uneasy, tepid, with long spells of hot 
 wind and dust. I no longer seemed to find refuge in my
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 393 
 
 work. I was unhappy at home. After walking for many 
 years in confidence and security along what appeared to be 
 a certain path, I had suddenly come out into a vague country 
 in which it was becoming more and more difficult to recog 
 nize landmarks. I did not like to confess this ; and yet I 
 heard within me occasional whispers. Could it be that I, 
 Hugh Paret, who had always been so positive, had made a 
 mess of my life ? There were moments when the pattern of 
 it appeared to have fallen apart, resolved itself into pieces 
 that refused to fit into each other. 
 
 Of course my relationship with Nancy had something to 
 do with this. . 
 
 One evening late in the spring, after dinner, Maude came 
 into the library. 
 
 "Are you busy, Hugh?" she asked. 
 
 I put down my newspapers. 
 
 " Because," she went on, as she took a chair near the table 
 where I was writing, "I wanted to tell you that I have de 
 cided to go to Europe, and take the children." 
 
 "To Europe!" I exclaimed. The significance of the an 
 nouncement failed at once to register in my brain, but I was 
 aware of a shock. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "When?" I asked. 
 
 " Right away. The end of this month." 
 
 "For the summer?" 
 
 "I haven't decided how long I shall stay." 
 
 I stared at her in bewilderment. In contrast to the agita 
 tion I felt rising within me, she was extraordinarily calm, 
 unbelievably so. 
 
 " But where do you intend to go in Europe ? " 
 
 " I shall go to London for a month or so, and after that to 
 some quiet place in France, probably at the sea, where the 
 children can learn French and German. After that, I have 
 no plans."
 
 394 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "But you talk as if you might stay indefinitely." 
 
 "I haven't decided," she repeated. 
 
 " But why why are you doing this ? " 
 
 I would have recalled the words as soon as I had spoken 
 them. There was the slightest unsteadiness in her voice as 
 she replied : 
 
 "Is it necessary to go into that, Hugh? Wouldn't it be 
 useless as well as a little painful ? Surely, going to Europe 
 without one's husband is not an unusual thing in these 
 days. Let it just be understood that I want to go, that 
 the children have arrived at an age when it will do them 
 good." 
 
 I got up and began to walk up and down the room, while 
 she watched me with a silent calm which was incomprehen 
 sible. In vain I summoned my faculties to meet it. 
 
 I had not thought her capable of such initiative. 
 
 "I can't see why you want to leave me," I said at last, 
 though with a full sense of the inadequacy of the remark, 
 and a suspicion of its hypocrisy. 
 
 1 "That isn't quite true," she answered. "In the first 
 place, you don't need me. I am not of the slightest use in 
 your life, I haven't been a factor in it for years. You ought 
 never to have married me, it was all a terrible mistake. 
 I began to realize that after we had been married a few 
 months even when we were on our wedding trip. But I 
 was too inexperienced perhaps too weak to acknowledge 
 it to myself. In the last few years I have come to see it 
 plainly. I should have been a fool if I hadn't. I am not 
 your wife in any real sense of the word, I cannot hold you, 
 I cannot even interest you. It's a situation that no woman 
 with self-respect can endure." 
 
 " Aren't those rather modern sentiments, for you, Maude ? " 
 I said. 
 
 She flushed a little, but otherwise retained her remarkable 
 composure. 
 
 "I don't care whether they are 'modern' or not, I only 
 know that my position has become impossible."
 
 'I WANT YOU, NANCY," I SAID, "I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED YOU."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 395 
 
 I walked to the other end of the room, and stood facing the 
 carefully drawn curtains of the windows ; fantastically, they 
 seemed to represent the impasse to which my mind had come. 
 Did she intend, ultimately, to get a divorce? I dared not 
 ask her. The word rang horribly in my ears, though un- 
 pronounced ; and I knew then that I lacked her courage, and 
 the knowledge was part of my agony. 
 
 I turned. 
 
 " Don't you think you've overdrawn things, Maude 
 exaggerated them? No marriages are perfect. You've 
 let your mind dwell until it has become inflamed on matters 
 which really don't amount to much." 
 
 "I was never saner, Hugh," she replied instantly. And 
 indeed I was forced to confess that she looked it. That new 
 Maude I had seen emerging of late years seemed now 
 to have found herself; she was no longer the woman I 
 had married, yielding, willing to overlook, anxious to 
 please, living in me. 
 
 " I don't influence you, or help you in any way. I never 
 have." 
 
 "Oh, that's not true," I protested. 
 
 But she cut me short, going on inexorably : 
 
 "I am merely your housekeeper, and rather a poor one 
 at that, from your point of view. You ignore me. I am 
 not blaming you for it you are made that way. It's true 
 that you have always supported me in luxury, that might 
 have been enough for another woman. It isn't enough for 
 me I, too, have a life to live, a soul to be responsible for. 
 It's not for my sake so much as for the children's that I 
 don't want it to be crushed." 
 
 "Crushed!" I repeated. 
 
 " Yes. You are stifling it. I say again that I'm not blam 
 ing you, Hugh. You are made differently from me. All 
 you care for, really, is your career. You may think that 
 you care, at tunes, for other things, but it isn't so." 
 
 I took, involuntarily, a deep breath. Would she mention 
 Nancy? Was it in reality Nancy who had brought about
 
 396 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 this crisis? And did Maude suspect the closeness of that 
 relationship ? 
 
 Suddenly I found myself begging her not to go ; the more 
 astonishing since, if at any time during the past winter this 
 solution had presented itself to me as a possibility, I should 
 eagerly have welcomed it ! But should I ever have had the 
 courage to propose a separation? I even wished to delude 
 myself now into believing that what she suggested was in 
 reality not a separation. I preferred to think of it as a trip. 
 ... A vision of freedom thrilled me, and yet I was wracked 
 and torn. I had an idea that she was suffering, that the 
 ordeal was a terrible one for her ; and at that moment there 
 crowded into my mind, melting me, incident after incident 
 of our past. 
 
 " It seems to me that we have got along pretty well to 
 gether, Maude. I have been negligent I'll admit it. But 
 I '11 try to do better in the future. And if you'll wait a 
 month or so, I '11 go to Europe with you, and we'll have a 
 good time." 
 
 She looked at me sadly, pityingly, I thought. 
 
 " No, Hugh, I 've thought it all out. You really don't 
 want me. You only say this because you are sorry for me, be 
 cause you dislike to have your feelings wrung. You needn't 
 be sorry for me, I shall be much happier away from you." 
 
 " Think it over, Maude," I pleaded. "I shall miss you 
 and the children. I haven't paid much attention to them, 
 either, but I am fond of them, and depend upon them, too." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "It's no use, Hugh. I tell you I've thought it all out. 
 You don't care for the children, you were never meant to 
 have any." 
 
 "Aren't you rather severe in your judgments?" 
 
 "I don't think so," she answered. "I'm willing to admit 
 my faults, that I am a failure so far as you are concerned. 
 Your ideas of life and mine are far apart." 
 
 "I suppose," I exclaimed bitterly, "that you are referring 
 to my professional practices."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 397 
 
 A note of weariness crept into her voice. I might have 
 known that she was near the end of her strength. 
 
 "No, I don't think it's that," she said dispassionately. 
 "I prefer to put it down, that part of it, to a fundamental 
 difference of ideas. I do not feel qualified to sit in judgment 
 on that part of your life, although I'll admit that many of 
 the things you have done, in common with the men with 
 whom you are associated, have seemed to me unjust and 
 inconsiderate of the rights and feelings of others. You have 
 alienated some of your best friends. If I were to arraign 
 you at all, it would be on the score of heartlessness. But 
 I suppose it isn't your fault, that you haven't any heart." 
 
 "That's unfair," I put in. 
 
 "I don't wish to be unfair," she replied. "Only, since 
 you ask me, I have to tell you that that is the way it seems 
 to me. I don't want to introduce the question of right and 
 wrong into this, Hugh, I'm not capable of unravelling it; 
 I can't put myself into your life, and see things from your 
 point of view, weigh your problems and difficulties. In 
 the first place, you won't let me. I think I understand 
 you, partly but only partly. You have kept yourself 
 shut up. But why discuss it ? I have made up my mind." 
 
 The legal aspect of the matter occurred to me. What 
 right had she to leave me? I might refuse to support her. 
 Yet even as these thoughts came I rejected them ; I knew 
 that it was not in me to press this point. And she could 
 always take refuge with her father; without the children, 
 of course. But the very notion sickened me. I could not 
 bear to think of Maude deprived of the children. I had 
 seated myself again at the table. I put my hand to my 
 forehead. 
 
 "Don't make it hard, Hugh," I heard her say, gently. 
 "Believe me, it is best. I know. There won't be any 
 talk about it, right away, at any rate. People will think 
 it natural that I should wish to go abroad for the summer. 
 And later well, the point of view about such affairs has 
 changed. They are better understood."
 
 398 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 She had risen. She was pale, still outwardly composed, 
 but I had a strange, hideous feeling that she was weeping 
 inwardly. 
 
 "Aren't you coming back ever?" I cried. 
 
 She did not answer at once. 
 
 "I don't know," she said, "I don't know," and left the 
 room abruptly. . . . 
 
 I wanted to follow her, but something withheld me. 
 I got up and walked around the room in a state of mind that 
 was near to agony, taking one of the neglected books out 
 of the shelves, glancing at its meaningless print, and replac 
 ing it ; I stirred the fire, opened the curtains and gazed 
 out into the street and closed them again. I looked around 
 me, a sudden intensity of hatred seized me for this big, 
 silent, luxurious house; I recalled Maude's presentiment 
 about it. Then, thinking I might still dissuade her, I went 
 slowly up the padded stairway to find her door locked ; 
 and a sense of the finality of her decision came over me. I 
 knew then that I could not alter it even were I to go all the 
 lengths of abjectness. Nor could I, I knew, have brought 
 myself to have feigned a love I did not feel. 
 
 What was it I felt? I could not define it. Amazement, 
 for one thing, that Maude with her traditional, Christian 
 view of marriage should have come to such a decision. I 
 went to my room, undressed mechanically and got into 
 bed. . . . 
 
 She gave no sign at the breakfast table the next morning 
 of having made the decision of the greatest moment in our 
 lives; she conversed as usual, asked about the news, re 
 proved the children for being noisy ; and when the children 
 had left the table there were no tears, reminiscences, re 
 criminations. In spite of the slight antagonism and envy 
 of which I was conscious, that she was thus superbly in 
 command of the situation, that she had developed her 
 pinions and was thus splendidly able to use them, my 
 admiration for her had never been greater. I made an 
 effort to achieve the frame of mind she suggested: since
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 399 
 
 she took it so calmly, why should I be tortured by the tragedy 
 of it ? Perhaps she had ceased to love me, after all ! Per 
 haps she felt nothing but relief. At any rate, I was grateful 
 to her, and I found a certain consolation, a sop to my pride in 
 the reflection that the initiative must have been hers to take. 
 I could not have deserted her. 
 
 "When do you think of leaving?" I asked. 
 
 "Two weeks from Saturday on the Olympic, if that is 
 convenient for you." Her manner seemed one of friendly 
 solicitude. "You will remain in the house this summer, 
 as usual, I suppose?" 
 
 "Yes," I said. 
 
 It was a sunny, warm morning, and I went downtown in 
 the motor almost blithely. It was the best solution after 
 all, and I had been a fool to oppose it. ... At the office, 
 there was much business awaiting me ; yet once in a while, 
 during the day, when the tension relaxed, the recollection 
 of what had happened flowed back into my consciousness. 
 Maude was going ! 
 
 I had telephoned Nancy, making an appointment for the 
 afternoon. Sometimes not too frequently we were in 
 the habit of going out into the country in one of her motors, 
 a sort of landaulet, I believe, in which we were separated 
 from the chauffeur by a glass screen. She was waiting for 
 me when I arrived, at four; and as soon as we had shot 
 clear of the city, "Maude is going away," I told her. 
 
 "Going away?" she repeated, struck more by the tone 
 of my voice than by what I had said. 
 
 " She announced last night that she was going abroad 
 indefinitely." 
 
 I had been more than anxious to see how Nancy would 
 take the news. A flush gradually deepened in her cheeks. 
 
 "You mean that she is going to leave you?" 
 
 " It looks that way. In fact, she as much as said so." 
 
 "Why? "said Nancy. 
 
 "Well, she explained it pretty thoroughly. Apparently, 
 it isn't a sudden decision," I replied, trying to choose my
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 words, to speak composedly as I repeated the gist of our 
 conversation. Nancy, with her face averted, listened in 
 silence a silence that continued some time after I had 
 ceased to speak. 
 
 "She didn't she didn't mention ?" the sentence 
 remained unfinished. 
 
 "No," I said quickly, "she didn't. She must know, of 
 course, but I'm sure that didn't enter into it." 
 
 Nancy's eyes as they returned to me were wet, and in them 
 was an expression I had never seen before, of pain, re 
 proach, of questioning. It frightened me. 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, how little you know !" she cried. 
 
 "What do you mean?" I demanded. 
 
 " That is what has brought her to this decision you and 
 I." 
 
 "You mean that that Maude loves me? That she is 
 jealous ? " I don't know how I managed to say it. 
 
 "No woman likes to think that she is a failure," murmured 
 Nancy. 
 
 "Well, but she isn't really," I insisted. "She could have 
 made another man happy a better man. It was all one 
 of those terrible mistakes our modern life seems to emphasize 
 so." 
 
 "She is a woman," Nancy said, with what seemed a 
 touch of vehemence. "It's useless to expect you to under 
 stand. . . . Do you remember what I said to you about 
 her? How I appealed to you when you married to try to 
 appreciate her ? " 
 
 "It wasn't that I didn't appreciate her," I interrupted, 
 surprised that Nancy should have recalled this, "she isn't 
 the woman for me, we aren't made for each other. It was 
 my mistake, my fault, I admit, but I don't agree with you 
 at all, that we had anything to do with her decision. It is 
 just the the culmination of a long period of incompatibility. 
 She has come to realize that she has only one life to live, and 
 she seems happier, more composed, more herself than she 
 has ever been since our marriage. Of course I don't mean to
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 401 
 
 say it isn't painful for her. . . . But I am sure she isn't 
 well, that it isn't because of our seeing one another," I con 
 cluded haltingly. 
 
 " She is finer than either of us, Hugh, far finer." 
 
 I did not relish this statement. 
 
 "She's fine, I admit. But I can't see how under the cir 
 cumstances any of us could have acted differently." And 
 Nancy not replying, I continued: "She has made up her 
 mind to go, I suppose I could prevent it by taking extreme 
 measures, but what good would it do ? Isn't it, after all, 
 the most sensible, the only way out of a situation that has 
 become impossible? Times have changed, Nancy, and you 
 yourself have been the first to admit it. Marriage is no 
 longer what it was, and people are coming to look upon it 
 more sensibly. In order to perpetuate the institution, as 
 it was, segregation, insulation, was the only course. Men 
 segregated their wives, women their husbands, the only 
 logical method of procedure, but it limited the individual. 
 Our mothers and fathers thought it scandalous if husband 
 or wife paid visits alone. It wasn't done. But our modern 
 life has changed all that. A marriage, to be a marriage, 
 should be proof against disturbing influences, should leave 
 the individuals free ; the binding element should be love, 
 not the force of an imposed authority. You seemed to 
 agree to all this." 
 
 "Yes, I know," she admitted. "But I cannot think that 
 happiness will ever grow out of unhappiness." 
 
 "But Maude will not be unhappy," I insisted. "She will 
 be happier, far happier, now that she has taken the step." 
 
 "Oh, I wish I thought so," Nancy exclaimed. "Hugh, 
 you always believe what you want to believe. And the 
 children. How can you bear to part with them ? " 
 
 I was torn, I had a miserable sense of inadequacy. 
 
 "I shall miss them," I said. "I have never really ap 
 preciated them. I admit I don't deserve to have them, 
 and I am willing to give them up for you, for Maude. ..." 
 
 We had made one of our favourite drives among the hills 
 
 2D
 
 402 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 on the far side of the Ashuela, and at six were back at Nancy's 
 house. I did not go in, but walked slowly homeward up 
 Grant Avenue. It had been a trying afternoon. I had not 
 expected, indeed, that Nancy would have rejoiced, but her 
 attitude, her silences, betraying, as they did, compunctions, 
 seemed to threaten our future happiness.
 
 XXII 
 
 ONE evening two or three days later I returned from the 
 office to gaze up at my house, to realize suddenly that it 
 would be impossible for me to live there, in those great, 
 empty rooms, alone ; and I told Maude that I would go to 
 the Club during her absence. I preferred to keep up the 
 fiction that her trip would only be temporary. She for 
 bore from contradicting me, devoting herself efficiently to 
 the task of closing the house, making it seem, somehow, a 
 rite, the final rite in her capacity as housewife. The 
 drawing-room was shrouded, and the library; the books 
 wrapped neatly in paper; a smell of camphor pervaded 
 the place ; the cheerful schoolroom was dismantled ; trunks 
 and travelling bags appeared. The solemn butler packed 
 my clothes, and I arranged for a room at the Club in the 
 wing that recently had been added for the accommodation 
 of bachelors and deserted husbands. One of the ironies 
 of those days was that the children began to suggest again 
 possibilities of happiness I had missed especially Matthew. 
 With all his gentleness, the boy seemed to have a precocious 
 understanding of the verities, and the capacity for suffering 
 which as a child I had possessed. But he had more self- 
 control. Though he looked forward to the prospect of new 
 scenes and experiences with the anticipation natural to his 
 temperament, I thought he betrayed at moments a certain 
 intuition as to what was going on. 
 
 "When are you coming over, father?" he asked once. 
 " How soon will your business let you ? " 
 
 He had been brought up in the belief that my business 
 was a tyrant. 
 
 403
 
 404 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, soon', Matthew, sometime soon," I said. 
 
 I had a feeling that he understood me, not intellectually, 
 but emotionally. What a companion he might have 
 been ! . . . Moreton and Biddy moved me less. They 
 were more robust, more normal, less introspective and 
 imaginative ; Europe meant nothing to them, but they were 
 frankly delighted and excited at the prospect of going on 
 the ocean, asking dozens of questions about the great ship, 
 impatient to embark. . . . 
 
 "I shan't need all that, Hugh/' Maude said, when I 
 handed her a letter of credit. "I I intend to live quite 
 simply, and my chief expenses will be the children's educa 
 tion. I am going to give them the best, of course." 
 
 "Of course," I replied. "But I want you to live over 
 there as you have been accustomed to live here. It's not 
 exactly generosity on my part, I have enough, and more 
 than enough." 
 
 She took the letter. 
 
 "Another thing I'd rather you didn't go to New York 
 with us, Hugh. I know you are busy " 
 
 "Of course I'm going," I started to protest. 
 
 "No," she went on, firmly. "I'd rather you didn't. 
 The hotel people will put me on the steamer very comfort 
 ably, and there are other reasons why I do not wish it." 
 I did not insist. . . . On the afternoon of her departure, 
 when I came uptown, I found her pinning some roses on her 
 jacket. 
 
 "Perry and Lucia sent them," she informed me. She 
 maintained the friendly, impersonal manner to the very 
 end ; but my soul, as we drove to the train, was full of un- 
 probed wounds. I had had roses put in her compartments 
 in the car; Tom and Susan Peters were there with more 
 roses, and little presents for the children. Their cheerful 
 ness seemed forced, and I wondered whether they suspected 
 that Maude's absence would be prolonged. 
 
 "Write us often, and tell us all about it, dear," said 
 Susan, as she sat beside Maude and held her hand; Tom
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 405 
 
 had Biddy on his knee. Maude was pale, but smiling and 
 composed. 
 
 "I hope to get a little villa in France, near the sea," she 
 said. "I'll send you a photograph of it, Susan." 
 
 "And Chickabiddy, when she comes back, will be rattling 
 off French like a native," exclaimed Tom, giving her a 
 hug. 
 
 "I hate French," said Biddy, and she looked at him sol 
 emnly. "I wish you were coming along, Uncle Tom." 
 
 Bells resounded through the great station. The porter 
 warned us off. I kissed the children one by one, scarcely 
 realizing what I was doing. I kissed Maude. She received 
 my embrace passively. 
 
 " Good-bye, Hugh," she said. 
 
 I alighted, and stood on the platform as the train pulled 
 out. The children crowded to the windows, but Maude 
 did not appear. ... I found myself walking with Tom and 
 Susan past hurrying travellers and porters to the Decatur 
 Street entrance, where my automobile stood waiting. 
 
 "I'll take you home, Susan," I said. 
 
 " We're ever so much obliged, Hugh," she answered, "but 
 the street-cars go almost to Perry's door. We're dining 
 there." 
 
 Her eyes were filled with tears, and she seemed taller, 
 more ungainly than ever older. A sudden impression 
 of her greatness of heart was borne home to me, and I grasped 
 the value of such rugged friendship as hers as Tom's. 
 
 "We shouldn't know how to behave in an automobile," 
 he said, as though to soften her refusal. And I stood watch 
 ing their receding figures as they walked out into the street 
 and hailed the huge electric car that came to a stop beyond 
 them. Above its windows was painted " The Ashuela 
 Traction Company," a label reminiscent of my professional 
 activities. Then I heard the chauffeur ask : 
 
 "Where do you wish to go, sir?" 
 
 "To the Club," I said. 
 
 My room was ready, my personal belongings, my clothes
 
 406 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 had been laid out, my photographs were on the dressing- 
 table. I took up, mechanically, the evening newspaper, 
 but I could not read it ; I thought of Maude, of the children, 
 memories flowed in upon me, a flood not to be dammed. 
 . . . Presently the club valet knocked at my door. He had 
 a dinner card. 
 
 " Will you be dining here, sir ? " he inquired. 
 
 I went downstairs. Fred Grierson was the only man in 
 the dining-room. 
 
 "Hello, Hugh," he said, "come and sit down. I hear 
 your wife's gone abroad." 
 
 "Yes," I answered, "she thought she'd try it instead of 
 the South Shore this summer." 
 
 Perhaps I imagined that he looked at me queerly. I had 
 made a great deal of money out of my association with Grier 
 son, I had valued very highly being an important member 
 of the group to which he belonged ; but to-night, as I watched 
 him eating and drinking greedily, I hated him even as I 
 hated myself. And after dinner, when he started talking 
 with a ridicule that was a thinly disguised bitterness about 
 the Citizens Union and their preparations for a campaign 
 I left him and went to bed. 
 
 Before a week had passed my painful emotions had largely 
 subsided, and with my accustomed resiliency I had regained 
 the feeling of self-respect so essential to my happiness. I 
 was free. My only anxiety was for Nancy, who had gone 
 to New York the day after my last talk with her; and it 
 was only by telephoning to her house that I discovered when 
 she was expected to return. ... I found her sitting beside 
 one of the open French windows of her salon, gazing across 
 at the wooded hills beyond the Ashuela. She was serious, 
 a little pale ; more exquisite, more desirable than ever ; but 
 her manner implied the pressure of control, and her voice 
 was not quite steady as she greeted me. 
 
 "You've been away a long tune," I said.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 407 
 
 "The dressmakers," she answered. Her colour rose a 
 little. "I thought they'd never get through." 
 
 "But why didn't you drop me a line, let me know when 
 you were coming?" I asked, taking a chair beside her, and 
 laying my hand on hers. She drew it gently away. 
 
 "What's the matter?" I asked. 
 
 "I've been thinking it all over what we're doing. It 
 doesn't seem right, it seems terribly wrong." 
 
 "But I thought we'd gone over all that," I replied, as 
 patiently as I could. " You're putting it on an old-fashioned, 
 moral basis." 
 
 "But there must be some basis," she urged. "There are 
 responsibilities, obligations there must be ! that we 
 can't get away from. I can't help feeling that we ought 
 to stand by our mistakes, and by our bargains ; we made a 
 choice it's cheating, somehow, and if we take this what 
 we want we shall be punished for it." 
 
 "But I'm willing to be punished, to suffer, as I told you. 
 If you loved me 
 
 "Hugh!" she exclaimed, and I was silent. "You don't 
 understand," she went on, a little breathlessly, "what I 
 mean by punishment is deterioration. Do you remember 
 once, long ago, when you came to me before I was married, 
 I said we'd both run after false gods, and that we couldn't 
 do without them? Well, and now this has come; it seems 
 so wonderful to me, coming again like that after we had 
 passed it by, after we thought it had gone forever ; it's opened 
 up visions for me that I never hoped to see again. It ought 
 to restore us, dear that's what I'm trying to say to 
 redeem us, to make us capable of being what we were meant 
 to be. If it doesn't do that, if it isn't doing so, it's the most 
 horrible of travesties, of mockeries. If we gain life only to 
 have it turn into death slow death ; if we go to pieces 
 again, utterly. For now there's hope. The more I think, 
 the more clearly I see that we can't take any step without 
 responsibilities. If we take this, you'll have me, and I'll 
 have you. And if we don't save each other "
 
 408 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "But we will," I said. 
 
 "Ah," she exclaimed, "if we could start new, without any 
 past. I married Ham with my eyes open." 
 
 " You couldn't know that he would become well, as 
 flagrant as he is. You didn't really know what he was then." 
 
 "There's no reason why I shouldn't have anticipated it. 
 I can't claim that I was deceived, that I thought my mar 
 riage was made in heaven. I entered into a contract, and 
 Ham has kept his part of it fairly well. He hasn't inter 
 fered with my freedom. That isn't putting it on a high 
 plane, but there is an obligation involved. You yourself, 
 in your law practice, are always insisting upon the sacred- 
 ness of contract as the very basis of our civilization." 
 
 Here indeed would have been a home thrust, had I been 
 vulnerable at the time. So intent was I on overcoming 
 her objections, that I resorted unwittingly to the modern 
 argument I had more than once declared in court to be 
 anathema the argument of the new reform in reference 
 to the common law and the constitution. 
 
 "A contract, no matter how seriously entered into at the 
 time it was made, that later is seen to violate the principles 
 of humanity should be void. And not only this, but you 
 didn't consent that he should disgrace you." 
 
 Nancy winced. 
 
 "I never told you that he paid my father's debts, I 
 never told anyone," she said, in a low voice. 
 
 "Even then," I answered after a moment, "you ought to 
 see that it's too terrible a price to pay for your happiness. 
 And Ham hasn't ever pretended to consider you in any way. 
 It's certain you didn't agree that he should do what he 
 is doing." 
 
 "Suppose I admitted it," she said, "there remain Maude 
 and your children. Their happiness, then* future becomes 
 my responsibility as well as yours." 
 
 "But I don't love Maude, and Maude doesn't love me. 
 I grant it's my fault, that I did her a wrong in marrying her, 
 but she is right in leaving me. I should be doing her a
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 409 
 
 double wrong. And the children will be happy with her, 
 they will be well brought up. I, too, have thought this 
 out, Nancy," I insisted, " and the fact is that in our respec 
 tive marriages we have been, each of us, victims of our time, 
 of our education. We were born in a period of transition, 
 we inherited views of life that do not fit conditions to-day. 
 It takes courage to achieve happiness, initiative to eman 
 cipate one's self from a morality that begins to hamper 
 and bind. To stay as we are, to refuse to take what is 
 offered us, is to remain between wind and water. I don't 
 mean that we should do anything hastily. We can afford 
 to take a reasonable time, to be dignified about it. But I 
 have come to the conclusion that the only thing that matters 
 in the world is a love like ours, and its fulfilment. Achieve 
 ment, success, are empty and meaningless without it. And 
 you do love me you've admitted it." 
 
 "Oh, I don't want to talk about it," she exclaimed, des 
 perately. 
 
 "But we have to talk about it," I persisted. "We have 
 to thrash it out, to see it straight, as you yourself have said." 
 
 " You speak of convictions, Hugh, new convictions, in 
 place of the old we have discarded. But what are they? 
 And is there no such thing as conscience even though it 
 be only an intuition of happiness or unhappiness? I do 
 care for you, I do love you " 
 
 "Then why not let that suffice?" I exclaimed, leaning 
 towards her. 
 
 She drew back. 
 
 "But I want to respect you, too," she said. 
 
 I was shocked, too shocked to answer. 
 
 "I want to respect you," she repeated, more gently. "I 
 don't want to think that that what we feel for each other 
 is unconsecrated." 
 
 "It consecrates itself," I declared. 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Surely it has its roots in everything that is fine in both 
 of us."
 
 410 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "We both went wrong," said Nancy. "We both sought 
 to wrest power and happiness from the world, to make our 
 own laws. How can we assert that this is not merely a 
 continuation of it ? " 
 
 " But can't we work out our beliefs together ? " I demanded. 
 "Won't you trust me, trust our love for one another? " 
 
 Her breath came and went quickly. 
 
 "Oh, you know that I want you, Hugh, as much as you 
 want me, and more. The time may come when I can't 
 resist you." 
 
 "Why do you resist me?" I cried, seizing her hands con 
 vulsively, and swept by a gust of passion at her confession. 
 
 "Try to understand that I am fighting for both of us!" 
 she pleaded an appeal that wrung me in spite of the pitch 
 to which my feelings had been raised. "Hugh, dear, we 
 must think it out. Don't now." 
 
 I let her hands drop. . . . 
 
 Beyond the range of hills rising from the far side of the 
 Ashuela was the wide valley in which was situated the Clover- 
 dale Country Club, with its polo field, golf course and tennis- 
 courts ; and in this same valley some of our wealthy citizens, 
 such as Howard Ogilvy and Leonard Dickinson, had bought 
 "farms," week-end playthings for spring and autumn. 
 Hambleton Durrett had started the fashion. Capriciously, 
 as he did everything else, he had become the owner of sev 
 eral hundred acres of pasture, woodland and orchard, ac 
 quired some seventy-five head of blooded stock, and pro 
 ceeded to house them in model barns and milk by machinery ; 
 for several months he had bored everyone in the Boyne 
 Club whom he could entice into conversation on the subject 
 of the records of pedigreed cows, and spent many bibulous 
 nights on the farm in company with those parasites who 
 surrounded him when he was in town. Then another in 
 terest had intervened; a feminine one, of course, and his 
 energies were transferred (so we understood) to the recon-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 411 
 
 struction and furnishing of a little residence in New York, 
 not far from Fifth Avenue. The farm continued under the 
 expert direction of a superintendent who was a graduate of 
 the State Agricultural College, and a select clientele, which 
 could afford to pay the prices, consumed the milk and cream 
 and butter. Quite consistent with their marital relations 
 was the fact that Nancy should have taken a fancy to the 
 place after Ham's interest had waned. Not that she cared 
 for the Guernseys, or Jerseys, or whatever they may have 
 been ; she evinced a sudden passion for simplicity, occa 
 sional simplicity, at least, for a contrast to and escape 
 from a complicated life of luxury. She built another house 
 for the superintendent, banished him from the little farm 
 house (where Ham had kept two rooms) ; banished along 
 with the superintendent the stiff plush furniture, the yellow- 
 red carpets, the easels and the melodeon, and decked it out 
 in bright chintzes, with wall-papers to match, dainty muslin 
 curtains, and rag-carpet rugs on the hardwood floors. The 
 pseudo-classic porch over the doorway, which had suggested 
 a cemetery, was removed, and a wide piazza added, furnished 
 with wicker lounging chairs and tables, and shaded with gay 
 awnings. 
 
 Here, to the farm, accompanied by a maid, she had been 
 in the habit of retiring from time to time, and here she came 
 in early July. Here, dressed in the simplest linen gowns of 
 pink or blue or white, I found a Nancy magically restored to 
 girlhood, a new Nancy, betraying only traces of the old, 
 a new Nancy in a new Eden. We had all the setting, all 
 the illusion of that perfect ideal of domesticity, love in a 
 cottage. Nancy and I, who all our lives had spurned sim 
 plicity, laughed over the joy we found in it : she made a high 
 art of it, of course ; we had our simple dinners, which Mrs. 
 Olsen cooked and served in the open air ; sometimes on the 
 porch, sometimes under the great butternut tree spreading 
 its shade over what in a more elaborate country-place, 
 would have been called a lawn, an uneven plot of grass 
 of ridges and hollows that ran down to the orchard. Nancy's
 
 412 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 eyes would meet mine across the little table, and often our 
 gaze would wander over the pastures below, lucent green 
 in the level evening light, to the darkening woods beyond, 
 gilt-tipped in the setting sun. There were fields of ripening 
 yellow grain, of lusty young corn that grew almost as we 
 watched it: the warm winds of evening were heavy with 
 the acrid odours of fecundity. Fecundity ! In that lay the 
 elusive yet insistent charm of that country; and Nancy's, 
 of course, was the transforming touch that made it paradise. 
 It was thus, in the country, I suggested that we should spend 
 the rest of our existence. What was the use of amassing 
 money, when happiness was to be had so simply ? 
 
 "How long do you think you could stand it?" she asked, 
 as she handed me a plate of blackberries. 
 
 "Forever, with the right woman," I announced. 
 
 "How long could the woman stand it?" . . . She hu 
 moured, smilingly, my crystal-gazing into our future, as though 
 she had not the heart to deprive me of the pleasure. 
 
 "I simply can't believe in it, Hugh," she said when I 
 pressed her for an answer. 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 "I suppose it's because I believe in continuity, I haven't 
 the romantic temperament, I always see the angel with 
 the flaming sword. It isn't that I want to see him." 
 
 "But we shall redeem ourselves," I said. "It won't be 
 curiosity and idleness. We are not just taking this thing, 
 and expecting to give nothing for it in return." 
 
 "What can we give that is worth it?" she exclaimed, with 
 one of her revealing flashes. 
 
 " We won't take it lightly, but seriously," I told her. " We 
 shall find something to give, and that something will spring 
 naturally out of our love. We'll read together, and think and 
 plan together." 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, you are incorrigible," was all she said. 
 
 The male tendency in me was forever strained to solve 
 her, to deduce from her conversation and conduct a body of 
 consistent law. The effort was useless. Here was a realm,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 413 
 
 that of Nancy's soul, in which there was apparently no such 
 thing as relevancy. In the twilight, after dinner, we often 
 walked through the orchard to a grassy bank beside the little 
 stream, where we would sit and watch the dying glow in the 
 sky. After a rain its swollen waters were turbid, opaque 
 yellow-red with the clay of the hills ; at other tunes it ran 
 smoothly, temperately, almost clear between the pasture 
 grasses and wild flowers. Nancy declared that it reminded 
 her of me. We sat there, into the lush, warm nights, and 
 the moon shone down on us, or again through long silences 
 we searched the bewildering, starry chart of the heavens, 
 with the undertones of the night-chorus of the fields in our 
 ears. Sometimes she let my head rest upon her knee; 
 but when, throbbing at her touch, with the life-force pulsing 
 around us, I tried to take her in my arms, to bring her lips 
 to mine, she resisted me with an energy of will and body that 
 I could not overcome, I dared not overcome. She acknowl 
 edged her love for me, she permitted me to come to her, she 
 had the air of yielding, but never yielded. Why, then, did 
 she allow the words of love to pass? and how draw the 
 line between caresses? I was maddened and disheartened 
 by that elusive resistance in her apparently so frail a 
 thing ! that neither argument nor importunity could 
 break down. Was there something lacking in me? or was 
 it that I feared to mar or destroy the love she had. This, 
 surely, had not been the fashion of other loves, called unlaw 
 ful ; the classic instances celebrated by the poets of all ages 
 rose to mock me. 
 
 "Incurably romantic," she had called me, in calmer 
 moments, when I was able to discuss our affair objectively. 
 And once she declared that I had no sense of tragedy. We 
 read "Macbeth:" together, I remember, one rainy Sunday. 
 The modern world, which was our generation, would seem 
 to be cut off from all that preceded it as with a descending 
 knife. It was precisely from "the sense of tragedy" that 
 we had been emancipated : from the " agonized conscience," 
 I should undoubtedly have said, had I been acquainted
 
 414 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 then with Mr. Santayana's later phrase. Conscience, 
 the old kind of conscience, and nothing inherent in the 
 deeds themselves, made the tragedy ; conscience was super 
 stition, the fear of the wrath of the gods: conscience was 
 the wrath of the gods. Eliminate it, and behold! there 
 were no consequences. The gods themselves, that kind 
 of gods, became as extinct as the deities of the Druids, the 
 Greek fates, the terrible figures of German mythology. 
 Yes, and as the God of Christian orthodoxy. 
 
 Had any dire calamities overtaken the modern Macbeths, 
 of whose personal lives we happened to know something? 
 Had not these great ones broken with impunity all the laws 
 of traditional morality? They ground the faces of the 
 poor, played golf and went to church with serene minds, 
 untroubled by criticism; they appropriated, quite freely, 
 other men's money, and some of them other men's wives, 
 and yet they were not haggard with remorse. The gods 
 remained silent. Christian ministers regarded these modern 
 transgressors of ancient laws benignly and accepted their 
 contributions. Here, indeed, were the supermen of the 
 mad German prophet and philosopher come to life, refuting 
 all classic tragedy. It is true that some of these supermen 
 were occasionally swept away by disease, -which in ancient 
 days would have been regarded as a retributive scourge, but 
 was in fact nothing but the logical working of the laws of 
 hygiene, the result of overwork. Such, though stated more 
 crudely, were my contentions when desire did not cloud my 
 brain and make me incoherent. And I did not fail to remind 
 * Nancy, constantly, that this was the path on which her 
 y'feet had been set; that to waver now was to perish. She 
 smiled, yet she showed concern. 
 
 " But suppose you don't get what you want ? " she objected. 
 "What then? Suppose one doesn't become a superman? or 
 a superwoman? What's to happen to one? Is there no 
 god but the superman's god, which is himself? Are there 
 no gods for those who can't be supermen ? or for those who 
 may refuse to be supermen?"
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 415 
 
 To refuse, I maintained, were a weakness of the will. 
 
 "But there are other wills," she persisted, "wills over 
 which the superman may conceivably have no control. 
 Suppose, for example, that you don't get me, that my will 
 intervenes, granting it to be conceivable that your future 
 happiness and welfare, as you insist, depend upon your get 
 ting me which I doubt." 
 
 "You've no reason to doubt it." 
 
 "Well, granting it, then. Suppose the orthodoxies and 
 superstitions succeed in inhibiting me. I may not be a 
 superwoman, but my will, or my conscience, if you choose, 
 may be stronger than yours. If you don't get what you 
 want, you aren't happy. In other words, you fail. Where 
 are your gods then ? The trouble with you, my dear Hugh, 
 is that you have never failed," she went on, "you've never 
 had a good, hard fall, you've always been on the winning 
 side, and you've never had the world against you. No won 
 der you don't understand the meaning and value of tragedy." 
 
 "And you?" I asked. 
 
 "No," she agreed, "nor I. Yet I have come to feel, 
 instinctively, that somehow concealed in tragedy is the 
 central fact of life, the true reality, that nothing is to be got 
 by dodging it, as we have dodged it. Your superman, at 
 least the kind of superman you portray, is petrified. Some 
 thing vital in him, that should be plastic and sensitive, has 
 turned to stone." 
 
 "Since when did you begin to feel this?" I inquired 
 uneasily. 
 
 "Since well, since we have been together again, in 
 the last month or two. Something seems to warn me that 
 if we take what we want, we shan't get it. That's an 
 Irish saying, I know, but it expresses my meaning. I may 
 be little, I may be superstitious, unlike the great women of 
 history who have dared. But it's more than mere playing 
 safe my instinct, I mean. You see, you are involved. 
 I believe I shouldn't hesitate if only myself were concerned, 
 but you are the uncertain quantity more uncertain than
 
 416 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 you have any idea ; you think you know yourself, you think 
 you have analyzed yourself, but the truth is, Hugh, you 
 don't know the meaning of struggle against real resistance." 
 
 I was about to protest. 
 
 "I know that you have conquered in the world of men 
 and affairs," she hurried on, " against resistance, but it isn't 
 the kind of resistance I mean. It doesn't differ essentially 
 from the struggle in the animal kingdom." 
 
 I bowed. "Thank you," I said. 
 
 She laughed a little. 
 
 "Oh, I have worshipped success, too. Perhaps I still 
 do that isn't the point. An animal conquers his prey, he 
 is in competition, in constant combat with others of his own 
 kind, and perhaps he brings to bear a certain amount of 
 intelligence in the process. Intelligence isn't the point, 
 either. I know what I'm saying is trite, it's banal, it sounds 
 like moralizing, and perhaps it is, but there is so much con 
 fusion to-day that I think we are in danger of losing sight of 
 the simpler verities, and that we must suffer for it. Your 
 super-animal, your supreme-stag subdues the other stags, 
 but he never conquers himself, he never feels the need of it, 
 and therefore he never comprehends what we call tragedy." 
 
 "I gather your inference," I said, smiling. 
 
 "Well," she admitted, "I haven't stated the case with 
 the shade of delicacy it deserves, but I wanted to make my 
 meaning clear. We have raised up a class in America, but 
 we have lost sight, a little considerably, I think of 
 the distinguishing human characteristics. The men you 
 were eulogizing are lords of the forest, more or less, and 
 we women, who are of their own kind, what they have made 
 us, surrender ourselves in submission and adoration to the 
 lordly stag in the face of all the sacraments that have 
 been painfully inaugurated by the race for the very purpose 
 of distinguishing us from animals. It is equivalent to saying 
 that there is no moral law ; or, if there is, nobody can de 
 fine it. We deny, inferentially, a human realm as dis 
 tinguished from the animal, and in the denial it seems to
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 417 
 
 me we are cutting ourselves off from what is essential 
 human development. We are reverting to the animal. I 
 have lost and you have lost not entirely, perhaps, but 
 still to a considerable extent the bloom of that fervour, 
 of that idealism, we may call it, that both of us possessed 
 when we were in our teens. We had occasional visions. 
 We didn't know what they meant, or how to set about their 
 accomplishment, but they were not, at least, mere selfish 
 aspirations; they implied, unconsciously no doubt, an 
 element of service, and certainly our ideal of marriage had 
 something fine in it." 
 
 "Isn't it for a higher ideal of marriage that we are search 
 ing?" I asked. 
 
 "If that is so," Nancy objected, "then all the other ele 
 ments of our lives are sadly out of tune with it. Even the 
 most felicitous union of the sexes demands sacrifice, an 
 adjustment of wills, and these are the very things we balk 
 at; and the trouble with our entire class in this country is 
 that we won't acknowledge any responsibility, there's no- 
 sacrifice in our eminence, we have no sense of the whole." 
 
 " Where did you get all these ideas ? " I demanded. 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "Well," she admitted, "I've been thrashing around a 
 little ; and I've read some of the moderns, you know. Do 
 you remember my telling you I didn't agree with them? 
 and now this thing has come on me like a judgment. I've 
 caught their mania for liberty, for self-realization what 
 ever they call it but their remedies are vague, they fail 
 to convince me that individuals achieve any quality by just 
 taking what they want, regardless of others." . . . 
 
 I was unable to meet this argument, and the result was 
 that when I was away from her I too began to "thrash 
 around" among the books in a vain search for a radical 
 with a convincing and satisfying philosophy. Thus we fly 
 to literature in crises of the heart! There was no lack of 
 writers who sought to deal and deal triumphantly 
 with the very situation in which I was immersed. I marked
 
 418 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 many passages, to read them over to Nancy, who was in 
 terested, but who accused me of being willing to embrace 
 any philosophy, ancient or modern, that ran with the stream 
 of my desires. It is worth recording that the truth of this 
 struck home. On my way back to the city I reflected that, 
 in spite of my protests against Maude's going protests 
 wholly sentimental and impelled by the desire to avoid 
 giving pain on the spot I had approved of her departure 
 because I didn't want her. On the other hand I had to 
 acknowledge if I hadn't wanted Nancy, or rather, if I had 
 become tired of her, I should have been willing to endorse 
 her scruples. ... It was not a comforting thought. 
 
 One morning when I was absently opening the mail I 
 found at my office I picked up a letter from Theodore Wat- 
 ling, written from a seaside resort in Maine, the contents 
 of which surprised and touched me, troubled me, and com 
 pelled me to face a situation with which I was wholly un 
 prepared to cope. He announced that this was to be his 
 last term in the Senate. He did not name the trouble his 
 physician had discovered, but he had been warned that he 
 must retire from active life. "The specialist whom I saw 
 in New York," he went on, "wished me to resign at once, 
 but when I pointed out to him how unfair this would be to 
 my friends in the state, to my party as a whole especially 
 in these serious and unsettled times he agreed that I 
 might with proper care serve out the remainder of my term. 
 I have felt it my duty to write to Barbour and Dickinson 
 and one or two others in order that they might be prepared 
 and that no time may be lost in choosing my successor. It 
 is true that the revolt within the party has never gained 
 much headway in our state, but in these days it is difficult 
 to tell when and where a conflagration may break out, or 
 how far it will go. I have ventured to recommend to them 
 the man who seems to me the best equipped to carry on the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 419 
 
 work I have been trying to do here in short, my dear 
 Hugh, yourself. The Senate, as you know, is not a bed of 
 roses just now for those who think as we do ; but I have the 
 less hesitancy in making the recommendation because I 
 believe you are not one to shun a fight for the convictions 
 we hold in common, and because you would regard, with 
 me, the election of a senator with the new views as a very 
 real calamity. If sound business men and lawyers should 
 be eliminated from the Senate, I could not contemplate 
 with any peace of mind what might happen to the country. 
 In thus urging you, I know you will believe me when I say 
 that my affection and judgment are equally involved, for 
 it would be a matter of greater pride than I can express to 
 have you follow me here as you have followed me at home. 
 And I beg of you seriously to consider it. ... I understand 
 that Maude and the children are abroad. Remember me 
 to them affectionately when you write. If you can find it 
 convenient to come here, to Maine, to discuss the matter, 
 you may be sure of a welcome. In any case, I expect to be 
 in Washington in September for a meeting of our special 
 committee. Sincerely and affectionately yours, Theodore 
 Watling." 
 
 It was characteristic of him that the tone of the letter 
 should be uniformly cheerful, that he should say nothing 
 whatever of the blow this must be to his ambitions and 
 hopes ; and my agitation at the new and disturbing prospect 
 thus opened up for me was momentarily swept away by 
 feelings of affection and sorrow. A sharp realization came 
 to me of how much I admired and loved this man, and this 
 was followed by a pang at the thought of the disappointment 
 my refusal would give him. Complications I did not wish 
 to examine were then in the back of my mind; and while 
 I still sat holding the letter in my hand the telephone rang, 
 and a message came from Leonard Dickinson begging me 
 to call at the bank at once. 
 
 Miller Gorse was there, and Tallant, waving a palm-leaf 
 while sitting under the electric fan. They were all very
 
 420 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 grave, and they began to talk about the suddenness of 
 Mr. Watling's illness and to speculate upon its nature. 
 Leonard Dickinson was the most moved of the three ; but 
 they were all distressed, and showed it even Tallant, 
 whom I had never credited with any feelings; they spoke 
 about the loss to the state. At length Gorse took a cigar 
 from his pocket and lighted it ; the smoke, impelled by the 
 fan, drifted over the panelled partition into the bank. 
 
 " I suppose Mr. Watling mentioned to you what he wrote 
 to us," he said. 
 
 "Yes," I admitted. 
 
 "Well," he asked, "what do you think of it?" 
 
 "I attribute it to Mr. Watling's friendship," I replied. 
 
 "No," said Gorse, in his businesslike manner, "Watling's 
 right, there's no one else." Considering the number of 
 inhabitants of our state, this remark had its humorous 
 aspect. 
 
 "That's true," Dickinson put in, "there's no one else 
 available who understands the situation as you do, Hugh, 
 no one else we can trust as we trust you. I had a wire from 
 Mr. Barbour this morning he agrees. We'll miss you 
 here, but now that Watling will be gone we'll need you there. 
 And he's right it's something we've got to decide on 
 right away, and get started on soon, we can't afford to wob 
 ble and run any chances of a revolt." 
 
 " It isn't everybody the senatorship comes to on a platter 
 especially at your age," said Tallant. 
 
 "To tell you the truth," I answered, addressing Dickinson, 
 "I'm not prepared to talk about it now. I appreciate the 
 honour, but I'm not at all sure I'm the right man. And 
 I've been considerably upset by this news of Mr. Watling." 
 
 "Naturally you would be," said the banker, sympathet 
 ically, "and we share your feelings. I don't know of any 
 man for whom I have a greater affection than I have for 
 Theodore Watling. We shouldn't have mentioned it now, 
 Hugh, if Watling hadn't started the thing himself, if it 
 weren't important to know where we stand right away.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 421 
 
 We can't afford to, lose the seat. Take your time, but 
 remember you're the man we depend upon." 
 
 Gorse nodded. I was aware, all the time Dickinson was 
 speaking, of being surrounded by the strange, disquieting 
 gaze of the counsel for the Railroad. . . . 
 
 I went back to my office to spend an uneasy morning. 
 My sorrow for Mr. Watling was genuine, but nevertheless 
 I found myself compelled to consider an honour no man 
 lightly refuses. Had it presented itself at any other time, 
 had it been due to a happier situation than that brought 
 about by the illness of a man whom I loved and admired, I 
 should have thought the prospect dazzling indeed, part 
 and parcel of my amazing luck. But now now I was in 
 an emotional state that distorted the factors of life, all those 
 things I hitherto had valued; even such a prize as this I 
 weighed in terms of one supreme desire: how would the 
 acceptance of the senatorship affect the accomplishment of 
 this desire ? That was the question. I began making rapid 
 calculations: the actual election would take place in the 
 legislature a year from the following January; provided 
 I were able to overcome Nancy's resistance which I was 
 determined to do nothing in the way of divorce proceed 
 ings could be thought of for more than a year ; and I feared 
 delay. On the other hand, if we waited until after I had 
 been duly elected to get my divorce and marry Nancy my 
 chances of reelection would be small. What did I care for 
 the senatorship anyway if I had her ? and I wanted her 
 now, as soon as I could get her. She a life with her rep 
 resented new values, new values I did not define, that 
 made all I had striven for in the past of little worth. This 
 was a bauble compared with the companionship of the 
 woman I loved, the woman intended for me, who would 
 give me peace of mind and soul and develop those truer 
 aspirations that had long been thwarted and starved for 
 lack of her. Gradually, as she regained the ascendency 
 over my mind she ordinarily held and from which she 
 had been temporarily displaced by the arrival of Mr. Wat-
 
 422 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 ling's letter and the talk in the bank I became impatient 
 and irritated by the intrusion. But what answer should 
 I give to Dickinson and Gorse? what excuse for declining 
 such an offer? I decided, as may be imagined, to wait, 
 to temporize. 
 
 The irony of circumstances of what might have been 
 prevented now my laying this trophy at Nancy's feet, 
 for I knew I had only to mention the matter to be certain 
 of losing her.
 
 XXIII 
 
 I HAD bought a small automobile, which I ran myself, 
 and it was my custom to arrive at the farm every evening 
 about five o'clock. But as I look back upon those days 
 they seem to have lost succession, to be fused together, as 
 it were, into one indeterminable period by the intense pres 
 sure of emotion ; unsatisfied emotion, and the state of 
 physical and mental disorganization set up by it is in the 
 retrospect not a little terrifying. The world grew more 
 and more distorted, its affairs were neglected, things upon 
 which I had set high values became as nothing. And even 
 if I could summon back something of the sequence of our 
 intercourse, it would be a mere repetition growing on my 
 part more irrational and insistent of what I have already 
 related. There were long, troubled, and futile silences when 
 we sat together on the porch or in the woods and fields; 
 when I wondered whether it were weakness or strength that 
 caused Nancy to hold out against my importunities : the 
 fears she professed of retribution, the benumbing effects of 
 the conventional years, or the deep-rooted remnants of a 
 Calvinism which as she proclaimed had lost definite 
 expression to persist as an intuition. I recall something she 
 said when she turned to me after one of these silences. 
 
 "Do you know how I feel sometimes? as though you and 
 I had wandered together into a strange country, and lost 
 our way. We have lost our way, Hugh it's all so clandes 
 tine, so feverish, so unnatural, so unrelated to life, this 
 existence we're leading. I believe it would be better if it 
 were a mere case of physical passion. I can't help it," she 
 went on, when I had exclaimed against this, " we are too 
 
 423
 
 424 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 too complicated, you are too complicated. It's because 
 we want the morning stars, don't you see?" She wound 
 her fingers tightly around mine. "We not only want this, 
 but all of life besides you wouldn't be satisfied with any 
 thing less. Oh, I know it. That's your temperament, 
 you were made that way, and I shouldn't be satisfied if you 
 weren't. The time would come when you would blame 
 me I don't mean vulgarly and I couldn't stand that. 
 If you weren't that way, if that weren't your nature, I mean, 
 I should have given way long ago." 
 
 I made some sort of desperate protest. 
 
 "No, if I didn't know you so well I believe I should have 
 given in long ago. I'm not thinking of you alone, but of 
 myself, too. I'm afraid I shouldn't be happy, that I should 
 begin to think and then I couldn't stop. The plain truth, 
 as I've told you over and over again, is that I'm not big 
 enough." She continued smiling at me, a smile on which 
 I could not bear to look. "I was wrong not to have gone 
 away," I heard her say. "I will go away." 
 
 I was, at the time, too profoundly discouraged to answer. . . . 
 
 One evening after an exhausting talk we sat, inert, on 
 the grass hummock beside the stream. Heavy clouds had 
 gathered in the sky, the light had deepened to amethyst, 
 the valley was still, swooning with expectancy, louder and 
 louder the thunder rolled from behind the distant hills, and 
 presently a veil descended to hide them from our view. 
 Great drops began to fall, unheeded. 
 
 "We must go in," said Nancy, at length. 
 
 I followed her across the field and through the orchard. 
 From the porch we stood gazing out at the whitening rain 
 that blotted all save the nearer landscape, and the smell of 
 wet, midsummer grasses will always be associated with the 
 poignancy of that moment. ... At dinner, between the 
 intervals of silence, our talk was of trivial things. We made 
 a mere pretence of eating, and I remember having my atten 
 tion arrested by the sight of a strange, pitying expression 
 on the face of Mrs. Olsen, who waited on us. Before that
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 425 
 
 the woman had been to me a mere ministering automaton. 
 But she must have had ideas and opinions, this transported 
 Swedish peasant. . . . Presently, having cleared the table, 
 she retired. . . . The twilight deepened to dusk, to dark 
 ness. The storm, having spent the intensity of its passion 
 in those first moments of heavy downpour and wind, had 
 relaxed to a gentle rain that pattered on the roof, and from 
 the stream came recurringly the dirge of the frogs. All 
 I could see of Nancy was the dim outline of her head and 
 shoulders: she seemed fantastically to be escaping me, to 
 be fading, to be going; in sudden desperation I dropped 
 on my knees beside her, and I felt her hands straying with 
 a light yet agonized touch, over my head. 
 
 "Do you think I haven't suffered, too? that I don't 
 suffer?" I heard her ask. 
 
 Some betraying note for which I had hitherto waited in 
 vain must have pierced to my consciousness, yet the quiver 
 of joy and the swift, convulsive movement that followed 
 it seemed one. Her strong, lithe body was straining in 
 my arms, her lips returning my kisses. . . . Clinging to 
 her hands, I strove to summon my faculties of realization; 
 and I began to speak in broken, endearing sentences. 
 
 " It's stronger than we are stronger than anything else 
 in the world," she said. 
 
 " But you're not sorry ? " I asked. 
 
 "I don't want to think I don't care," she replied. "I 
 only know that I love you. I wonder if you will ever know 
 how much!" 
 
 The moments lengthened into hours, and she gently re 
 minded me that it was late. The lights in the little farm 
 houses near by had long been extinguished. I pleaded 
 to linger ; I wanted her, more of her, all of her with a fierce 
 desire that drowned rational thought, and I feared that 
 something might still come between us, and cheat me of her. 
 
 "No, no," she cried, with fear in her voice. "We shall 
 have to think it out very carefully what we must do. 
 We can't afford to make any mistakes."
 
 426 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "We'll talk it all over to-morrow," I said. 
 
 With a last, reluctant embrace I finally left her, walked 
 blindly to where the motor car was standing, and started 
 the engine. I looked back. Outlined in the light of the 
 doorway I saw her figure in what seemed an attitude of 
 supplication. . . . 
 
 I drove cityward through the rain, mechanically taking 
 the familiar turns in the road, barely missing a man in a 
 buggy at a four-corners. He shouted after me, but the 
 world to which he belonged didn't exist. I lived again 
 those moments that had followed Nancy's surrender, 
 seeking to recall and fix in my mind every word that had 
 escaped from her lips the trivial things that to lovers 
 are so fraught with meaning. I lived it all over again, as 
 I say, but the reflection of it, though intensely emotional, 
 differed from the reality in that now I was somewhat able 
 to regard the thing, to regard myself, objectively ; to define 
 certain feelings that had flitted in filmy fashion through my 
 consciousness, delicate shadows I recognized at the time 
 as related to sadness. When she had so amazingly yielded, 
 the thought for which my mind had been vaguely groping 
 was that the woman who lay there in my arms, obscured 
 by the darkness, was not Nancy at all ! It was as if this 
 one precious woman I had so desperately pursued had, in 
 the capture, lost her identity, had mysteriously become 
 just woman, in all her significance, yes, and helplessness. 
 The particular had merged (inevitably, I might have known) 
 into the general: the temporary had become the lasting, 
 with a chain of consequences vaguely implied that even in 
 m y J ov gave me pause. For the first time in my life I 
 had a glimpse of what marriage might mean, marriage 
 in a greater sense than I had ever conceived it, a sort of 
 cosmic sense, implying obligations transcending promises 
 and contracts, calling for greatness of soul of a kind I had 
 not hitherto imagined. Was there in me a grain of doubt 
 of my ability to respond to such a high call? I began to 
 perceive that such a union as we contemplated involved
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 427 
 
 more obligations than one not opposed to traditional 
 views of morality. I fortified myself, however, if indeed 
 I really needed fortification in a mood prevailingly trium 
 phant and exalted, with the thought that this love was 
 different, the real thing, the love of maturity steeped in the 
 ideals of youth. Here was a love for which I must be pre 
 pared to renounce other things on which I set a high value ; 
 prepared, in case the world, for some reason, should not 
 look upon us with kindliness. It was curious that such 
 reflections as these should have been delayed until after 
 the achievement of my absorbing desire, more curious that 
 they should have followed so closely on the heels of it. The 
 affair had shifted suddenly from a basis of adventure, of 
 uncertainty, to one of fact, of commitment ; I am exagger 
 ating my concern in order to define it; I was able to per 
 suade myself without much difficulty that these little, 
 cloudy currents in the stream of my joy were due to a natural 
 reaction from the tremendous strain of the past weeks, mere 
 morbid fancies. 
 
 When at length I reached my room at the Club I sat 
 looking out at the rain falling on the shining pavements 
 under the arc-lights. Though waves of heat caused by 
 some sudden recollection or impatient longing still ran 
 through my body, a saner joy of anticipation was succeeding 
 emotional tumult, and I reflected that Nancy had been 
 right in insisting that we walk circumspectly in spite of 
 passion. After all, I had outwitted circumstance, I had 
 gained the prize, I could afford to wait a little. We should 
 talk it over to-morrow, no, to-day. The luminous face 
 of the city hall clock reminded me that midnight was long 
 past. . . . 
 
 I awoke with the consciousness of a new joy, suddenly 
 to identify it with Nancy. She was mine ! I kept repeating 
 it as I dressed ; summoning her, not as she had lain in my 
 arms in the darkness though the intoxicating sweetness 
 of that pervaded me but as she had been before the 
 completeness of her surrender, dainty, surrounded by
 
 428 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 things expressing an elusive, uniquely feminine personality. 
 I could afford to smile at the weather, at the obsidian 
 sky, at the rain still falling persistently; and yet, as I 
 ate my breakfast, I felt a certain impatience to verify what 
 I knew was a certainty, and hurried to the telephone 
 booth. I resented the instrument, its possibilities of be 
 trayal, her voice sounded so matter-of-fact as she bade me 
 good morning and deplored the rain. 
 
 "I'll be out as soon as I can get away," I said. "I have 
 a meeting at three, but it should be over at four." And 
 then I added irresistibly : " Nancy, you're not sorry ? You 
 you still ?" 
 
 "Yes, don't be foolish," I heard her reply, and this time 
 the telephone did not completely disguise the note for which 
 I strained. I said something more, but the circuit was 
 closed. . . . 
 
 I shall not attempt to recount the details of our inter 
 course during the week that followed. There were mo 
 ments of stress and strain when it seemed to me that we 
 could not wait, moments that strengthened Nancy's resolu 
 tion to leave immediately for the East: there were other, 
 calmer periods when the wisdom of her going appealed to 
 me, since our ultimate union would be hastened thereby. 
 We overcame by degrees the distastefulness of the discussion 
 of ways and means. . . . We spent an unforgettable Sun 
 day among the distant high hills, beside a little lake of our 
 own discovery, its glinting waters sapphire and chrysoprase. 
 A grassy wood road, at the inviting entrance to which we 
 left the automobile, led down through an undergrowth of 
 laurel to a pebbly shore, and there we lunched ; there we 
 lingered through the long summer afternoon, Nancy with 
 her back against a tree, I with my head in her lap gazing 
 up at filmy clouds drifting imperceptibly across the sky, 
 listening to the droning notes of the bees, notes that some 
 times rose in a sharp crescendo, and again were suddenly 
 hushed. The smell of the wood-mould mingled with the 
 fainter scents of wild flowers. She had brought along a
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 429 
 
 volume by a modern poet : the verses, as Nancy read them, 
 moved me, they were filled with a new faith to which my 
 being responded, the faith of the forth-farer; not the faith 
 of the anchor, but of the sail. I repeated some of the lines 
 as indications of a creed to which I had long been trying 
 to convert her, though lacking the expression. She had let 
 the book fall on the grass. I remember how she smiled 
 down at me with the wisdom of the ages in her eyes, seek 
 ing my hand with a gesture that was almost maternal. 
 
 "You and the poets," she said, "you never grow up. 
 I suppose that's the reason why we love you and these 
 wonderful visions of freedom you have. Anyway, it's nice 
 to dream, to recreate the world as one would like to have 
 it." 
 
 " But that's what you and I are doing," I insisted. 
 
 " We think we're doing it or rather you think so," she 
 replied. "And sometimes, I admit that you almost per 
 suade me to think so. Never quite. What disturbs me," 
 she continued, "is to find you and the poets founding your 
 new freedom on new justifications, discarding the old law 
 only to make a new one, as though we could ever get 
 away from necessities, escape from disagreeable things, ex 
 cept in dreams. And then, this delusion of believing that 
 we are masters of our own destiny " She paused and 
 pressed my fingers. 
 
 "There you go back to predestination !" I exclaimed. 
 
 "I don't go back to anything, or forward to anything," 
 she exclaimed. "Women are elemental, but I don't expect 
 you to understand it. Laws and codes are foreign to us, 
 philosophies and dreams may dazzle us for the moment, 
 but what we feel underneath and what we yield to are the 
 primal forces, the great necessities; when we refuse joys 
 it's because we know these forces by a sort of instinct, when 
 we're overcome it's with a full knowledge that there's a 
 price. You've talked a great deal, Hugh, about carving 
 out our future. I listened to you, but I resisted you. It 
 wasn't the morality that was taught me as a child that
 
 430 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 made me resist, it was something deeper than that, more 
 fundamental, something I feel but can't yet perceive, and 
 yet shall perceive some day. It isn't that I'm clinging to 
 the hard and fast rules because I fail to see any others, it 
 isn't that I believe that all people should stick together 
 whether they are happily married or not, but I must say 
 it even now I have a feeling I can't define that divorce 
 isn't for us. I'm not talking about right and wrong in the 
 ordinary sense it's just what I feel. I've ceased to think." 
 
 " Nancy I " I reproached her. 
 
 "I can't help it I don't want to be morbid. Do you 
 remember my asking you about God ? the first day this 
 began? and whether you had a god? Well, that's the 
 trouble with us all to-day, we haven't any God, we're wan 
 derers, drifters. And now it's just life that's got hold of 
 us, my dear, and swept us away together. That's our 
 justification if we needed one it's been too strong 
 for us." She leaned back against the tree and closed her 
 eyes. "We're like chips in the torrent of it, Hugh." . . . 
 
 It was not until the shadow of the forest had crept far 
 across the lake and the darkening waters were still that 
 we rose reluctantly to put the dishes in the tea basket and 
 start on our homeward journey. The tawny fires of the 
 sunset were dying down behind us, the mist stealing, ghost 
 like, into the valleys below; in the sky a little moon 
 curled like a freshly cut silver shaving, that presently turned 
 to gold, the white star above it to fire. 
 
 Where the valleys widened we came to silent, decorous 
 little towns and villages where yellow-lit windows gleaming 
 through the trees suggested refuge and peace, while we 
 were wanderers in the night. It was Nancy's mood; and 
 now, in the evening's chill, it recurred to me poignantly. 
 In one of these villages we passed a church, its doors flung 
 open; the congregation was singing a familiar hymn. I 
 slowed down the car; I felt her shoulder pressing against 
 my own, and reached out my hand and found hers. 
 
 "Are you warm enough?" I asked. . . .
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 431 
 
 We spoke but little on that drive, we had learned the 
 futility of words to express the greater joys and sorrows, 
 the love that is compounded of these. 
 
 It was late when we turned in between the white gates 
 and made our way up the little driveway to the farmhouse. 
 I bade her good night on the steps of the porch. 
 
 "You do love me, don't you?" she whispered, clinging to 
 me with a sudden, straining passion. "You will love me, 
 always, no matter what happens?" 
 
 "Why, of course, Nancy," I answered. 
 
 "I want to hear you say it, 'I love you, I shall love you 
 always.' " 
 
 I repeated it fervently. 
 
 "No matter what happens?" 
 
 " No matter what happens. As if I could help it, Nancy ! 
 Why are you so sad to-night?" 
 
 "Ah, Hugh, it makes me sad I can't tell why. It is 
 so great, it is so terrible, and yet it's so sweet and beautiful.'* 
 
 She took my face in her hands and pressed a kiss against 
 my forehead. . . . 
 
 The next day was dark. At two o'clock in the afternoon 
 the electric light was still burning over my desk when the 
 telephone rang and I heard Nancy's voice. 
 
 "Is that you, Hugh?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I have to go East this afternoon." 
 
 "Why?" I asked. Her agitation had communicated 
 itself to me. "I thought you weren't going until Thurs 
 day. What's the matter?" 
 
 "I've just had a telegram," she said. "Ham's been hurt 
 I don't know how badly he was thrown from a polo 
 pony this morning at Narragansett, in practice, and they're 
 taking him to Boston to a private hospital. The telegram's 
 from Johnny Shephard. I'll be at the house in town at four." 
 
 Filled with forebodings I tried in vain to suppress I
 
 432 A FAR COUNTRY' 
 
 dropped the work I was doing and got up and paced the 
 room, pausing now and again to gaze out of the window at 
 the wet roofs and the grey skies. I was aghast at the idea 
 of her going to Ham now even though he were hurt 
 badly hurt ; and yet I tried to think it was natural, that it 
 was fine of her to respond to such a call. And she couldn't 
 very well refuse his summons. But it was not the news of 
 her husband's accident that inspired the greater fear, which 
 was quelled and soothed only to rise again when I recalled 
 the note I had heard in her voice, a note eloquent of tragedy 
 of tragedy she had foreseen. At length, unable to remain 
 where I was any longer, I descended to the street and walked 
 uptown in the rain. The Durrett house was closed, the 
 blinds of its many windows drawn, but Nancy was watch 
 ing for me and opened the door. So used had I grown to 
 seeing her in the simple linen dresses she had worn in the 
 country, a costume associated with exclusive possession, that 
 the sight of her travelling suit and hat renewed in me an 
 agony of apprehension. The unforeseen event seemed to 
 have transformed her once more. Her veil was drawn up, 
 her face was pale, in her eyes were traces of tears. 
 
 "You're going?" I asked, as I took her hands. 
 
 "Hugh, I have to go." 
 
 She led me through the dark, shrouded drawing room into 
 the little salon where the windows were open on the silent 
 city-garden. I took her in my arms ; she did not resist, as 
 I half expected, but clung to me with what seemed desper 
 ation. 
 
 " I have to go, dear you won't make it too hard for me ! 
 It's only ordinary decency, and there's no one else to go 
 to him." 
 
 She drew me to the sofa, her eyes beseeching me. 
 
 "Listen, dear, I want you to see it as I see it. I know that 
 you will, that you do. I should never be able to forgive 
 myself if I stayed away now, I neither of us could ever 
 be happy about it. You do see, don't you?" she implored. 
 
 "Yes," I admitted agitatedly.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 433 
 
 Her grasp on my hand tightened. 
 
 "I knew you would. But it makes me happier to hear 
 you say it." 
 
 We sat for a moment in helpless silence, gazing at one 
 another. Slowly her eyes had filled. 
 
 "Have you heard anything more?" I managed to ask. 
 
 She drew a telegram from her bag, as though the move 
 ment were a relief. 
 
 "This is from the doctor in Boston his name is Ma- 
 gruder. They have got Ham there, it seems. A horse kicked 
 him in the head, after he fell, he had just recovered 
 consciousness." 
 
 I took the telegram. The words seemed meaningless, 
 all save those of the last sentence. "The situation is se 
 rious, but by no means hopeless." Nancy had not spoken 
 of that. The ignorant cruelty of its convention ! The 
 man must have known what Hambleton Durrett was! 
 Nancy read my thoughts, and took the paper from my hand. 
 
 "Hugh, dear, if it's hard for you, try to understand that 
 it's terrible for me to think that he has any claim at all. 
 I realize now, as I never did before, how wicked it was in 
 me to marry him. I hate him, I can't bear the thought of 
 going near him." 
 
 She fell into wild weeping. I tried to comfort her, who 
 could not comfort myself ; I don't remember my inadequate 
 words. We were overwhelmed, obliterated by the sense of 
 calamity. ... It was she who checked herself at last by 
 an effort that was almost hysterical. 
 
 " I mustn't yield to it ! " she said. " It's time to leave 
 and the train goes at six. No, you mustn't come to the 
 station, Hugh I don't think I could stand it. I'll send 
 you a telegram." She rose. "You must go now you 
 must." 
 
 "You'll come back to me?" I demanded thickly, as I 
 held her. 
 
 "Hugh, I am yours, now and always. How can you 
 doubt it?" 
 
 2F
 
 434 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 At last I released her, when she had begged me again. 
 And I found myself a little later walking past the familiar, 
 empty houses of those streets. . . . 
 
 The front pages of the evening newspapers announced 
 the accident to Hambleton Durrett, and added that Mrs. 
 Durrett, who had been lingering in the city, had gone to her 
 husband's bedside. The morning papers contained more of 
 biography and ancestry, but had little to add to the bulletin ; 
 and there was no lack of speculation at the Club and else 
 where as to Ham's ability to rally from such a shock. I 
 could not bear to listen to these comments : they were vio 
 lently distasteful to me. The unforeseen accident and 
 Nancy's sudden departure had thrown my life completely 
 out of gear : I could not attend to business, I dared not go 
 away lest the news from Nancy be delayed. I spent the 
 hours in an exhausting mental state that alternated between 
 hope and fear, a state of unmitigated, intense desire, of balked 
 realization, sometimes heightening into that sheer terror 
 I had felt when I had detected over the telephone that note 
 in her voice that seemed of despair. Had she had a presen 
 timent, all along, that something would occur to separate 
 us ? As I went back over the hours we had passed together 
 since she had acknowledged her love, in spite of myself the 
 conviction grew on me that she had never believed in the 
 reality of our future. Indeed, she had expressed her disbe 
 lief in words. Had she been looking all along for a sign 
 a sign of wrath ? And would she accept this accident of 
 Ham's as such? 
 
 Retrospection left me trembling and almost sick. 
 
 It was not until the second morning after her departure 
 that I received a telegram giving the name of her Boston 
 hotel, and saying that there was to be a consultation that 
 day, and as soon as it had taken place she would write. 
 Such consolation as I could gather from it was derived from
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 435 
 
 four words at the end, she missed me dreadfully. Some 
 tremor of pity for her entered into my consciousness, without 
 mitigating greatly the wildness of my resentment, of my 
 forebodings. 
 
 I could bear no longer the city, the Club, the office, the 
 daily contact with my associates and clients. Six hours 
 distant, near Rossiter, was a small resort in the mountains 
 of which I had heard. I telegraphed Nancy to address me 
 there, notified the office, packed my bag, and waited impa 
 tiently for midday, when I boarded the train. At seven I 
 reached a little station where a stage was waiting to take 
 me to Calender's Mill. 
 
 It was not until morning that I beheld my retreat, when 
 little wisps of vapour were straying over the surface of the 
 lake, and the steep green slopes that rose out of the water 
 on the western side were still in shadow. The hotel, a much 
 overgrown and altered farm-house, stood, surrounded by 
 great trees, in an ancient clearing that sloped gently to the 
 water's edge, where an old-fashioned, octagonal summer- 
 house overlooked a landing for rowboats. The resort, 
 indeed, was a survival of simpler times. . . . 
 
 In spite of the thirty-odd guests, people of very moder 
 ate incomes who knew the place and had come here year 
 after year, I was as much alone as if I had been the only 
 sojourner. The place was so remote, so peaceful in con 
 trast to the city I had left, which had become intolerable. 
 And at night, during hours of wakefulness, the music of the 
 waters falling over the dam was soothing. I used to walk 
 down there and sit on the stones of the ruined mill ; or climb 
 to the crests on the far side of the pond to gaze for hours 
 westward where the green billows of the Alleghenies lost 
 themselves in the haze. I had discovered a new country; 
 here, when our trials should be over, I would bring Nancy, 
 and I found distraction in choosing sites for a bungalow. 
 In my soul hope flowered with little watering. Uncertain 
 news was good news. After two days of an impatience all 
 but intolerable, her first letter arrived, I learned that the
 
 436 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 specialists had not been able to make a diagnosis, and I be 
 gan to take heart again. At times, she said, Ham was 
 delirious and difficult to manage; at other times he sank 
 into a condition of coma ; and again he seemed to know her 
 and Ralph, who had come up from Southampton, where he 
 had been spending the summer. One doctor thought that 
 Ham's remarkable vitality would pull him through, in spite 
 of what his life had been. The shock as might have been 
 surmised had affected the brain. . . . The letters that 
 followed contained no additional news; she did not dwell 
 on the depressing reactions inevitable from the situation in 
 which she found herself one so much worse than mine; 
 she expressed a continual longing for me; and yet I had 
 trouble to convince myself that they did not lack the note 
 of reassurance for which I strained as I eagerly scanned them 
 of reassurance that she had no intention of permitting her 
 husband's condition to interfere with that ultimate happi 
 ness on which it seemed my existence depended. I tried 
 to account for the absence of this note by reflecting that the 
 letters were of necessity brief, hurriedly scratched off at odd 
 moments; and a natural delicacy would prevent her from 
 referring to our future at such a time. They recorded no 
 change in Ham's condition save that the periods of coma had 
 ceased. The doctors were silent, awaiting the arrival in 
 this country of a certain New York specialist who was 
 abroad. She spent most of her days at the hospital, return 
 ing to the hotel at night exhausted : the people she knew in 
 the various resorts around Boston had been most kind, send 
 ing her flowers, and calling when in town to inquire. At 
 length came the news that the New York doctor was home 
 again, and coming to Boston. In that letter was a sentence 
 which rang like a cry in my ears : "Oh, Hugh, I think these 
 doctors know now what the trouble is, I think I know. They 
 are only waiting for Dr. Jameson to confirm it." . . . 
 
 It was always an effort for me to control my impatience 
 after the first rattling was heard in the morning of the stage 
 that brought the mail, and I avoided the waiting group in
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 437 
 
 front of the honeycombed partition of boxes beside the 
 "office." On the particular morning of which I am now 
 writing the proprietor himself handed me a letter of ominous 
 thickness which I took with me down to the borders of 
 the lake before tearing open the flap. In spite of the 
 calmness and restraint of the first lines, because of them, 
 I felt creeping over me an unnerving sensation I knew 
 for dread. . . . 
 
 "Hugh, the New York doctor has been here. It is as I 
 have feared for some weeks, but I couldn't tell you until I 
 was sure. Ham is not exactly insane, but he is childish. 
 Sometimes I think that is even worse. I have had a talk 
 with Dr. Jameson, who has simply confirmed the opinion 
 which the other physicians have gradually been forming. 
 The accident has precipitated a kind of mental degeneration, 
 but his health, otherwise, will not be greatly affected. 
 
 "Jameson was kind, but very frank, for which I was 
 grateful. He did not hesitate to say that it would have been 
 better if the accident had been fatal. Ham won't be help 
 less, physically. Of course he won't be able to play polo, 
 or take much active exercise. If he were to be' helpless, I 
 could feel that I might be of some use, at least of more use. 
 He knows his friends. Some of them have been here to see 
 him, and he talks quite rationally with them, with Ralph, 
 with me, only once in a while he says something silly. It 
 seems odd to write that he is not responsible, since he never 
 has been, his condition is so queer that I am at a loss to 
 describe it. The other morning, before I arrived from the 
 hotel and when the nurse was downstairs, he left the hospi 
 tal, and we found him several blocks along Commonwealth 
 Avenue, seated on a bench, without a hat he was annoyed 
 that he had forgotten it, and quite sensible otherwise. We 
 began by taking him out every morning in an automobile. 
 To-day he had a walk with Ralph, and insisted on going into 
 a club here, to which they both belong. Two or three men 
 were there whom they knew, and he talked to them about 
 his fall from the pony and told them just how it happened.
 
 438 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 At such times only a close observer can tell from his manner 
 that everything is not right. 
 
 "Ralph, who always could manage him, prevented his 
 taking anything to drink. He depends upon Ralph, and it 
 will be harder for me when he is not with us. His attitude 
 towards me is just about what it has always been. I try to 
 amuse him by reading the newspapers and with games ; we 
 have a chess-board. At times he seems grateful, and then 
 he will suddenly grow tired and hard to control. Once or 
 twice I have had to call in Dr. Magruder, who owns the 
 hospital. 
 
 "It has been terribly hard for me to write all this, but I 
 had to do it, in order that you might understand the situa 
 tion completely. Hugh dear, I simply can't leave him. 
 This has been becoming clearer and clearer to me all these 
 weeks, but it breaks my heart to have to write it. I have 
 struggled against it, I have lain awake nights trying to find 
 justification for going to you, but it is stronger than I. I 
 am afraid of it I suppose that's the truth. Even in those 
 unforgettable days at the farm I was afraid of it, although 
 I did not know what it was to be. Call it what you like, 
 say that I am weak. I am willing to acknowledge that it is 
 weakness. I wish no credit for it, it gives me no glow, the 
 thought of it makes my heart sick. I'm not big enough 
 I suppose that's the real truth. I once might have been; 
 but I'm not now, the years of the life I chose have made 
 a coward of me. It's not a question of morals or duty 
 it's simply that I can't take the thing for which my soul 
 craves. It's too late. If I believed in prayer I'd pray 
 that you might pity and forgive me. I really can't ex 
 pect you to understand what I can't myself explain. Oh, 
 I need pity and I pity you, my dear. I can only hope 
 that you will not suffer as I shall, that you will find relief 
 a way to work out your life. But I will not change my de 
 cision, I cannot change it. Don't come on, don't attempt 
 to see me now. I can't stand any more than I am stand 
 ing, I should lose my mind."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 439 
 
 Here the letter was blotted, and some words scratched 
 out. I was unable to reconstruct them. 
 
 "Ralph and I," she proceeded irrelevantly, "have got 
 Ham to agree to go to Buzzard's Bay, and we have taken a 
 house near Wareham. Write and tell me that you forgive 
 and pity me. I love you even more, if such a thing is pos 
 sible, than I have ever loved you. This is my only comfort 
 and compensation, that I have had and have been able to 
 feel such a love, and I know I shall always feel it. Nancy.'* 
 
 The first effect of this letter was a paralyzing one. I was 
 unable to realize or believe the thing that had happened 
 to me, and I sat stupidly holding the sheet in my hand until 
 I heard voices along the path, and then I fled instinctively, 
 like an animal, to hide my injury from any persons I might 
 meet. I wandered down the shore of the lake, striking at 
 length into the woods, seeking some inviolable shelter ; nor 
 was I conscious of physical effort until I found myself pant 
 ing near the crest of the ridge where there was a pasture, 
 which some ancient glacier had strewn with great boulders. 
 Beside one of these I sank. Heralded by the deep tones of 
 bells, two steers appeared above the shoulder of a hill and 
 stood staring at me with bovine curiosity, and fell to grazing 
 again. A fleet of white clouds, like ships pressed with sail, 
 hurried across the sky as though racing for some determined 
 port; and the shadows they cast along the hillsides accen 
 tuated the high brightness of the day, emphasized the vivid 
 and hateful beauty of the landscape. My numbness began 
 to be penetrated by shooting pains, and I grasped little by 
 little the fulness of my calamity, until I was in the state of 
 wild rebellion of one whom life for the first time has foiled 
 in a supreme desire. There was no fate about this thing, 
 it was just an absurd accident. The operation of the laws 
 of nature had sent a man to the ground : another combination 
 of circumstances would have killed him, still another, and 
 he would have arisen unhurt. But because of this partic 
 ular combination my happiness was ruined, and Nancy's ! 
 
 She had not expected me to understand. Well, I didn't
 
 440 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 understand, I had no pity, in that hour I felt a resentment 
 almost amounting to hate; I could see only unreasoning 
 superstition in the woman I wanted above everything in 
 the world. Women of other days had indeed renounced 
 great loves : the thing was not unheard of. But that this 
 should happen in these times and to me ! It was un 
 thinkable that Nancy of all women shouldn't be emancipated 
 from the thralls of religious inhibition ! And if it wasn't 
 "conscience," what was it? Was it, as she said, weakness, 
 lack of courage to take life when it was offered her ? . . . I 
 was suddenly filled with the fever of composing arguments 
 to change a decision that appeared to me to be the re 
 sult of a monstrous caprice and delusion ; writing them out, 
 as they occurred to me, in snatches on the backs of en 
 velopes her envelopes. Then I proceeded to make the 
 draft of a letter, the effort required for composition easing 
 me until the draft was finished ; when I started for the hotel, 
 climbing fences, leaping streams, making my way across 
 rock faces and through woods; halting now and then as 
 some reenforcing argument occurred to me to write it into 
 my draft at the proper place until the sheets were interlined 
 and blurred and almost illegible. It was already three 
 o'clock when I reached my room, and the mail left at four. 
 I began to copy and revise my scrawl, glancing from time 
 to time at my watch, which I had laid on the table. Hur 
 riedly washing my face and brushing my hair, I arrived down- 
 Stan's just as the stage was leaving. . . . 
 
 After the letter had gone still other arguments I might 
 have added began to occur to me, and I regretted that I 
 had not softened some of the things I wrote and made others 
 more emphatic. In places argument had degenerated into 
 abject entreaty. Never had my desire been so importunate 
 as now, when I was in continual terror of losing her. Nor 
 could I see how I was to live without her, life lacking a 
 motive being incomprehensible: yet the fire of optimism 
 in me, though died down to ashes, would not be extinguished. 
 At moments it flared up into what almost amounted to a
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 441 
 
 conviction that she could not resist my appeal. I had threat 
 ened to go to her, and more than once I started packing. . . . 
 
 Three days later I received a brief note in which she man 
 aged to convey to me, though tenderly and compassionately, 
 that her decision was unalterable. If I came on, she would 
 refuse to see me. I took the afternoon stage and went back 
 to the city, to plunge into affairs again ; but for weeks my 
 torture was so acute that it gives me pain to recall it, to 
 dwell upon it to-day. . . . And yet, amazing as it may 
 seem, there came a tune when hope began to dawn again 
 out of my despair. Perhaps my life had not been utterly 
 shattered, after all : perhaps Ham Durrett would get well : 
 such things happened, and Nancy would no longer have an 
 excuse for continuing to refuse me. Little by little my anger 
 at what I had now become convinced was her weakness 
 cooled, and though paradoxically I had continued to love 
 her in spite of the torture for which she was responsible, in 
 spite of the resentment I felt, I melted toward her. True 
 to my habit of reliance on miracles, I tried to reconcile myself 
 to a period of waiting. 
 
 Nevertheless I was faintly aware consequent upon if 
 not as a result of this tremendous experience of some 
 change within me. It was not only that I felt at times a 
 novel sense of uneasiness at being a prey to accidents, sub 
 ject to ravages of feeling ; the unity of mind that had hitherto 
 enabled me to press forward continuously toward a concrete 
 goal showed signs of breaking up: the goal had lost its 
 desirability. I seemed oddly to be relapsing into the states 
 of questioning that had characterized my earlier years. 
 Perhaps it would be an exaggeration to say that I actually 
 began to speculate on the possible existence of a realm where 
 the soul might find a refuge from the bufferings of life, 
 from which the philosophy of prosperity was powerless to 
 save it. .
 
 XXIV 
 
 IT was impossible, of course, that my friends should have 
 failed to perceive the state of disorganization I was in, and 
 some of them at least must have guessed its cause. Dick 
 inson, on his return from Maine, at once begged me to go 
 away. I rather congratulated myself that Tom had chosen 
 these months for a long-delayed vacation in Canada. His 
 passion for fishing still persisted. 
 
 In spite of the fact I have noted, that I had lost a certain 
 zest for results, to keep busy seemed to be the only way to 
 relieve my mind of an otherwise intolerable pressure : and 
 I worked sometimes far into the evening. In the back 
 ground of my thoughts lay the necessity of coming to a 
 decision on the question of the senatorship; several times 
 Dickinson and Gorse had spoken of it, and I was beginning 
 to get letters from influential men in other parts of the state. 
 They seemed to take it for granted that there was no ques 
 tion of my refusing. The time came when I had grown able 
 to consider the matter with a degree of calmness. What 
 struck me first, when I began to debate upon it, was that the 
 senatorship offered a new and possibly higher field for my 
 energies, while at the same time the office would be a logical 
 continuation of a signal legal career. I was now unable to 
 deny that I no longer felt any exhilaration at the prospect 
 of future legal conquests similar to those of the past; but 
 once in the Senate, I might regain something of that intense 
 conviction of fighting for a just and sound cause with which 
 Theodore Watling had once animated me : fighting there, 
 in the Capitol at Washington, would be different ; no stigma 
 of personal gain attached to it ; it offered a nearer approach 
 
 442
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 443 
 
 to the ideal I had once more begun to seek, held out hopes of 
 a renewal of my unity of mind. Mr. Watling had declared 
 that there was something to fight for ; I had even glimpsed 
 that something, but I had to confess that for some years 
 I had not been consciously fighting for it. I needed some 
 thing to fight for. 
 
 There was the necessity, however, of renewing my cal 
 culations. If Hambleton Durrett should recover, even dur 
 ing the ensuing year, and if Nancy relented it would not 
 be possible for us to be divorced and married for some tune. 
 I still clung tenaciously to the belief that there were no 
 relationships wholly unaffected by worldly triumphs, and 
 as Senator I should have strengthened my position. It 
 did not strike me even after all my experience that 
 such a course as I now contemplated had a parallel in 
 the one that I had pursued in regard to her when I was 
 young. 
 
 It seemed fitting that Theodore Watling should be the 
 first to know of my decision. I went to Washington to 
 meet him. It pained me to see him looking more worn, 
 but he was still as cheerful, as mentally vigorous as ever, 
 and I perceived that he did not wish to dwell upon his ill 
 ness. I did venture to expostulate with him on the risk 
 he must be running in serving out his term. We were 
 sitting in the dining room of his house. 
 
 "We've only one life to live, Hugh," he answered, smiling 
 at me, " and we might as well get all out of it we can. A few 
 years more or less doesn't make much difference and I 
 ought to be satisfied. I'd resign now, to please my wife, 
 to please my friends, but we can't trust this governor to 
 appoint a safe man. How little we suspected when we elected 
 him that he'd become infected. You never can tell, in these 
 days, can you ? " 
 
 It was the note of devotion to his cause that I had come 
 to hear : I felt it renewing me, as I had hoped. The threat 
 of disease, the louder clamourings of the leaders of the mob 
 had not sufficed to dismay him though he admitted more
 
 444 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 concern over these. My sympathy and affection were 
 mingled with the admiration he never failed to inspire. 
 
 "But you, Hugh," he said concernedly, "you're not look 
 ing very well, my son. You must manage to take a good 
 rest before coming here before the campaign you'll have 
 to go through. We can't afford to have anything happen 
 to you you're too young." 
 
 I wondered whether he had heard anything . . . He 
 spoke to me again about the work to be done, the work he 
 looked to me to carry on. 
 
 "We'll have to watch for our opportunity," he said, "and 
 when it comes we can handle this new movement not by 
 crushing it, but by guiding it. I've come to the conclusion 
 that there is a true instinct in it, that there are certain things 
 we have done which have been mistakes, and which we 
 can't do any more. But as for this theory that all wisdom 
 resides in the people, it's buncombe. What we have to do is 
 to work out a practical programme." 
 
 His confidence in me had not diminished. It helped to 
 restore confidence in myself. 
 
 The weather was cool and bracing for September, and 
 as we drove in a motor through the beautiful avenues of the 
 city he pointed out a house for me on one of the circles, 
 one of those distinguished residences, instances of a nascent 
 good taste, that are helping to redeem the polyglot aspect 
 of our national capital. Mr. Watling spoke rather 
 tactfully, I thought of Maude and the children, and 
 ventured the surmise that they would be returning in a 
 few months. I interpreted this, indeed, as in rather the 
 nature of a kindly hint that such a procedure would be 
 wise in view of the larger life now dawning for me, but I 
 made no comment. ... He even sympathized with Nancy 
 Durrett. 
 
 "She did the right thing, Hugh," he said, with the ad 
 mirable casual manner he possessed of treating subjects 
 which he knew to be delicate. "Nancy's a fine woman. 
 Poor devil ! " This in reference to Ham. . .
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 445 
 
 Mr. Watling reassured me on the subject of his own 
 trouble, maintaining that he had many years left if he took 
 care. He drove me to the station. I travelled homeward 
 somewhat lifted out of myself by this visit to him; with 
 some feeling of spaciousness derived from Washington 
 itself, with its dignified Presidential Mansion among the 
 trees, its granite shaft drawing the eye upward, with its 
 winged Capitol serene upon the hill. Should we deliver 
 these heirlooms to the mob? Surely Democracy meant 
 more than that ! 
 
 All this time I had been receiving, at intervals, letters 
 from Maude and the children. Maude's were the letters 
 of a friend, and I found it easy to convince myself that 
 their tone was genuine, that the separation had brought 
 contentment to her; and those independent and self-suffi 
 cient elements in her character I admired now rather than 
 deplored. At Etretat, which she found much to her taste, 
 she was living quietly, but making friends with some Amer 
 ican ' : and English, and one French family of the same name, 
 Buffon, as the great naturalist. The father was a retired 
 silk manufacturer ; they now resided in Paris, and had been 
 very kind in helping her to get an apartment in that city 
 for the winter. She had chosen one on the Avenue Kleber, 
 not far from the Arc. It is interesting, after her arraignment 
 of me, that she should have taken such pains to record their 
 daily life for my benefit in her clear, conscientious hand 
 writing. I beheld Biddy, her dresses tucked above slim 
 little knees, playing in the sand on the beach, her hair flying 
 in the wind and lighted by the sun which gave sparkle to 
 the sea. I saw Maude herself in her beach chair, a book 
 lying in her lap, its pages whipped by the breeze. And 
 there was Moreton, who must be proving something of a 
 handful, since he had fought with the French boys on the 
 beach and thrown a "rock" through the windows of the 
 Buffon family. I remember one of his letters made
 
 446 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 perfect after much correcting and scratching, in which 
 he denounced both France and the French, and appealed 
 to me to come over at once to take him home. Maude 
 had enclosed it without comment. This letter had not 
 been written under duress, as most of his were. 
 
 Matthew's letters he wrote faithfully once a week I 
 kept in a little pile by themselves and sometimes reread 
 them. I wondered whether it were because of the fact 
 that I was his father though a most inadequate one 
 that I thought them somewhat unusual. He had learned 
 French Maude wrote with remarkable ease. I was 
 particularly struck in these letters with the boy's power 
 of observation, with his facile use of language, with the 
 vivid simplicity of his descriptions of the life around him, 
 of his experiences at school. The letters were thoughtful 
 not dashed off in a hurry; they gave evidence in every 
 line of the delicacy of feeling that was, I think, his most 
 appealing quality, and I put them down with the impression 
 strong on me that he, too, longed to return home, but would 
 not say so. There was a certain pathos in this youthful 
 restraint that never failed to touch me, even in those times 
 when I had been most obsessed with love and passion. . . . 
 The curious effect of these letters was that of knowing more 
 than they expressed. He missed me, he wished to know 
 when I was coming over. And I was sometimes at a loss 
 whether to be grateful to Maude or troubled because she 
 had as yet given him no hint of our separation. What 
 effect would it have on him when it should be revealed to 
 him? ... It was through Matthew I began to apprehend 
 certain elements in Maude I had both failed to note and 
 appreciate; her little mannerisms that jarred, her habits 
 of thought that exasperated, were forgotten, and I was 
 forced to confess that there was something fine in the 
 achievement of this attitude of hers that was without ill 
 will or resentment, that tacitly acknowledged my continued 
 rights and interest in the children. It puzzled and troubled 
 me.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 447 
 
 The Citizens Union began its campaign early that autumn, 
 long before the Hons. Jonathan Parks and Timothy Mac- 
 Guire Republican and Democratic candidates for Mayor 
 thought of going on the stump. For several weeks the 
 meetings were held in the small halls and club rooms of 
 various societies and orders in obscure portions of the city. 
 The forces of "privilege and corruption" were not much 
 alarmed. Perry Blackwood accused the newspapers of 
 having agreed to a " conspiracy of silence " ; but, as Judah 
 B. Tallant remarked, it was the business of the press to give 
 the public what it wanted, and the public as yet hadn't 
 shown much interest in the struggle being waged in its 
 behalf. When the meetings began to fill up it would be 
 time to report them in the columns of the Era. Mean 
 while, however, the city had been quietly visited by 
 an enterprising representative of a New York periodical 
 of the new type that developed with the opening years 
 of the century one making a specialty of passionate 
 "muck-raking." And since the people of America love 
 nothing better than being startled, Yardley's Weekly had 
 acquired a circulation truly fabulous. The emissary of 
 the paper had attended several of the Citizens meetings; 
 interviewed, it seemed, many persons: the result was a 
 revelation to make the blood of politicians, capitalists 
 and corporation lawyers run cold. I remember very 
 well the day it appeared on our news stands, and the 
 heated denunciations it evoked at the Boyne Club. Ralph 
 Hambleton was the only one who took it calmly, who seemed 
 to derive a certain enjoyment from the affair. Had he been 
 a less privileged person, they would have put him in chan 
 cery. Leonard Dickinson asserted that Yardley's should 
 be sued for libel. 
 
 "There's just one objection to that," said Ralph. 
 
 "What?" asked the banker. 
 
 "It isn't libel."
 
 448 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "I defy them to prove it," Dickinson snapped. "It's a 
 d d outrage ! There isn't a city or village in the country 
 that hasn't exactly the same conditions. There isn't any 
 other way to run a city " 
 
 "That's what Mr. Krebs says," Ralph replied, "that the 
 people ought to put Judd Jason officially in charge. He 
 tells 'em that Jason is probably a more efficient man than 
 Democracy will be able to evolve in a coon's age, that we 
 ought to take him over, instead of letting the capitalists 
 have him." 
 
 "Did Krebs say that?" Dickinson demanded. 
 
 "You can't have read the article very thoroughly, 
 Leonard," Ralph commented. "I'm afraid you only 
 picked out the part of it that compliments you. This 
 fellow seems to have been struck by Krebs, says he's a 
 coming man, that he's making original contributions to 
 the people's cause. Quite a tribute. You ought to read 
 it." 
 
 Dickinson, who had finished his lunch, got up and left 
 the table after lighting his cigar. Ralph's look followed 
 him amusedly. 
 
 "I'm afraid it's time to cash in and be good," he observed. 
 
 "We'll get that fellow Krebs yet," said Grierson, wrath- 
 fully. Miller Gorse alone made no remarks, but in spite 
 of his silence he emanated an animosity against reform 
 and reformers that seemed to charge the very atmosphere, 
 and would have repressed any man but Ralph. . . . 
 
 I sat in my room at the Club that night and reread the 
 article, and if its author could have looked into my soul 
 and observed the emotions he had set up, he would, no 
 doubt, have experienced a grim satisfaction. For I, too, 
 had come in for a share of the comment. Portions of the 
 matter referring to me stuck in my brain like tar, such as 
 the reference to my father, to the honoured traditions of 
 the Parets and the Brecks which I had deliberately repu 
 diated. I had less excuse than many others. The part I 
 had played in various reprehensible transactions such as
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 449 
 
 the Riverside Franchise and the dummy telephone com 
 pany affair was dwelt upon, and I was dismissed with the 
 laconic comment that I was a graduate of Harvard. . . . 
 
 My associates and myself were referred to collectively 
 as a "gang," with the name of our city prefixed; we were 
 linked up with and compared to the gangs of other cities 
 the terminology used to describe us being that of the 
 police reporter. We "operated," like burglars; we 
 "looted": only, it was intimated in one place, "second- 
 story men" were angels compared to us, who had never 
 seen the inside of a penitentiary. Here we were, all ar 
 raigned before the bar of public opinion, the relentless 
 Dickinson, the surfeited Scherer, the rapacious Grierson, 
 the salacious Tallant. I have forgotten what Miller Gorse 
 was called; nothing so classic as a Minotaur; Judd Jason 
 was a hairy spider who spread his net and lurked in dark 
 ness for his victims. Every adjective was called upon to do 
 its duty. . . . Even Theodore Watling did not escape, 
 but it was intimated that he would be dealt with in another 
 connection in a future number. 
 
 The article had a crude and terrifying power, and the 
 pain it aroused, following almost immediately upon the 
 suffering caused by my separation from Nancy, was cumu 
 lative in character and effect, seeming actively to reenforce 
 the unwelcome conviction I had been striving to suppress, 
 that the world, which had long seemed so acquiescent in 
 conforming itself to my desires, was turning against me. 
 Though my hunger for Nancy was still gnawing, I had 
 begun to fear that I should never get her now; and the 
 fact that she would not even write to me seemed to confirm 
 this. 
 
 Then there was Matthew I could not bear to think 
 that he would ever read that article. 
 
 In vain I tried that night to belittle to myself its conten 
 tions and probable results, to summon up the heart to fight ; 
 in vain I sought to reconstruct the point of view, to gain 
 something of that renewed hope and power, of devotion to 
 2a
 
 450 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 a cause I had carried away from Washington after my talk 
 with Theodore Watling. He, though stricken, had not 
 wavered in his faith. Why should I ? . . . 
 
 Whether or not as the result of the article in Yardley's, 
 which had been read more or less widely in the city, the 
 campaign of the Citizens Union gained ground, and people 
 began to fill the little halls to hear Krebs, who was a candi 
 date for district attorney. Evidently he was entertaining 
 and rousing them, for his reputation spread, and some of 
 the larger halls were hired. Dickinson and Gorse became 
 alarmed, and one morning the banker turned up at the 
 Club while I was eating my breakfast. 
 
 "Look here, Hugh," he said, "we may as well face the 
 fact that we've got a fight ahead of us, we'll have to 
 start some sort of a back-fire right away." 
 
 "You think Greenhalge has a chance of being elected?" 
 I asked. 
 
 "I'm not afraid of Greenhalge, but of this fellow Krebs. 
 We can't afford to have him district attorney, to let a dema 
 gogue like him get a start. The men the Republicans 
 and Democrats have nominated are worse than useless. 
 Parks is no good, and neither is MacGuire. If only we 
 could have foreseen this thing we might have had better 
 candidates put up but there's no use crying over spilt 
 milk. You'll have to go on the stump, Hugh that's all 
 there is to it. You can answer him, and the newspapers 
 will print your speeches in full. Besides it will help you 
 when it comes to the senatorship." 
 
 i The mood of extreme dejection that had followed the 
 appearance of the article in Yardley's did not last. I had 
 acquired aggressiveness: an aggressiveness, however, dif 
 fering in quality from the feeling I once would have had, 
 for this arose from resentment, not from belief. It was 
 impossible to live in the atmosphere created by the men
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 451 
 
 with whom I associated especially at such a time with 
 out imbibing something of the emotions animating them, 
 even though I had been free from these emotions myself. 
 I, too, had begun to be filled with a desire for revenge; 
 and when this desire was upon me I did not have in my 
 mind a pack of reformers, or even the writer of the article 
 in Yardley's. I thought of Hermann Krebs. He was my 
 persecutor; it seemed to me that he always had been. . . . 
 
 "Well, I'll make speeches if you like," I said to Dickinson. 
 
 "I'm glad," he replied. "We're all agreed, Gorse and 
 the rest of us that you ought to. We've got to get some 
 ginger into this fight, and a good deal more money, I'm 
 afraid. Jason sends word we'll need more. By the way, 
 Hugh, I wish you'd drop around and talk to Jason and get 
 his idea of how the land lies." 
 
 I went, this tune in the company of Judah B. Tallant. 
 Naturally we didn't expect to see Mr. Jason perturbed, 
 nor was he. He seemed to be in an odd, rather exultant 
 mood if he can be imagined as exultant. We were not 
 long in finding out what pleased him nothing less than 
 the fact that Mr. Krebs had proposed him for mayor ! 
 
 "D d if I wouldn't make a good one, too," he said. 
 " D d if I wouldn't show 'em what a real mayor is ! " 
 
 "I guess there's no danger of your ever being mayor, 
 Judd," Tallant observed, with a somewhat uneasy jocularity. 
 
 "I guess there isn't, Judah," replied the boss, quickly, 
 but with a peculiar violet flash in his eyes. "They won't 
 ever make you mayor, either, if I can help it. And I've a 
 notion I can. I'd rather see Krebs mayor." 
 
 "You don't think he meant to propose you seriously," 
 Tallant exclaimed. 
 
 "I'm not a d d fool," said the boss. "But I'll say 
 this, that he half meant it. Krebs has a head-piece on him, 
 and I tell you if any of this reform dope is worth anything 
 his is. There's some sense in what he's talking, and if all 
 the voters was like him you might get a man like me for 
 mayor. But they're not, and I guess they never will be."
 
 452 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Both Tallant and I were surprised to hear these sentiments 
 out of the mouth of Mr. Jason. 
 
 "You don't think that crowd's going to win, do you?" 
 asked the owner of the Era, a trifle uneasily. 
 
 "Win!" exclaimed the boss contemptuously. "They'll 
 blow up, and you'll never hear of 'em. I'm not saying we 
 won't need a little powder," he added which was one 
 of the matters we had come to talk about. He gave us 
 likewise a very accurate idea of the state of the campaign, 
 mentioning certain things that ought to be done. "You 
 ought to print some of Krebs's speeches, Judah, like what 
 he said about me. They're talking it all around that you're 
 afraid to." 
 
 " Print things like his proposal to make you mayor ! " 
 
 "Sure," said Mr. Jason. "The people are dotty there 
 ain't one in ten thousand understands what he's driving at 
 when he gets off things like that. They take it on the level." 
 
 Tallant reflected. 
 
 "By gum, I believe you're right," he said. "You think 
 they will blow up?" he added. 
 
 "Krebs is the whole show, I tell you. They wouldn't be 
 anywhere without him. The yaps that listen to him don't 
 understand him, but somehow he gets under their skins. 
 Have you seen him lately ? " 
 
 "Never saw him," replied Tallant. 
 
 "Well, if you had, you'd know he was a sick man." 
 
 " Sick ! " I exclaimed. " How do you know ? " 
 
 "It's my business to know things," said Judd Jason, 
 and added to Tallant, " that your reporters don't find 
 out." 
 
 "What's the matter with him?" Tallant demanded. A 
 slight exultation in his tone did not escape me. 
 
 "You've got me there," said Jason, "but I have it pretty 
 straight. Any one of your reporters will tell you that he 
 looks sick." . . . 
 
 The Era took Mr. Jason's advice and began to publish 
 those portions of Krebs's speeches that were seemingly detri-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 453 
 
 mental to his own cause. Other conservative newspapers 
 followed suit. ... i$j 
 
 The information that I was to enter the lists against 
 Krebs was received with satisfaction and approval by those 
 of our friends who were called in to assist at a council of 
 war in the directors' room of the Corn National Bank. 
 I was flattered by the confidence these men seemed to have 
 in my ability. All were in a state of anger against the 
 reformers ; none of them seriously alarmed as to the actual 
 outcome of the campaign, especially when I had given 
 them the opinion of Mr. Jason. What disturbed them 
 was the possible effect upon the future of the spread of 
 heretical, socialistic doctrines, and it was decided to or 
 ganize a publicity bureau, independently of the two domi 
 nant political parties, to be in charge of a certain New York 
 journalist who made a business of such affairs, who was 
 to be paid a sum commensurate with the emergency. He 
 was to have carte blanche, even in the editorial columns of 
 our newspapers. He was also to flood the city with " litera 
 ture." We had fought many wars before this, and we 
 planned our campaign precisely as though we were dealing 
 with one of those rebellions in the realm of finance of which 
 I have given an instance. But now the war chest of our 
 opponents was negligible; and we were comforted by the 
 thought that, however disagreeable the affair might be 
 while it lasted, in the long run capital was invincible. 
 
 Before setting to work to prepare my speeches it was 
 necessary to make an attempt to familiarize myself with 
 the seemingly unprecedented line of argument Krebs had 
 evolved apparently as disconcerting to his friends as to 
 his opponents. It occurred to me, since I did not care to 
 attend Krebs's meetings, to ask my confidential stenographer, 
 Miss McCoy, to go to Turner's Hall and take down one of his 
 speeches verbatim. Miss McCoy had never intruded on me
 
 454 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 her own views, and I took for granted that they coincided 
 with my own. 
 
 1 "I'd like to get an accurate record of what he is saying," 
 I told her. " Do you mind going ? " 
 
 "No, I'll be glad to go, Mr. Paret," she said quietly. 
 
 "He's doing more harm than we thought," I remarked, 
 after a moment. "I've known him for a good many years. 
 He's clever. He's sowing seeds of discontent, starting 
 trouble that will be very serious unless it is headed off." 
 
 Miss McCoy made no comment. . . . 
 
 Before noon the next day she brought in the speech, 
 neatly typewritten, and laid it on my desk. Looking up 
 and catching her eye just as she was about to withdraw, 
 I was suddenly impelled to ask : 
 
 "Well, what did you think of it?" 
 
 She actually flushed, for the first tune in my dealings 
 with her betraying a feeling which I am sure she deemed 
 most unprofessional. 
 
 "I liked it, Mr. Paret," she replied simply, and I knew 
 that she had understated. It was quite apparent that 
 Krebs had captivated her. I tried not to betray my an 
 noyance. 
 
 " Was there a good audience ? " I asked. 
 
 "Yes," she said. 
 
 " How many do you think ? " 
 
 She hesitated. 
 
 "It isn't a very large hall, you know. I should say it 
 would hold about eight hundred people." 
 
 " And it was full ? " I persisted. 
 
 "Oh, yes, there were numbers of people standing." 
 
 I thought I detected in her tone although it was not 
 apologetic a desire to spare my feelings. She hesitated 
 a moment more, and then left the room, closing the door 
 softly behind her. . . . 
 
 Presently I took up the pages and began to read. The 
 language was simple and direct, an appeal to common sense, 
 yet the words strangely seemed charged with an emotional
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 455 
 
 power that I found myself resisting. When at length I 
 laid down the sheets I wondered whether it were imagination, 
 or the uncomfortable result of memories of conversations I 
 had had with him. 
 
 I was, however, confronted with the task of refuting his 
 arguments: but with exasperating ingenuity he seemed to 
 have taken the wind out of our sails. It is difficult to answer 
 a man who denies the cardinal principle of American de 
 mocracy, that a good mayor or a governor may be made 
 out of a dog-catcher. He called this the Cincinnatus 
 theory: that any American, because he was an American, 
 was fit for any job in the gift of state or city or government, 
 from sheriff to Ambassador to Great Britain. Krebs sub 
 stituted for this fallacy what may be called the doctrine 
 of potentiality. If we inaugurated and developed a system 
 of democratic education, based on scientific principles, and 
 caught the dog-catcher young enough, he might become a 
 statesman or thinker or scientist and make his contribution 
 to the welfare and progress of the nation : again, he might 
 not; but he would have had his chance, he would not be 
 in a position to complain. 
 
 Here was a doctrine, I immediately perceived, which it 
 would be suicidal to attempt to refute. It ought, indeed, 
 to have been my line. With a growing distaste I began 
 to realize that all there was left for me was to flatter a popu 
 lace that Krebs, paradoxically, belaboured. Never in the 
 history of American "uplift" had an electorate been in this 
 manner wooed ! upbraided for expediency, a proneness to 
 demand immediate results, an unwillingness to think, 
 yes, and an inability to think straight. Such an electorate 
 deserved to be led around by the nose by the Jasons and 
 Dickinsons, the Gorses and the Griersons and the Parets. 
 
 Yes, he had mentioned me. That gave me a queer sen 
 sation. How is one to handle an opponent who praises 
 one with a delightful irony? We, the Dickinsons, Grier 
 sons, Parets, Jasons, etc., had this virtue at least, and it 
 was by no means the least of the virtues, that we did
 
 456 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 think. We had a plan, a theory of government, and we 
 carried it out. He was inclined to believe that morality 
 consisted largely, if not wholly, in clear thinking, and not 
 in the precepts of the Sunday-school. That was the trouble 
 with the so-called " reform " campaigns, they were conducted 
 on lines of Sunday-school morality; the people worked 
 themselves up into a sort of revivalist frenzy, an emotional 
 state which, if the truth were told, was thoroughly immoral, 
 unreasonable and hypocritical : like all frenzies, as a matter 
 of course it died down after the campaign was over. More 
 over, the American people had shown that they were un 
 willing to make any sacrifices for the permanent betterment 
 of conditions, and as soon as their incomes began to fall off 
 they turned again to the bosses and capitalists like an 
 abject flock of sheep. 
 
 He went on to explain that he wasn't referring now to 
 that part of the electorate known as the labour element, 
 the men who worked with their hands in mills, factories, etc. 
 They had their faults, yet they possessed at least the virtue 
 of solidarity, a willingness to undergo sacrifices in order to 
 advance the standard of conditions ; they too had a tenacity 
 of purpose and a plan, such as it was, which the small business 
 men, the clerks lacked. . . . 
 
 We must wake up to the fact that we shouldn't get Utopia 
 by turning out Mr. Jason and the highly efficient gentlemen 
 who hired and financed him. It wasn't so simple as that. 
 Utopia was not an achievement after all, but an undertaking, 
 a state of mind, the continued overcoming of resistance by a 
 progressive education and effort. And all this talk of polit 
 ical and financial "wickedness" was rubbish; the wicked 
 ness they complained of^did not reside merely in individuals : 
 it was a social disorder, or rather an order that no longer 
 suited social conditions. If the so-called good citizens would 
 take the trouble to educate themselves, to think instead of 
 allowing their thinking to be done for them, they would 
 see that the "evils" which had been published broadcast 
 were merely the symptoms of that disease which had come
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 457 
 
 upon the social body through their collective neglect and 
 indifference. They held up their hands in horror at the spec 
 tacle of a commercial, licensed prostitution, they shunned 
 the prostitute and the criminal ; but there was none of us, 
 if honest, who would not exclaim when he saw them, " there, 
 but for the Grace of God, go I ! " What we still called " sin " 
 was largely the result of lack of opportunity, and the active 
 principle of society as at present organized tended more 
 and more to restrict opportunity. Lack of opportunity, 
 lack of proper nutrition, these made sinners by the whole 
 sale ; made, too, nine-tenths of the inefficient of whom we 
 self-righteously complained. We had a national philosophy 
 that measured prosperity in dollars and cents, included in 
 this measurement the profits of liquor dealers who were re 
 sponsible for most of our idiots. So long as we set our hearts 
 on that kind of prosperity, so long as we failed to grasp the 
 simple and practical fact that the greatest assets of a nation 
 are healthy and sane and educated, clear-thinking human 
 beings, just so long was prostitution logical, Riverside Fran 
 chises, traction deals, Judd Jasons, and the respectable gentle 
 men who continued to fill their coffers out of the public purse 
 inevitable. 
 
 The speaker turned his attention to the "respectable gentle 
 men" with the full coffers, amongst whom I was by implica 
 tion included. We had simply succeeded under the rules 
 to which society tacitly agreed. That was our sin. He 
 ventured to say that there were few men in the hall who at 
 the bottom of their hearts did not envy and even honour our 
 success. He, for one, did not deem these "respectable gen 
 tlemen" utterly reprehensible; he was sufficiently emanci 
 pated to be sorry for us. He suspected that we were not 
 wholly happy in being winners in such a game, he even be 
 lieved that we could wish as much as any others to change the 
 game and the prizes. What we represented was valuable 
 energy misdirected and misplaced, and in a reorganized com 
 munity he would not abolish us, but transform us : transform, 
 at least, the individuals of our type, who were the builders gone
 
 458 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 wrong under the influence of an outworn philosophy. We 
 might be made to serve the city and the state with the same 
 effectiveness that we had served ourselves. 
 
 If the best among the scientists, among the university pro 
 fessors and physicians were willing to labour and they 
 were for the advancement of humanity, for the very love 
 of the work and service without disproportionate emoluments, 
 without the accumulation of a wealth difficult to spend, why 
 surely these big business men had been moulded in infancy 
 from no different clay ! All were Americans. Instance after 
 instance might be cited of business men and lawyers of ability 
 making sacrifices, giving up their personal affairs in order to 
 take places of honour in the government in which the salary 
 was comparatively small, proving that even these were open 
 to inducements other than merely mercenary ones. 
 
 It was unfortunate, he went on, but true, that the vast 
 majority of people of voting age in the United States to-day 
 who thought they had been educated were under the obliga 
 tion to reeducate themselves. He suggested, whimsically, 
 a vacation school for Congress and all legislative bodies as 
 a starter. Until the fact of the utter inadequacy of the old 
 education were faced, there was little or no hope of solving 
 the problems that harassed us. One thing was certain 
 that they couldn't be solved by a rule-of-thumb morality. 
 Coincident with the appearance of these new and mighty 
 problems, perhaps in response to them, a new and saner view 
 of life itself was being developed by the world's thinkers, new 
 sciences were being evolved, correlated sciences ; a psychology 
 making a truer analysis of human motives, impulses, of 
 human possibilities ; an economics and a theory of govern 
 ment that took account of this psychology, and of the vast 
 changes applied science had made in production and distri 
 bution. We lived in a new world, which we sought to ignore ; 
 and the new education, the new viewpoint was in truth 
 nothing but religion made practical. It had never been 
 thought practical before. The motive that compelled men 
 to work for humanity in science, in medicine, in art yes,
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 459 
 
 and in business, if we took the right view of it, was the reli 
 gious motive. The application of religion was to-day ex 
 tending from the individual to society. No religion that did 
 not fill the needs of both was a true religion. 
 
 This meant the development of a new culture, one to be 
 founded on the American tradition of equality of opportunity. 
 But culture was not a weed that grew overnight ; it was a 
 leaven that spread slowly and painfully, first inoculating a 
 few who suffered and often died for it, that it might gradually 
 affect the many. The spread of culture implied the recogni 
 tion of leadership : democratic leadership, but still leadership. 
 Leadership, and the wisdom it implied, did not reside in the 
 people, but in the leaders who sprang from the people and 
 interpreted their needs and longings. . . . He went on to 
 discuss a part of the programme of the Citizens Union. . . . 
 
 What struck me, as I laid down the typewritten sheets, 
 was the extraordinary resemblance between the philosophies 
 of Hermann Krebs and Theodore Watling. Only Krebs's 
 philosophy was the bigger, held the greater vision of the two ; 
 I had reluctantly and rather bitterly to admit it. The appeal 
 of it had even reached and stirred me, whose task was to re 
 fute it ! Here indeed was something to fight for perhaps 
 to die for, as he had said : and as I sat there in my office 
 gazing out of the window I found myself repeating certain 
 phrases he had used the phrase about leadership, for in 
 stance. It was a tremendous conception of Democracy, that 
 of acquiescence to developed leadership made responsible; 
 a conception I was compelled to confess transcended Mr. 
 Watling's, loyal as I was to him. ... I began to reflect how 
 novel all this was in a political speech although what I 
 have quoted was in the nature of a preamble. It was a ser 
 mon, an educational sermon. Well, that is what sermons 
 always had been, and even now pretended to be, edu 
 cational and stirring, appealing to the emotions through the 
 intellect. It didn't read like the Socialism he used to preach, 
 it had the ring of religion. He had called it religion. 
 
 With an effort of the will I turned from this ironical and
 
 460 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 dangerous vision of a Hugh Paret who might have been en 
 listed in an inspiring struggle, of a modern yet unregenerate 
 Saul kicking against the pricks, condemned to go forth breath 
 ing fire against a doctrine that made a true appeal ; against 
 the man I believed I hated just because he had made this ap 
 peal. In the act of summoning my counter-arguments I was 
 interrupted by the entrance of Grierson. He was calling on 
 a matter of business, but began to talk about the extracts 
 from Krebs's speech he had read in the Mail and State. 
 
 "What in hell is this fellow driving at, Paret?" he de 
 manded. " It sounds to me like the ranting of a lunatic der 
 vish. If he thinks so much of us, and the way we run the 
 town, what's he squawking about ? " 
 
 I looked at Grierson, and conceived an intense aversion for 
 him. I wondered how I had ever been able to stand him, 
 to work with him. I saw him in a sudden flash as a cunning, 
 cruel bird of prey, a gorged, drab vulture with beady eyes, 
 a resemblance so extraordinary that I wondered I had never 
 remarked it before. For he had the hooked vulture nose, 
 while the pink baldness of his head was relieved by a few 
 scanty tufts of hair. 
 
 "The people seem to like what he's got to say," I observed. 
 
 "It beats me," said Grierson. "They don't understand a 
 quarter of it I've been talking to some of 'em. It's their 
 d d curiosity, I guess. You know how they'll stand for 
 hours around a street fakir." 
 
 " It's more than that," I retorted. 
 
 Grierson regarded me piercingly. 
 
 "Well, we'll put a crimp in him, all right," he said, with 
 a laugh. 
 
 I was in an unenviable state of mind when he left me. I 
 had an impulse to send for Miss McCoy and ask her if she had 
 understood what Krebs was "driving at," but for reasons 
 that must be fairly obvious I refrained. I read over again 
 that part of Krebs's speech which dealt with the immediate 
 programme of the Citizens Union. After paying a tribute 
 to Greenhalge as a man of common sense and dependability
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 461 
 
 who would make a good mayor, he went on to explain the 
 principle of the new charter they hoped ultimately to get, 
 which should put the management of the city in the hands 
 of one man, an expert employed by a commission ; an expert 
 whose duty it would be to conduct the affairs of the city on a 
 business basis, precisely as those of any efficient corporation 
 were conducted. This plan had already been adopted, with 
 encouraging results, in several smaller cities of the country. 
 He explained in some detail, with statistics, the waste and in 
 efficiency and dishonesty in various departments under the 
 present system, dwelling particularly upon the deplorable 
 state of affairs in the city hospital. 
 
 I need not dwell upon this portion of his remarks. Since 
 then text-books and serious periodicals have dealt with these 
 matters thoroughly. They are now familiar to all thinking 
 Americans.
 
 XXV 
 
 MY entrance into the campaign was accompanied by a 
 blare of publicity, and during that fortnight I never picked 
 up a morning or evening newspaper without reading, on the 
 first page, some such headline as " Crowds flock to hear Paret." 
 As a matter of fact, the crowds did flock ; but I never quite 
 knew as I looked down from platforms on seas of faces how 
 much of the flocking was spontaneous. Much of it was so, 
 since the struggle had then become sufficiently dramatic to 
 appeal to the larger public imagination that is but occasion 
 ally waked ; on the other hand, the magic of advertising can 
 not be underestimated ; nor must the existence be ignored 
 of an organized corps of shepherds under the vigilant direc 
 tion of Mr. Judd Jason, whose duty it was to see that none 
 of our meetings was lacking in numbers and enthusiasm. 
 There was always a demonstrative gathering overflowing the 
 sidewalk in front of the entrance, swaying and cheering in the 
 light of the street lamps, and on the floor within an ample 
 scattering of suspiciously bleary-eyed voters to start the 
 stamping and applauding. In spite of these known facts, 
 the impression of popularity, of repudiation of reform by a 
 large majority of level-headed inhabitants had reassuring and 
 reenforcing effects. 
 
 Astute citizens, spectators of the fray if indeed there 
 were any might have remarked an unique and significant 
 feature of that campaign : that the usual recriminations be 
 tween the two great parties were lacking. Mr. Parks, the 
 Republican candidate, did not denounce Mr. MacGuire, the 
 Democratic candidate. Republican and Democratic speakers 
 
 462
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 463 
 
 alike expended their breath in lashing Mr. Krebs and the 
 Citizens Union. 
 
 It is difficult to record the fluctuations of my spirit. When 
 I was in the halls, speaking or waiting to speak, I reacted to 
 that phenomenon known as mob psychology, I became self- 
 confident, even exhilarated ; and in those earlier speeches I 
 managed, I think, to strike the note for which I strove the 
 judicial note, suitable to a lawyer of weight and prominence, 
 of deprecation rather than denunciation. I sought to em 
 body and voice a fine and calm sanity at a time when everyone 
 else seemed in danger of losing their heads, and to a large 
 extent achieved it. I had known Mr. Krebs for more than 
 twenty years, and while I did not care to criticise a fellow- 
 member of the bar, I would go so far as to say that he was 
 visionary, that the changes he proposed in government would, 
 if adopted, have grave and far-reaching results: we could 
 not, for instance, support in idleness those who refused to do 
 their share of the work of the world. Mr. Krebs was well- 
 meaning. I'jefrained from dwelling too long upon him, pass 
 ing to Mr. Greenhalge, also well-meaning, but a man of medi 
 ocre ability who would make a mess of the government of a 
 city which would one day rival New York and Chicago. 
 (Loud cheers.) And I pointed out that Mr. Perry Black- 
 wood had been unable to manage the affairs of the Boyne 
 Street road. Such men, well-intentioned though they might 
 be, were hindrances to progress. This led me naturally to a 
 discussion of the Riverside Franchise and the Traction Con 
 solidation. I was one of those whose honesty and good faith 
 had been arraigned, but I would not stoop to refute the accu 
 sations. I dwelt upon the benefits to the city, uniform 
 service, electricity and large comfortable cars instead of rattle 
 trap conveyances, and the development of a large and grow 
 ing population in the Riverside neighbourhood : the continual 
 extension of lines to suburban districts that enabled hard- 
 worked men to live out of the smoke : I called attention to 
 the system of transfers, the distance a passenger might be 
 conveyed, and conveyed quickly, for the sum of five cents.
 
 464 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I spoke of our capitalists as men more sinned against than 
 sinning. Their money was always at the service of enter 
 prises tending to the development of our metropolis. 
 
 When I was not in the meetings, however, and especially 
 when in my room at night, I was continually trying to fight 
 off a sense of loneliness that seemed to threaten to overwhelm 
 me. I wanted to be alone, and yet I feared to be. I was 
 aware, in spite of their congratulations on my efforts, of a 
 growing dislike for my associates; and in the appalling 
 emptiness of the moments when my depression was greatest 
 I was forced to the realization that I had no disinterested 
 friend not one in whom I could confide. Nancy had 
 failed me ; I had scarcely seen Tom Peters that winter, and 
 it was out of the question to go to him. For the third time 
 in my life, and in the greatest crisis of all, I was feeling the 
 need of Something, of some sustaining and impelling Power 
 that must be presented humanly, possessing sympathy and 
 understanding and love. ... I think I had a glimpse 
 just a pathetic glimpse of what the Church might be of 
 human solidarity, comfort and support, of human tolerance, 
 if stripped of the superstition of an ancient science. My tor 
 tures weren't of the flesh, but of the mind. My mind was the 
 sheep which had gone astray. Was there no such thing, 
 could there be no such thing as a human association that 
 might at the same time be a divine organism, a fold and a 
 refuge for the lost and divided minds ? The source of all this 
 trouble was social. . . . 
 
 Then toward the end of that last campaign week, madness 
 suddenly came upon me. I know now how near the break 
 ing point I was, but the immediate cause of my "flying to 
 pieces" to use a vivid expression was a speech made 
 by Guptill, one of the Citizens Union candidates for alder 
 man, a young man of a radical type not uncommon in these 
 days, though new to my experience: an educated man in 
 the ultra-radical sense, yet lacking poise and perspective, 
 with a certain brilliance and assurance. He was a journal 
 ist, a correspondent of some Eastern newspapers and periodi-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 465 
 
 cals. In this speech, which was reported to me for it 
 did not get into the newspapers I was the particular 
 object of his attack. Men of my kind, and not the Judd 
 Jasons (for whom there was some excuse) were the least 
 dispensable tools of the capitalists, the greatest menace to 
 civilization. We were absolutely lacking in principle, we 
 were ready at any tune to besmirch our profession by legal 
 izing steals ; we fouled our nests with dirty fees. Not all 
 that he said was vituperation, for he knew something of the 
 modern theory of the law that legal radicals had begun to 
 proclaim, and even to teach in some tolerant universities. 
 
 The next night, in the middle of a prepared speech I was 
 delivering to a large crowd in Kingdon Hall there had been 
 jeers from a group in a corner at some assertion I made. 
 Guptill's accusations had been festering in my mind. The 
 faces of the people grew blurred as I felt anger boiling, rising 
 within me ; suddenly my control gave way, and I launched 
 forth into a denunciation of Greenhalge, Krebs, Guptill 
 and even of Perry Blackwood that must have been without 
 license or bounds. I can recall only fragments of my re 
 marks : Greenhalge wanted to be mayor, and was willing to 
 put the stigma of slander on his native city in order to gain 
 his ambition ; Krebs had made a failure of his profession, of 
 everything save in bringing shame on the place of his adoption ; 
 and on the single occasion heretofore when he had been be 
 fore the public, in the School Board fiasco, the officials in 
 dicted on his supposed evidence had triumphantly been 
 vindicated ; Guptill was gaining money and notoriety out of 
 his spleen; Perry Blackwood was acting out of spite . . . 
 I returned to Krebs, declaring that he would be the boss of 
 the city if that ticket were elected, demanding whether 
 they wished for a boss an agitator itching for power and 
 recognition. . . . 
 
 I was conscious at the moment only of a wild relief and 
 
 joy in letting myself go, feelings heightened by the clapping 
 
 and cheers with which my characterizations were received. 
 
 The fact that the cheers were mingled with hisses merely 
 
 2n
 
 466 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 served to drive me on. At length, when I had returned to 
 Krebs, the hisses were redoubled, angering me the more be 
 cause of the evidence they gave of friends of his in my audi 
 ences. Perhaps I had made some of these friends for him ! 
 A voice shouted out above the uproar : 
 
 "I know about Krebs. He's a d d sight better man 
 than you." And this started a struggle in a corner of the 
 hall. ... I managed, somehow, when the commotion had 
 subsided, to regain my poise, and ended by uttering the 
 conviction that the common sense of the community would 
 repudiate the Citizens Union and all it stood for. . . . 
 
 But that night, as I lay awake listening to the street noises 
 and staring at the glint from a street lamp on the brass knob 
 of my bedstead, I knew that I had failed. I had committed 
 the supreme violation of the self that leads inevitably to its 
 final dissolution. . . . Even the exuberant headlines of the 
 newspapers handed me by the club servant in the morning 
 brought but little relief. 
 
 On the Saturday morning before the Tuesday of election 
 there was a conference in the directors' room of the Corn 
 National. The city reeked with smoke and acrid, stale gas, 
 the electric lights were turned on to dispel the November 
 gloom. It was not a cheerful conference, nor a confident 
 one. For the first time in a collective experience the men 
 gathered there were confronted with a situation which they 
 doubted their ability to control, a situation for which there 
 was no precedent. They had to reckon with a new and 
 unsolvable equation in politics and finance, the indepen 
 dent voter. There was an element of desperation in the dis 
 cussion. Recriminations passed. Dickinson implied that 
 Gorse with all his knowledge of political affairs ought to have 
 foreseen that something like this was sure to happen, should 
 have managed better the conventions of both great parties. 
 The railroad counsel retorted that it had been as much 
 Dickinson's fault as his. Grierson expressed a regret that
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 467 
 
 I had broken out against the reformers ; it had reacted, he 
 said, and this was just enough to sting me to retaliate 
 that things had been done in the campaign, chiefly through 
 his initiative, that were not only unwise, but might land 
 some of us in the penitentiary if Krebs were elected. 
 
 "Well," Grierson exclaimed, "whether he's elected or not, 
 I wouldn't give much now for your chances of getting to the 
 Senate. We can't afford to fly in the face of the dear public." 
 
 A tense silence followed this remark. In the street below 
 the rumble of the traffic came to us muffled by the heavy 
 plate-glass windows. I saw Tallant glance at Gorse and 
 Dickinson, and I knew the matter had been decided be 
 tween themselves, that they had been merely withhold 
 ing it from me until after election. I was besmirched, 
 for the present at least. 
 
 " I think you will do me the justice, gentlemen," I remem 
 ber saying slowly, with the excessive and rather ridiculous 
 formality of a man who is near the end of his tether, "that 
 the idea of representing you in the Senate was yours, not 
 mine. You begged me to take the appointment against my 
 wishes and my judgment. I had no desire to go to Wash 
 ington then, I have less to-day. I have come to the conclu 
 sion that my usefulness to you is at an end." 
 
 I got to my feet. I beheld Miller Gorse sitting impassive, 
 with his encompassing stare, the strongest man of them all. 
 A change of firmaments would not move him. But Dick 
 inson had risen and put his hand on my shoulder. It was 
 the first time I had ever seen him white. 
 
 " Hold on, Hugh," he exclaimed, " I guess we're all a little 
 cantankerous to-day. This confounded campaign has got 
 on our nerves, and we say things we don't mean. You 
 mustn't think we're not grateful for the services you've ren 
 dered us. We're all in the same boat, and there isn't a 
 man who's been on our side of this fight who could take a 
 political office at this time. We've got to face that fact, and 
 I know you have the sense to see it, too. I, for one, won't 
 be satisfied until I see you in the Senate. It's where you
 
 468 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 belong, and you deserve to be there. You understand what 
 the public is, how it blows hot and cold, and in a few years 
 they'll be howling to get us back, if these demagogues win. 
 
 "Sure," chimed in Grierson, who was frightened, "that's 
 right, Hugh. I didn't mean anything. Nobody appre 
 ciates you more than I do, old man." 
 
 Tallant, too, added something, and Berringer, I've 
 forgotten what. I was tired, too tired to meet their advances 
 halfway. I said that I had a speech to get ready for that 
 night, and other affairs to attend to, and left them grouped 
 together like crestfallen conspirators all save Miller 
 Gorse, whose pervasive gaze seemed to follow me after I 
 had closed the door. 
 
 An elevator took me down to the lobby of the Corn Bank 
 Building. I paused for a moment, aimlessly regarding the 
 streams of humanity hurrying in and out, streaking the white 
 marble floor with the wet filth of the streets. Someone spoke 
 my name. It was Bitter, Judd Jason's "legal" tool, and I 
 permitted myself to be dragged out of the eddies into a quiet 
 corner by the cigar stand. 
 
 "Say, I guess we've got Krebs's goat all right, this time," 
 he told me confidentially, in a voice a little above a whisper ; 
 " he was busy with the shirt-waist girls last year, you remem 
 ber, when they were striking. Well, one of 'em, one of the 
 strike leaders, has taken to easy street ; she's agreed to send 
 him a letter to-night to come 'round to her room after his 
 meeting, to say that she's sick and wants to see him. He'll 
 go, all right. We'll have some fun, we'll be ready for him. 
 Do you get me? So long. The old man's waiting for me." 
 
 It may seem odd that this piece of information did not 
 produce an immediately revolting effect. I knew that simi 
 lar practices had been tried on Krebs, but this was the 
 first tune I had heard of a definite plan, and from a man 
 like Bitter. As I made my way out of the building I had, 
 indeed, a nauseated feeling; Jason's "lawyer" was a dirty 
 little man, smelling of stale cigars, with a blue-black, un 
 shaven face. In spite of the shocking nature of his confi-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 469 
 
 dence, he had actually not succeeded in deflecting the current 
 of my thoughts; these were still running over the scene in 
 the directors' room. I had listened to him passively while 
 he had held my buttonhole, and he had detained me but an 
 instant. 
 
 When I reached the street I was wondering whether Gorse 
 and Dickinson and the others, Grierson especially, could 
 possibly have entertained the belief that I would turn traitor ? 
 I told myself that I had no intention of this. How could 
 I turn traitor? and what would be the object? revenge? 
 The nauseated feeling grew more acute. . . . Reaching 
 my office, I shut the door, sat down at my desk, summoned 
 my will, and began to jot down random notes for the part of 
 my speech I was to give the newspapers, notes that were mere 
 silly fragments of arguments I had once thought effective. 
 I could no more concentrate on them than I could have 
 written a poem. Gradually, like the smoke that settled 
 down on our city until we lived in darkness at midday, the 
 horror of what Bitter had told me began to pervade my 
 mind, until I was in a state of terror. 
 
 Had I, Hugh Paret, fallen to this, that I could stand by 
 consenting to an act which was worse than assassination ? 
 Was any cause worth it? Could any cause survive it? 
 But my attempts at reasoning might be likened to the strain 
 ings of a wayfarer lost on a mountain side to pick his way hi 
 the gathering dusk. I had just that desperate feeling of 
 being lost, and with it went an acute sense of an imminent 
 danger ; the ground, no longer firm under my feet, had be- 
 ;come a sliding shale sloping toward an unseen precipice. 
 Perhaps, like the wayfarer, my fears were the sharper for 
 the memory of the beauty of the morning on that same 
 mountain, when, filled with vigour, I had gazed on it from 
 the plain below and beheld the sun breaking through the 
 mists. . . . 
 
 The necessity of taking some action to avert what I now 
 realized as an infamy pressed upon me, yet in conflict with 
 the pressure of this necessity there persisted that old rebel-
 
 470 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 lion, that bitterness which had been growing all these years 
 against the man who, above all others, seemed to me to 
 represent the forces setting at nought my achievements, 
 bringing me to this pass. . . . 
 
 I thought of appealing to Leonard Dickinson, who surely, 
 if he knew of it, would not permit this thing to be done ; 
 and he was the only man with the possible exception of Miller 
 Gorse who might be able to restrain Judd Jason. But I de 
 layed until after the luncheon hour, when I called up the 
 bank on the telephone, to discover that it was closed. I had 
 forgotten that the day was Saturday. I was prepared to 
 say that I would withdraw from the campaign, warn Krebs 
 myself if this kind of tactics were not suppressed. But I 
 could not get the banker. Then I began to have doubts of 
 Dickinson's power in the matter. Judd Jason had never 
 been tractable, by any means ; he had always maintained a 
 considerable independence of the financial powers, and to-day 
 not only financial control, but the dominance of Jason him 
 self was at stake. He would fight for it to the last ditch, 
 and make use of any means. No, it was of no use to appeal 
 to him. What then? Well, there was a reaction, or an 
 attempt at one. Krebs had not been born yesterday, he had 
 avoided the wiles of the politicians heretofore, he wouldn't 
 be fool enough to be taken hi now. I told myself that if I 
 were not in a state bordering on a nervous breakdown, I 
 should laugh at such morbid fears, I steadied myself suffi 
 ciently to dictate the extract from my speech that was to 
 be published. I was to make addresses at two halls, alter 
 nating with Parks, the mayoralty candidate. At four o'clock 
 I went back to my room in the Club to try to get some 
 rest. . . . 
 
 Seddon's Hall, the place of my first meeting, was jammed 
 that Saturday night. I went through my speech auto 
 matically, as in a dream, the habit of long years asserting 
 itself. And yet so I was told afterwards my delivery 
 was not mechanical, and I actually achieved more emphasis, 
 gave a greater impression of conviction than at any time
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 471 
 
 since the night I had lost my control and violently de 
 nounced the reformers. By some astonishing subconscious 
 process I had regained my manner, but the applause came 
 to me as from a distance. Not only was my mind not 
 there; it did not seem to be anywhere. I was dazed, nor did 
 I feel save once a fleeting surge of contempt for the mob 
 below me with their silly faces upturned to mine. There 
 may have been intelligent expressions among them, but 
 they failed to catch my eye. 
 
 I remember being stopped by Grierson as I was going out 
 of the side entrance. He took my hand and squeezed it, 
 and there was on his face an odd, surprised look. 
 
 "That was the best yet, Hugh," he said. 
 
 I went on past him. Looking back on that evening now, 
 it would almost seem as though the volition of another 
 possessed me, not my own: seemingly, I had every inten 
 tion of going on to the National Theatre, in which Parks 
 had just spoken, and as I descended the narrow stairway 
 and emerged on the side street I caught sight of my chauffeur 
 awaiting me by the curb. 
 
 "I'm not going to that other meeting," I found myself 
 saying. " I'm pretty tired." 
 
 "Shall I drive you back to the Club, sir?" he inquired. 
 
 "No I'll walk back. Wait a moment." I entered the 
 car, turned on the light and scribbled a hasty note to Andrews, 
 the chairman of the meeting at the National, telling him that 
 I was too tired to speak again that Jiight, and to ask one of 
 the younger men there to take my place. Then I got out of 
 the car and gave the note to the chauffeur. 
 
 "You're all right, sir?" he asked, with a note of anxiety 
 in his voice. He had been with me a long tune. 
 
 I reassured him. He started the car, and I watched it 
 absently as it gathered speed and turned the corner. I 
 began to walk, slowly at first, then more and more rapidly 
 until I had gamed a breathless pace ; in ten minutes I was 
 in West Street, standing in front of the Templar's Hall 
 where the meeting of the Citizens Union was in progress.
 
 472 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 Now that I had arrived there, doubt and uncertainty as 
 sailed me. I had come as it were in spite of myself, thrust 
 onward by an impulse I did not understand, which did not 
 seem to be mine. What was I going to do? The proceed 
 ing suddenly appeared to me as ridiculous, tinged with the 
 weirdness of somnambulism. I revolted, walked away, got 
 as far as the corner and stood beside a lamp post, pretending 
 to be waiting for a car. The street lights were reflected in 
 perpendicular, wavy-yellow ribbons on the wet asphalt, 
 and I stood staring with foolish intentness at this phe 
 nomenon, wondering how a painter would get the effect in 
 oils. Again I was walking back towards the hall, com 
 bating the acknowledgment to myself that I had a plan, 
 a plan that I did not for a moment believe I would carry 
 out. I was shivering. 
 
 I climbed the steps. The wide vestibule was empty 
 except for two men who stopped a low-toned conversation 
 to look at me. I wondered whether they recognized me; 
 that I might be recognized was an alarming possibility 
 which had not occurred to me. 
 
 "Who is speaking?" I asked. 
 
 "Mr. Krebs," answered the taller man of the two. 
 
 The hum of applause came from behind the swinging 
 doors. I pushed them open cautiously, passing suddenly 
 out of the cold into the reeking, heated atmosphere of a 
 building packed with human beings. The space behind the 
 rear seats was filled with men standing, and those nearest 
 glanced around with annoyance at the interruption of my 
 entrance. I made my way along the wall, finally reaching 
 a side aisle, whence I could get sight of the platform and the 
 speaker. 
 
 I heard his words distinctly, but at first lacked the faculty 
 of stringing them together, or rather of extracting their 
 collective sense. The phrases indeed were set ringing 
 through my mind, I found myself repeating them without 
 any reference to their meaning ; I had reached the peculiar 
 pitch of excitement that counterfeits abnormal calm, and
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 473 
 
 all sense of strangeness at being there in that meeting had 
 passed away. I began to wonder how I might warn Krebs, 
 and presently decided to send him a note when he should 
 have finished speaking but I couldn't make up my mind 
 whether to put my name to the note or not. Of course I 
 needn't have entered the hall at all : I might have sent in 
 my note at the side door. 
 
 I must have wished to see Krebs, to hear him speak; to 
 observe, perhaps, the effect on the audience. In spite of 
 my inability to take in what he was saying, I was able to 
 regard him objectively, objectively, in a restricted sense. 
 I noticed that he had grown even thinner; the flesh had 
 fallen away from under his cheek-bones, and there were 
 sharp, deep, almost perpendicular lines on either side of his 
 mouth. He was emaciated, that was the word. Once in a 
 while he thrust his hand through his dry, ashy hair which 
 was of a tone with the paleness of his face. Such was his 
 only gesture. 
 
 He spoke quietly, leaning with one elbow against the side 
 of his reading stand. The occasional pulsations of applause 
 were almost immediately hushed, as though the people 
 feared to lose even a word that should fall from his dry 
 lips. What was it he was talking about? I tried to con 
 centrate my attention, with only partial success. He was 
 explaining the new theory of city government that did 
 not attempt to evade, but dealt frankly with the human 
 needs of to-day, and sought to meet those needs in a positive 
 way. . . What had happened to me, though I did not realize 
 it, was that I had gradually come under the influence of a 
 tragic spell not attributable to the words I heard, existing 
 independently of them, pervading the spacious hall, weaving 
 into unity dissentient minds. And then, with what seemed 
 a retarded rather than sudden awareness, I knew that he 
 had stopped speaking. Once more he ran his hand through 
 his hair, he was seemingly groping for words that would 
 not come. I was pierced by a strange agony the amazing 
 source of which seemed to be a smile on the face of Her-
 
 474 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 mann Krebs, an ineffable smile illuminating the place like 
 a flash of light, in which suffering and tragedy, comradeship 
 and loving kindness all were mingled. He stood for a 
 moment with that smile on his face swayed, and would 
 have fallen had it not been for the quickness of a man 
 on the platform behind him, and into whose arms he 
 sank. 
 
 In an instant people had risen in their seats, men were 
 hurrying down the aisles, while a peculiar human murmur 
 or wail persisted like an undertone beneath the confusion 
 of noises, striking the very note of my own feelings. Above 
 the heads of those about me I saw Krebs being carried off 
 the platform. . . . The chairman motioned for silence 
 and inquired if there were a physician in the audience, and 
 then all began to talk at once. The man who stood beside 
 me clutched my arm. 
 
 "I hope he isn't dead! Say, did you see that smile? 
 My God, I'll never forget it!" 
 
 The exclamation poignantly voiced the esteem in which 
 Krebs was held. As I was thrust along out of the hall by 
 the ebb of the crowd still other expressions of this esteem 
 came to me in fragments, expressions of sorrow and dismay, 
 of a loyalty I had not imagined. Mingled with these were 
 occasional remarks of skeptics shaken, in human fashion, 
 by the suggestion of the inevitable end that never fails to 
 sober and terrify humanity. 
 
 "I guess he was a bigger man than we thought. There 
 was a lot of sense in what he had to say." 
 
 "There sure was," the companion of this speaker an 
 swered. 
 
 They spoke of him in the past tense. I was seized and 
 obsessed by the fear that I should never see him again, and 
 at the same moment I realized sharply that this was the 
 one thing I wanted to see him. I pushed through the 
 people, gained the street, and fairly ran down the alley 
 that led to the side entrance of the hall, where a small 
 group was gathered under the light that hung above the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 475 
 
 doorway. There stood on the step, a little above the others, 
 a young man in a grey flannel shirt, evidently a mechanic. 
 I addressed him. 
 
 " What does the doctor say ? " 
 
 Before replying he surveyed me with surprise and, I think, 
 with instinctive suspicion of my clothes and bearing. 
 
 "What can he say?" he retorted. 
 
 "You mean ?" I began. 
 
 " I mean Mr. Krebs oughtn't never to have gone into this 
 campaign," he answered, relenting a trifle, perhaps at the 
 tone of my voice. " He knew it, too, and some of us fellows 
 tried to stop him. But we couldn't do nothing with him," 
 he added dejectedly. 
 
 "What is the trouble ?" I asked. 
 
 "They tell me it's his heart. He wouldn't talk about it." 
 
 "When I think of what he done for our union !" exclaimed 
 a thick-set man, plainly a steel worker. "He's just wore 
 himself out, fighting that crooked gang." He stared with 
 sudden aggressiveness at me. "Haven't I seen you some- 
 wheres ? " he demanded. 
 
 A denial was on my lips when the sharp, sinister strokes 
 of a bell were heard coming nearer. 
 
 "It's the ambulance," said the man on the step. 
 
 Glancing up the alley beyond the figures of two police 
 men who had arrived and were holding the people back, 
 I saw the hood of the conveyance as it came to a halt, and 
 immediately a hospital doctor and two assistants carrying 
 a stretcher hurried towards us, and we made way for them 
 to enter. After a brief interval, they were heard coming 
 slowly down the steps inside. By the white, cruel light of 
 the arc I saw Krebs lying motionless. ... I laid hold of 
 one of the men who had been on the platform. He did not 
 resent the act, he seemed to anticipate my question. 
 
 "He'c conscious. The doctors expect him to rally when 
 he gets to the hospital." 
 
 I walked back to the Club to discover that several inquiries 
 had been made about me. Reporters had been there, Re-
 
 476 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 publican Headquarters had telephoned to know if I were 
 ill. Leaving word that I was not to be disturbed under 
 any circumstances, I went to my room, and spent most of 
 the night in distracted thought. When at last morning 
 came I breakfasted early, searching the newspapers for ac 
 counts of the occurrence at Templar's Hall; and the fact 
 'that these were neither conspicuous nor circumstantial was 
 ' in the nature of a triumph of self-control on the part of edi 
 tors and reporters. News, however sensational, had severely 
 to be condensed in the interest of a cause, and at this critical 
 stage of the campaign to make a tragic hero of Hermann 
 Krebs would have been the height of folly. There were 
 a couple of paragraphs giving the gist of his speech, and a 
 statement at the end that he had been taken ill and conveyed 
 to the Presbyterian Hospital. . . . 
 
 The hospital itself loomed up before me that Sunday 
 morning as I approached it along Ballantyne Street, a diluted 
 sunshine washing the extended, businesslike fa$ade of grimy, 
 yellow brick. We were proud of that hospital in the city, 
 and many of our foremost citizens had contributed large 
 sums of money to the building, scarcely ten years old. It 
 had been one of Maude's interests. I was ushered into the 
 reception room, where presently came the physician in 
 charge, a Dr. Castle, one of those quiet-mannered, modern 
 young medical men who bear on their persons the very stamp 
 of efficiency, of the dignity of a scientific profession. His 
 greeting implied that he knew all about me, his pres 
 ence seemed to increase the agitation I tried not to betray, 
 and must have betrayed. 
 
 "Can I do anything for you, Mr. Paret?" he asked. 
 
 "I have come to inquire about Mr. Krebs, who was 
 brought here last night, I believe." 
 
 I was aware for an instant of his penetrating, professional 
 glance, the only indication of the surprise he must have felt 
 that Hermann Krebs, of all men, should be the object of my 
 solicitude. 
 
 " Why, we sent him home this morning. Nineteen twenty-
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 477 
 
 six Fowler Street. He wanted to go, and there was no use 
 in his staying." 
 
 "He will recover?" I asked. 
 
 The physician shook his head, gazing at me through his 
 glasses. 
 
 " He may live a month, Mr. Paret, he may die to-morrow. 
 He ought never to have gone into this campaign, he knew 
 he had this trouble. Hepburn warned him three months 
 ago, and there's no man who knows more about the heart 
 than Hepburn." 
 
 "Then there's no hope?" I asked. 
 
 "Absolutely none. It's a great pity." He added, after 
 a moment, "Mr. Krebs was a remarkable man." 
 
 "Nineteen twenty-six Fowler Street?" I repeated. 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 I held out my hand mechanically, and he pressed it, and 
 went with me to the door. 
 
 "Nineteen twenty-six Fowler Street," he repeated. . . . 
 
 The mean and sordid aspect of Fowler Street emphasized 
 and seemed to typify my despair, the pungent coal smoke 
 stifled my lungs even as it stifled my spirit. Ugly factories, 
 which were little more than sweatshops, wore an empty, 
 menacing, " Sunday " look, and the faint November sunlight 
 glistened on dirty pavements where children were making 
 a semblance of play. Monotonous rows of red houses suc 
 ceeded one another, some pushed forward, others thrust 
 back behind little plots of stamped earth. Into one of these 
 I turned. It seemed a little cleaner, better kept, less sordid 
 than the others. I pulled the bell, and presently the door 
 was opened by a woman whose arms were bare to the elbow. 
 She wore a blue-checked calico apron that came to her 
 throat, but the apron was clean, and her firm though fur 
 rowed face gave evidences of recent housewifely exertions. 
 Her eyes had the strange look of the cheerfulness that is 
 intimately acquainted with sorrow. She did not seem 
 surprised at seeing me. 
 
 " I have come to ask about Mr. Krebs," I told her.
 
 478 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, yes," she said, "there's been so many here this 
 morning already. It's wonderful how people love him, all 
 kinds of people. No, sir, he don't seem to be in any pain. 
 Two gentlemen are up there now in his room, I mean." 
 
 She wiped her arms, which still bore traces of soap-suds, 
 ... and then, with a gesture natural and unashamed, lifted the 
 corner of her apron to her eyes. 
 
 " Do you think I could see him for a moment ? " I 
 asked. "I've known him for a long time." 
 
 "Why, I don't know," she said, "I guess so. The doctor 
 said he could see some, and he wants to see his friends. 
 That's not strange he always did. I'll ask. Will you 
 tell me your name ? " 
 
 I took out a card. She held it without glancing at it, and 
 invited me in. 
 
 I waited, unnerved and feverish, pulsing, in the dark 
 and narrow hall beside the flimsy rack where several coats 
 and hats were hung. Once before I had visited Krebs in 
 that lodging-house in Cambridge long ago with something 
 of the same feelings. But now they were greatly intensified. 
 Now he was dying. . . . 
 
 The woman was descending. 
 
 "He says he wants to see you, sir," she said rather breath 
 lessly, and I followed her. In the semi-darkness of the 
 stairs I passed the three men who had been with Krebs, and 
 when I reached the open door of his room he was alone. I 
 hesitated just a second, swept by the heat wave that follows 
 sudden shyness, embarrassment, a sense of folly it is too 
 l late to avert. 
 
 Krebs was propped up with pillows. 
 
 "Well, this is good of you," he said, and reached out his 
 hand across the spread. I took it, and sat down beside the 
 shiny oak bedstead, in a chair covered with tobacco-colored 
 plush. 
 
 "You feel better?" I asked. 
 
 "Oh, I feel all right," he answered, with a smile. "It's 
 queer, but I do."
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 479- 
 
 My eye fell upon the long line of sectional book-cases that 
 lined one side of the room. "Why, you've got quite a 
 library here," I observed. 
 
 "Yes, I've managed to get together some good books. 
 But there is so much to read nowadays, so much that is 
 really good and new, a man has the hopeless feeling he can 
 never catch up with it all. A thousand writers and students 
 are making contributions to-day where fifty years ago there 
 was one." 
 
 " I've been following your speeches, after a fashion, I 
 wish I might have been able to read more of them. Your 
 argument interested me. It's new, unlike the ordinary 
 propaganda of " 
 
 "Of agitators," he supplied, with a smile. 
 
 "Of agitators," I agreed, and tried to return his smile. 
 "An agitator who appears to suggest the foundations of a 
 constructive programme and who isn't afraid to criticise the 
 man with a vote as well as the capitalist is an unusual 
 phenomenon." 
 
 "Oh, when we realize that we've only got a little time 
 left in which to tell what we think to be the truth, it doesn't 
 require a great deal of courage, Paret. I didn't begin to 
 see this thing until a little while ago. I was only a crude, 
 hot-headed revolutionist. God knows I'm crude enough 
 still. But I began to have a glimmering of what all 
 these new fellows in the universities are driving at." He 
 waved his hand towards the book-cases. " Driving at col 
 lectively, I mean. And there are attempts, worthy attempts, 
 to coordinate and synthesize the sciences. What I have 
 been saying is not strictly original. I took it on the stump, 
 that's all. I didn't expect it to have much effect in this 
 campaign, but it was an opportunity to sow a few seeds, 
 to start a sense of personal dissatisfaction in the minds of a 
 few voters. What is it Browning says? It's in Bishop 
 Blougram, I believe. 'When the fight begins within him 
 self, a man's worth something.' It's an intellectual fight, of 
 course."
 
 480 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 His words were spoken quietly, but I realized suddenly 
 that the mysterious force which had drawn me to him now, 
 against my will, was an intellectual rather than apparently 
 sentimental one, an intellectual force seeming to comprise 
 within it all other human attractions. And yet I felt a sud 
 den contrition. 
 
 "See here, Krebs," I said, "I didn't come here to bother 
 you about these matters, to tire you. I mustn't stay. I'll 
 call in again to see how you are from time to time." 
 
 "But you're not tiring me," he protested, stretching forth 
 a thin, detaining hand. "I don't want to rot, I want to 
 live and think as long as I can. To tell you the truth, Paret, 
 I've been wishing to talk to you I'm glad you came in." 
 
 "You've been wishing to talk to me?" I said. 
 
 "Yes, but I didn't expect you'd come in. I hope you 
 won't mind my saying so, under the circumstances, but I've 
 always rather liked you, admired you, even back in the 
 Cambridge days. After that I used to blame you for going 
 out and taking what you wanted, and I had to live a good 
 many years before I began to see that it's better for a man 
 to take what he wants than to take nothing at all. I took 
 what I wanted, every man worth his salt does. There's 
 your great banker friend in New York whom I used to think 
 was the arch-fiend. He took what he wanted, and he took 
 a good deal, but it happened to be good for him. And by 
 piling up his corporations, Ossa on Pelion, he is paving the 
 way for a logical economic evolution. How can a man in 
 our tune find out what he does want unless he takes some 
 thing and gives it a trial?" 
 
 "Until he begins to feel that it disagrees with him," I 
 said. "But then," I added involuntarily, "then it may be 
 too late to try something else, and he may not know what to 
 try." This remark of mine might have surprised me had 
 it not been for the feeling now grown definite that 
 Krebs had something to give me, something to pass on to 
 me, of all men. Indeed, he had hinted as much, when he 
 acknowledged a wish to talk to me. "What seems so
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 481 
 
 strange," I said, as I looked at him lying back on his 
 pillows, " is your faith that we shall be able to bring order 
 out of all this chaos your belief in Democracy." 
 
 "Democracy's an adventure," he replied, "the great 
 adventure of mankind. I think the trouble in many minds 
 lies in the fact that they persist in regarding it as something 
 to be made safe. All that can be done is to try to make it 
 as safe as possible. But no adventure is safe life itself 
 is an adventure, and neither is that safe. It's a hazard, 
 as you and I have found out. The moment we try to make 
 life safe we lose all there is in it worth while." 
 
 I thought a moment. 
 
 "Yes, that's so," I agreed. On the table beside the bed 
 in company with two or three other volumes, lay a Bible. 
 He seemed to notice that my eye fell upon it. 
 
 "Do you remember the story of the Prodigal Son?" he 
 asked. "Well, that's the parable of democracy, of self- 
 government in the individual and in society. In order to 
 arrive at salvation, Paret, most of us have to take our journey 
 into a far country." 
 
 "A far country!" I exclaimed. The words struck a 
 reminiscent chord. 
 
 "We have to leave what seem the safe things, we have to 
 wander and suffer in order to realize that the only true safety 
 lies in development. We have first to cast off the leading 
 strings of authority. It's a delusion that we can insure 
 ourselves by remaining within its walls we have to risk 
 our lives and our souls. It is discouraging when we look 
 around us to-day, and in a way the pessimists are right 
 when they say we don't see democracy. We see only what 
 may be called the first stage of it ; for democracy is still in a 
 far country eating the husks of individualism, materialism. 
 What we see is not true freedom, but freedom run to riot, 
 men struggling for themselves, spending on themselves the 
 fruits of their inheritance; we see a government intent on 
 one object alone exploitation of this inheritance in order 
 to achieve what it calls prosperity. And God is far away." 
 2i
 
 482 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "And we shall turn ? " I asked. 
 
 "We shall turn or perish. I believe that we shall turn." 
 He fixed his eyes on my face. "What is it," he asked, "that 
 brought you here to me, to-day?" 
 
 I was silent. 
 
 "The motive, Paret the motive that sends us all wan 
 dering into a far country is divine, is inherited from God 
 himself. And the same motive, after our eyes shall have been 
 opened, after we shall have seen and known the tragedy and 
 misery of life, after we shall have made the mistakes and com 
 mitted the sins and experienced the emptiness the same 
 motive will lead us back again. That, too, is an adventure, 
 the greatest adventure of all. Because, when we go back we 
 shall not find the same God or rather we shall recognize 
 him in ourselves. Autonomy is godliness, knowledge is 
 godliness. We went away cringing, superstitious, we saw 
 everywhere omens and evidences of his wrath in the earth 
 and sea and sky, we burned candles and sacrificed animals 
 in the vain hope of averting scourges and other calamities. 
 But when we come back it will be with a knowledge of 
 his ways, gained at a price, the price he, too, must have 
 paid. and we shall be able to stand up and look him in the 
 face, and all our childish superstitions and optimisms shall 
 have been burned away." 
 
 Some faith indeed had given him strength to renounce 
 those things in life I had held dear, driven him on to fight un 
 til his exhausted body failed him, and even now that he was 
 physically helpless sustained him. I did not ask myself, 
 then, the nature of this faith. In its presence it could no more 
 be questioned than the light. It was light ; I felt bathed in 
 it. Now it was soft, suffused : but I remembered how the 
 night before in the hall, just before he had fallen, it had 
 flashed forth in a smile and illumined my soul with an ecstasy 
 that yet was anguish. . . . 
 
 "We shall get back," I said at length. My remark 
 was not a question it had escaped from me almost 
 unawares.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 483 
 
 "The joy is in the journey," he answered. "The secret 
 is in the search." 
 
 "But for me?" I exclaimed. 
 
 "We've all been lost, Paret. It would seem as though we 
 have to be." 
 
 "And yet you are saved," I said, hesitating over the 
 word. 
 
 "It is true that I am content, even happy," he asserted, 
 "in spite of my wish to live. If there is any secret, it lies, 
 I think, in the struggle for an open mind, in the keeping alive 
 of a desire to know more and more. That desire, strangely 
 enough, hasn't lost its strength. We don't know whether 
 there is a future life, but if there is, I think it must be a con 
 tinuation of this." He paused. " I told you I was glad you 
 came in I've been thinking of you, and I saw you in the 
 hall last night. You ask what there is for you I'll tell 
 you, the new generation." 
 
 " The new generation." 
 
 "That's the task of every man and woman who wakes up. 
 I've come to see how little can be done for the great majority 
 of those who have reached our age. It's hard but it's 
 true. Superstition, sentiment, the habit of wrong thinking 
 or of not thinking at all have struck in too deep, the habit of 
 unreasoning acceptance of authority is too paralyzing. Some 
 may be stung back into life, spurred on to find out what the 
 world really is, but not many. The hope lies in those who are 
 coming after us we must do for them what wasn't done 
 for us. We really didn't have much of a chance, Paret. 
 What did our instructors at Harvard know about the age that 
 was dawning? what did anybody know? You can educate 
 yourself or rather reeducate yourself. All this" and 
 he waved his hand towards his bookshelves " all this has 
 sprung up since you and I were at Cambridge ; if we don't 
 try to become familiar with it, if we fail to grasp the point 
 of view from which it's written, there's little hope for us. Go 
 away from all this and get straightened out, make yourself 
 acquainted with the modern trend in literature and criticism,.
 
 484 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 with modern history, find out what's being done in the field 
 of education, read the modern sciences, especially biology, 
 and psychology and sociology, and try to get a glimpse of 
 the fundamental human needs underlying such phenomena as 
 the labour and woman's movements. God knows I've just 
 begun to get my glimpse, and I've floundered around ever 
 since I left college. ... I don't mean to say we can ever 
 see the whole, but we can get a clew, an idea, and pass it on 
 to our children. You have children, haven't you ? " 
 
 "Yes," I said. . . . 
 
 He said nothing he seemed to be looking out of the 
 window. 
 
 "Then the scientific point of view in your opinion hasn't 
 done away with religion ? " I asked presently. 
 
 "The scientific point of view is the religious point of view," 
 he said earnestly, "because it's the only self-respecting point 
 of view. I can't believe that God intended to make a crea 
 ture who would not ultimately weigh his beliefs with his 
 reason instead of accepting them blindly. That's immoral, 
 if you like especially in these days." 
 
 "And are there, then, no 'over-beliefs'?" I said, re 
 membering the expression in something I had read. 
 
 "That seems to me a relic of the method of ancient science, 
 which was upside down, a mere confusion with faith. Faith 
 and belief are two different things ; faith is the emotion, the 
 steam, if you like, that drives us on in our search for truth. 
 Theories, at a stretch, might be identified with ' over-beliefs ' 
 but when it comes to confusing our theories with facts, in 
 stead of recognizing them as theories, when it comes to living 
 by 'over-beliefs' that have no basis in reason and observed 
 facts, that is fatal. It's just the trouble with so much of 
 our electorate to-day unreasoning acceptance without 
 thought." 
 
 "Then," I said, "you admit of no other faculty than 
 reason?" 
 
 "I confess that I don't. A great many insights that we 
 .seem to get from what we call intuition I think are due to
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 485 
 
 the reason, which is unconsciously at work. If there were 
 another faculty that equalled or transcended reason, it seems 
 to me it would be a very dangerous thing for the world's 
 progress. We'd come to rely on it rather than on ourselves 
 the trouble with the world is that it has been relying on it. 
 Reason is the mind it leaps to the stars without realizing 
 always how it gets there. It is through reason we get the 
 self-reliance that redeems us." 
 
 " But you ! " I exclaimed. " You rely on something else 
 besides reason?" 
 
 "Yes, it is true," he explained gently, "but that Thing 
 Other-than-Ourselves we feel stirring in us is power, and that 
 power, or the Source of it, seems to have given us our reason 
 for guidance if it were not so we shouldn't have a sem 
 blance of freedom. For there is neither virtue nor develop 
 ment in finding the path if we are guided. We do rely on 
 that power for movement and in the moments when it is 
 withdrawn we are helpless. Both the power and the reason 
 are God's." 
 
 "But the Church," I was moved by some untraced thought 
 to ask, "you believe there is a future for the Church?" 
 
 "A church of all those who disseminate truth, foster open- 
 mindedness, serve humanity and radiate faith," he replied 
 
 but as though he were speaking to himself, not to me. . . . 
 A few moments later there was a knock at the door, and 
 
 the woman of the house entered to say that Dr. Hepburn had 
 arrived. I rose and shook Krebs's ,hand : sheer inability to 
 express my emotion drove me to commonplaces. 
 
 " I'll come in soon again, if I may," I told him. 
 
 "Do, Paret," he said, "it's done me good to talk to you 
 
 more good than you imagine." 
 
 I was unable to answer him, but I glanced back from the 
 doorway to see him smiling after me. On my way down the 
 stairs I bumped into the doctor as he ascended. The dingy 
 brown parlour was filled with men, standing in groups and 
 talking in subdued voices. I hurried into the street, and on 
 the sidewalk stopped face to face with Perry Blackwood.
 
 486 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Hugh!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?" 
 
 "I came to inquire for Krebs," I answered. "I've seen 
 him." 
 
 "You you've been talking to him?" Perry demanded. 
 
 I nodded. He stared at me for a moment with an aston 
 ishment to which I was wholly indifferent. He did not seem 
 to know just how to act. 
 
 "Well, it was decent of you, Hugh, I must say. How 
 does he seem?" 
 
 "Not at all like like what you'd expect, in his manner." 
 
 "No," agreed Perry agitatedly, "no, he wouldn't. My 
 God, we've lost a big man in him." 
 
 "I think we have," I said. 
 
 He stared at me again, gave me his hand awkwardly, 
 and went into the house. It was not until I had walked the 
 length of the block that I began to realize what a shock my 
 presence there must have been to him, with his head full of 
 the contrast between this visit and my former attitude. 
 Could it be that it was only the night before I had made a 
 speech against him and his associates? It is interesting 
 that my mind rejected all sense of anomaly and inconsis 
 tency. Krebs possessed me; I must have been in reality 
 extremely agitated, but this sense of being possessed seemed 
 a quiet one. An amazing thing had happened and yet I 
 was not amazed. The Krebs I had seen was the man I had 
 known for many years, the man I had ridiculed, despised and 
 oppressed, but it seemed to me then that he had been my 
 friend and intimate all my life : more than that, I had an odd 
 feeling he had always been a part of me, and that now had 
 begun to take place a merging of personality. Nor could 
 I feel that he was a dying man. He would live on. . . . 
 
 I could not as yet sort and appraise, reduce to order the 
 possessions he had wished to turn over to me. 
 
 It was noon, and people were walking past me in the 
 watery, diluted sunlight, men in black coats and top hats 
 and women in bizarre, complicated costumes bright with 
 colour. I had reached the more respectable portion of the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 48? 
 
 city, where the churches were emptying. These very people, 
 whom not long ago I would have acknowledged as my own 
 kind, now seemed mildly animated automatons, wax figures. 
 The day was like hundreds of Sundays I had known, the 
 city familiar, yet passing strange. I walked like a ghost 
 through it. ...
 
 XXVI 
 
 ACCOMPANIED by young Dr. Strafford, I went to California. 
 My physical illness had been brief. Dr. Brooke had taken 
 matters hi his own hands and ordered an absolute rest, after 
 dwelling at some length on the vicious pace set by modern 
 business and the lack of consideration and knowledge shown 
 by men of affairs for their bodies. There was a limit to the 
 wrack and strain which the human organism could stand. 
 He must of course have suspected the presence of disturb 
 ing and disintegrating factors, but he confined himself to 
 telling me that only an exceptional constitution had saved 
 me from a serious illness ; he must in a way have compre 
 hended why I did not wish to go abroad, and have my family 
 join me on the Riviera, as Tom Peters proposed. California 
 had been my choice, and Dr. Brooke recommended the 
 climate of Santa Barbara. 
 
 High up on the Montecito hills I found a villa beside 
 the gateway of one of the deep canons that furrow the 
 mountain side, and day after day I lay in a chair on the 
 sunny terrace, with a continually recurring amazement 
 at the brilliancy of my surroundings. In the early morning 
 I looked down on a feathery mist hiding the world, a mist 
 presently to be shot with silver and sapphire-blue, dissolved 
 by slow enchantment until there lay revealed the plain 
 and the shimmering ocean with its distant islands trembling 
 in the haze. At sunset my eyes sought the mountains, 
 mountains unreal, like glorified scenery of grand opera, 
 with violet shadows in the wooded canon clefts, and crags 
 of pink tourmaline and ruby against the skies. All day 
 long in the tempered heat flowers blazed around me, insects 
 hummed, lizards darted in and out of the terrace wall, 
 
 488
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 489 
 
 birds flashed among the checkered shadows of the live oaks. 
 That grove of gnarled oaks summoned up before me visions 
 of some classic villa poised above Grecian seas, shining 
 amidst dark foliage, the refuge of forgotten kings. Below 
 me, on the slope, the spaced orange trees were heavy with 
 golden fruit. 
 
 After a while, as I grew stronger, I was driven down and 
 allowed to walk on the wide beach that stretched in front *" 
 of the gay houses facing the sea. Cormorants dived under 
 the long rollers that came crashing in from the Pacific; 
 gulls wheeled and screamed in the soft wind; alert little 
 birds darted here and there with incredible swiftness, leav 
 ing tiny footprints across the ribs and furrows of the wet 
 sand. Far to the southward a dark barrier of mountains 
 rose out of the sea. Sometimes I sat with my back against 
 the dunes watching the drag of the outgoing water rolling 
 the pebbles after it, making a gleaming floor for the light 
 to dance. 
 
 At first I could not bear to recall the events that had 
 preceded and followed my visit to Krebs that Sunday 
 morning. My illness had begun that night; on the Mon 
 day Tom Peters had come to the Club and insisted upon 
 my being taken to his house. . . . When I had recovered 
 sufficiently there had been rather a pathetic renewal of 
 our friendship. Perry came to see me. Their attitude 
 was one of apprehension not unmixed with wonder; and 
 though they knew of the existence of a mental crisis, sus 
 pected, in all probability, some of the causes of it, they 
 refrained carefully from all comments, contenting them 
 selves with telling me when I was well enough that Krebs 
 had died quite suddenly that Sunday afternoon; that his 
 death occurring at such a crucial moment had been 
 sufficient to turn the tide of the election and make Edgar 
 Greenhalge mayor. Thousands who had failed to under 
 stand Hermann Krebs, but whom he had nevertheless 
 stirred and troubled, suddenly awoke to the fact that he 
 had had elements of greatness. . . .
 
 490 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 My feelings in those first days at Santa Barbara may be 
 likened, indeed, to those of a man who has passed through a 
 terrible accident that has deprived him of sight or hearing, 
 and which he wishes to forget. What I was most conscious 
 of then was an aching sense of loss an ache that by de 
 grees became a throbbing pain as life flowed back into me, 
 reinflaming once more my being with protest and passion, 
 arousing me to revolt against the fate that had overtaken 
 me. I even began at moments to feel a fierce desire to go 
 back and take up again the fight from which I had been 
 so strangely removed removed by the agency of things still 
 obscure. I might get Nancy yet, beat down her resistance, 
 overcome her, if only I could be near her and see her. But 
 even in the midst of these surges of passion I was conscious 
 of the birth of a new force I did not understand, and which 
 I resented, that had arisen to give battle to my passions 
 and desires. This struggle was not mentally reflected as 
 a debate between right and wrong, as to whether I should 
 or should not be justified in taking Nancy if I could get 
 her: it seemed as though some new and small yet dogged 
 intruder had forced an entrance into me, an insignificant 
 pigmy who did not hesitate to bar the pathway of the re 
 viving giant of my desires. These contests sapped my 
 strength. It seemed as though in my isolation I loved 
 Nancy, I missed her more than ever, and the flavour she 
 gave to life. 
 
 Then Hermann Krebs began to press himself on me. I 
 use the word as expressive of those early resentful feelings, 
 I rather pictured him then as the personification of an 
 hostile element in the universe that had brought about 
 my miseries and accomplished my downfall; I attributed 
 the disagreeable thwarting of my impulses to his agency; 
 I did not wish to think of him, for he stood somehow for a 
 vague future I feared to contemplate. Yet the illusion of 
 his presence, once begun, continued to grow upon me, and 
 I find myself utterly unable to describe that struggle in 
 which he seemed to be fighting as against myself for my
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 491 
 
 confidence; that process whereby he gradually grew as 
 real to me as though he still lived until I could almost 
 hear his voice and see his smile. At moments I resisted 
 wildly, as though my survival depended on it; at other 
 moments he seemed to bring me peace. One day I recalled 
 as vividly as though it were taking place again that last 
 time I had been with him; I seemed once more to be 
 listening to the calm yet earnest talk ranging over so many 
 topics, politics and government, economics and science 
 and religion. I did not yet grasp the synthesis he had 
 made of them all, but I saw them now all focussed in him 
 elements he had drawn from human lives and human ex 
 periences. I think it was then I first felt the quickenings 
 of a new life to be born in travail and pain. . . . Wearied, 
 yet exalted, I sank down on a stone bench and gazed out at 
 the little island of Santa Cruz afloat on the shimmering sea. 
 
 I have mentioned my inability to depict the terrible 
 struggle that went on in my soul. It seems strange that 
 Nietzsche that most ruthless of philosophers to the 
 romantic mind ! should express it for me. " The genius 
 of the heart, from contact with which every man goes away 
 richer, not 'blessed' and overcome, . . . but richer himself, 
 fresher to himself than before, opened up, breathed upon 
 and sounded by a thawing wind ; more uncertain, perhaps, 
 more delicate, more bruised; but full of hopes which as 
 yet lack names, full of a new will and striving, full of a new 
 unwillingness and counterstriving." . . . 
 
 Such was my experience with Hermann Krebs. How 
 keenly I remember that new unwillingness and counter- 
 striving ! In spite of the years it has not wholly died down, 
 even to-day. . . . 
 
 Almost coincident with these quickenings of which I have 
 spoken was the consciousness of a hunger stronger than the 
 craving for bread and meat, and I began to meditate on my 
 ignorance, on the utter inadequacy and insufficiency of my
 
 492 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 early education, on my neglect of the new learning during 
 the years that had passed since I left Harvard. And I 
 remembered Krebs's words that We must "reeducate 
 ourselves." What did I know ? A system of law, inherited 
 from another social order, that was utterly unable to cope 
 with the complexities and miseries and injustices of a modern 
 industrial world. I had spent my days in mastering an 
 inadequate and archaic code why ? in order that I might 
 learn how to evade it ? This in itself condemned it. What 
 did I know of We? of the shining universe that surrounded 
 me? What did I know of the insect and the flower, of the 
 laws that moved the planets and made incandescent the 
 suns? of the human body, of the human soul and its in 
 stincts? Was this knowledge acquired at such cost of 
 labour and life and love by my fellow-men of so little worth 
 to me that I could ignore it? declare that it had no signifi 
 cance for me? no bearing on my life and conduct? If 
 I were to rise and go forward and I now felt something 
 like a continued impulse, hi spite of relaxations and revolts 
 I must master this knowledge, it must be my guide, 
 form the basis of my creed. I who never had had a 
 creed, never felt the need of one! For lack of one I had 
 been rudely jolted out of the frail shell I had thought so 
 secure, and stood, as it were, naked and shivering to the 
 storms, staring at a world that was no function of me, after 
 all. My problem, indeed, was how to become a function of 
 it. . . . 
 
 I resolved upon a course of reading, but it was a question 
 what books to get. Krebs could have told me, if he had 
 lived. I even thought once of writing Perry Blackwood to 
 ask him to make a list of the volumes in Krebs's little library ; 
 but I was ashamed to do this. 
 
 Dr. Strafford still remained with me. Not many years 
 out of the medical school, he had inspired me with a liking 
 for him and a respect for his profession, and when he informed 
 me one day that he could no longer conscientiously accept 
 the sum I was paying him, I begged him to stay on. He was
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 493 
 
 a big and wholesome young man, companionable, yet quiet 
 and unobtrusive, watchful without appearing to be so, with 
 the innate as well as the cultivated knowledge of psychology 
 characteristic of the best modern physicians. When I grew 
 better I came to feel that he had given his whole mind to the 
 study of my case, though he never betrayed it in his con 
 versation. 
 
 "Strafford," I said to him one morning with such an air 
 of unconcern as I could muster, " I've an idea I'd like to read 
 a little science. Could you recommend a work on biology ? " 
 
 I chose biology because I thought he would know something 
 about it. 
 
 "Popular biology, Mr. Paret?" 
 
 "Well, not too popular," I smiled. "I think it would do 
 me good to use my mind, to chew on something. Besides, 
 you can help me over the tough places." 
 
 He returned that afternoon with two books. 
 
 "I've been rather fortunate in getting these," he said. 
 " One is fairly elementary. They had it at the library. And 
 the other " he paused delicately, "I didn't know whether 
 you might be interested in the latest speculations on the sub 
 ject." 
 
 "Speculations?" I repeated/ 
 
 " Well, the philosophy of it." He almost achieved a blush 
 under his tan. He held out the second book on the phi 
 losophy of the organism. " It's the work of a German scien 
 tist who stands rather high. I read it last winter, and it 
 interested me. I got it from a clergyman I know who is 
 spending the winter in Santa Barbara." 
 
 "A clergyman!" 
 
 Strafford laughed. "An 'advanced' clergyman," he ex 
 plained. "Oh, a lot of them are reading science now. I 
 think it's pretty decent of them." 
 
 I looked at Strafford, who towered six feet three, and it 
 suddenly struck me that he might be one of the forerunners 
 of a type our universities were about to turn out. I wondered 
 what he believed. Of one thing I was sure, that he was not
 
 494 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 in the medical profession to make money. That was a faith 
 in itself. 
 
 I began with the elementary work. 
 
 "You'd better borrow a Century Dictionary," I said. 
 
 "That's easy," he said, and actually achieved it, with the 
 clergyman's aid. 
 
 The absorption in which I fought my way through those 
 books may prove interesting to future generations, who, at 
 Sunday-school age, when the fable of Adam and Eve was 
 painfully being drummed into me (without any mention of its 
 application), will be learning to think straight, acquiring 
 easily in early youth what I failed to learn until after forty. 
 And think of all the trouble and tragedy that will have 
 been averted. It is true that I had read some biology at 
 Cambridge, which I had promptly forgotten ; it had not been 
 especially emphasized by my instructors as related to life 
 certainly not as related to religion: such incidents as that of 
 Adam and Eve occupied the religious field exclusively. I had 
 been compelled to commit to memory, temporarily, the 
 matter in those books; but what I now began to perceive 
 was that the matter was secondary compared to the mew 
 point of science and this had been utterly neglected. As 
 I read, I experienced all the excitement of an old-fashioned 
 romance, but of a romance of such significance as to touch the 
 very springs of existence ; and above all I was impressed with 
 the integrity of the scientific method an integrity com 
 mensurate with the dignity of man that scorned to quibble 
 to make out a case, to affirm something that could not be 
 proved. 
 
 Little by little I became familiar with the principles of 
 embryonic evolution, ontogeny, and of biological evolution, 
 phylogeny ; realized, for the first time, my own history and 
 that of the ancestors from whom I had developed and de 
 scended. I, this marvellously complicated being, torn by de 
 sires and despairs, was the result of the union of two mi 
 croscopic cells. "All living things come from the egg," 
 such had been Harvey's dictum. The result was like the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 495 
 
 tonic of a cold douche. I began to feel cleansed and puri 
 fied, as though something sticky-sweet which all my life 
 had clung to me had been washed away. Yet a question 
 arose, an insistent question that forever presses itself on 
 the mind of man; how could these apparently chemical 
 and mechanical processes, which the author of the book 
 contented himself with recording, account for me? The 
 spermia darts for the egg, and pierces it; personal history 
 begins. But what mysterious shaping force is it that re 
 peats in the individual the history of the race, supervises 
 the orderly division of the cells, by degrees directs the 
 symmetry, sets aside the skeleton and digestive tract and 
 supervises the structure ? 
 
 I took up the second book, that on the philosophy of the 
 organism, to read in its preface that a much-to-be-honoured 
 British nobleman had established a foundation of lectures in 
 a Scotch University for forwarding the study of a Natural 
 Theology. The term possessed me. Unlike the old theology 
 woven of myths and a fanciful philosophy of the decadent 
 period of Greece, natural theology was founded on science 
 itself, and scientists were among those who sought to develop 
 it. Here was a synthesis that made a powerful appeal, one 
 of the many signs and portents of a new era of which I was 
 dimly becoming cognizant ; and now that I looked for signs, 
 I found them everywhere, in my young Doctor, in Krebs, 
 in references in the texts ; indications of a new order beginning 
 to make itself felt in a muddled, chaotic human world, which 
 might which must have a parallel with the order that re 
 vealed itself in the egg ! Might not both, physical and social, 
 be due to the influence of the same invisible, experimenting, 
 creating Hand ? 
 
 My thoughts lingered lovingly on this theology so well 
 named " natural," on its conscientiousness, its refusal to affirm 
 what it did not prove, on its lack of dogmatic dictums and 
 infallible revelations; yet it gave me the vision of a new 
 sanction whereby man might order his life, a sanction from 
 which was eliminated fear and superstition and romantic
 
 496 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 hope, a sanction whose doctrines unlike those of the senti 
 mental theology did not fly in the face of human instincts 
 and needs. Nor was it a theology devoid of inspiration and 
 poetry, though poetry might be called its complement. 
 With all that was beautiful and true in the myths dear to 
 mankind it did not conflict, annulling only the vicious dog 
 matism of literal interpretation. In this connection I re 
 membered something that Krebs had said in our talk 
 about poetry and art, that these were emotion, religion 
 expressed by the tools reason had evolved. Music, he had 
 declared, came nearest to the cry of the human soul. . . . 
 
 That theology cleared for faith an open road, made of faith 
 a reasonable thing, yet did not rob it of a sense of high adven 
 ture ; cleansed it of the taints of thrift and selfish concern. 
 In this reamrmation of vitalism there might be a future, yes, 
 an individual future, yet it was far from the smug conception 
 of salvation. Here was a faith conferred by the freedom of 
 truth, a faith that lost and regained itself in life ; it was dy 
 namic hi its operation ; for, as Lessing said, the searching after 
 truth, and not its possession, gives happiness to man. In the 
 words of an American scientist, taken from his book on Hered 
 ity, "The evolutionary idea has forced man to consider the 
 probable future of his own race on earth and to take measures 
 to control that future, a matter he had previously left largely 
 to fate." 
 
 Here indeed was another sign of the times, to find in a 
 strictly scientific work a sentence truly religious ! As I con 
 tinued to read these works, I found them suffused with reli 
 gion, religion of a kind and quality I had not imagined. The 
 birthright of the spirit of man was freedom, freedom to experi 
 ment, to determine, to create to create himself, to create 
 society in the image of God ! Spiritual creation the function 
 of cooperative man through the coming ages, the task that 
 was to make him divine. Here indeed was the germ of a new 
 sanction, of a new motive, of a new religion that strangely 
 harmonized with the concepts of the old once the dynamic 
 power of these was revealed.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 497 
 
 I had been thinking of my family of my family in terms 
 of Matthew and yet with a growing yearning that em 
 braced them all. I had not informed Maude of my illness, 
 and I had managed to warn Tom Peters not to do so. I had 
 simply written her that after the campaign I had gone for a 
 rest to California ; yet in her letters to me, after this informa 
 tion had reached her, I detected a restrained anxiety and 
 affection that troubled me. Sequences of words curiously 
 convey meanings and implications that transcend their literal 
 sense, true thoughts and feelings are difficult to disguise 
 even in written speech. Could it be possible after all that 
 had happened that Maude still loved me? I continually 
 put the thought away from me, but continually it returned to 
 haunt me. Suppose Maude could not help loving me, in 
 spite of my weaknesses and faults, even as I loved Nancy 
 in spite of hers? Love is no logical thing. 
 
 It was Matthew I wanted, Matthew of whom I thought, 
 and trivial, long-forgotten incidents of the past kept recur 
 ring to me constantly. I still received* his weekly letters ; 
 but he did not ask why, since I had taken a vacation, I had 
 not come over to them. He represented the medium, the 
 link between Maude and me that no estrangement, no sep 
 aration could break. 
 
 All this new vision of mine was for him, for the coming 
 generation, the soil in which it must be sown, the Americans 
 of the future. And who so well as Matthew, sensitive yet 
 brave, would respond to it ? I wished not only to give him 
 what I had begun to grasp, to study with him, to be his com 
 panion and friend, but to spare him, if possible, some of my 
 own mistakes and sufferings and punishments. But could I 
 go back ? Happy coincidences of desires and convictions had 
 been so characteristic of that other self I had been struggling 
 to cast off : I had so easily been persuaded, when I had had 
 a chance of getting Nancy, that it was the right thing to do ! 
 And now, in my loneliness, was I not growing just as eager 
 2x
 
 498 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 to be convinced that it was my duty to go back to the family 
 which in the hour of self-sufficiency I had cast off? I had 
 believed in divorce then why not now? Well, I still 
 believed in it. I had thought of a union with Nancy as some 
 thing that would bring about the " self-realization that springs 
 from the gratification of a great passion," an appealing 
 phrase I had read somewhere. But, it was at least a favour 
 able symptom that I was willing now to confess that the 
 "self-realization" had been a secondary and sentimental 
 consideration, a rosy, self-created halo to give a moral and 
 religious sanction to my desire. Was I not trying to do that 
 very thing now? It tortured me to think so; I strove to 
 achieve a detached consideration of the problem, to arrive 
 at length at a thought that seemed illuminating : that the 
 " wrongness" or " Tightness," utility and happiness of all such 
 unions depend upon whether or not they become a part 
 of the woof and warp of the social fabric; in other words, 
 whether the gratification of any particular love by divorce 
 and remarriage does or does not tend to destroy a portion of 
 that fabric. Nancy certainly would have been justified in 
 divorce. It did notseem in the retrospect that I would have 
 been: surely not if, after I had married Nancy, I had de 
 veloped this view of life that seemed to me to be the true view. 
 I should have been powerless to act upon it. But the chances 
 were I should not have developed it, since it would seem that 
 any salvation for me at least must come precisely through 
 suffering, through not getting what I wanted. Was this 
 equivocating ? 
 
 My mistake had been in marrying Maude instead of Nancy 
 a mistake largely due to my saturation with a false idea of 
 life. Would not the attempt to cut loose from the conse 
 quences of that mistake in my individual case have been 
 futile ? But there was a remedy for it the remedy Krebs 
 had suggested : I might still prevent my children from mak 
 ing such a mistake, I might help to create in them what I 
 might have been, and thus find a solution for myself. My 
 errors would then assume a value.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 499 
 
 But the question tortured me: would Maude wish it? 
 Would it be fair to her if she did not ? By my long neglect 
 I had forfeited the right to go. And would she agree with 
 my point of view if she did permit me to stay ? I had less 
 concern on this score, a feeling that that development of hers, 
 which once had irritated me, was in the same direction as my 
 own. . . . 
 
 I have still strangely to record moments when, in spite of 
 the aspirations I had achieved, of the redeeming vision I 
 had gained, at the thought of returning to her I revolted. 
 At such times recollections came into my mind of those 
 characteristics in her that had seemed most responsible 
 for my alienation. . . . That demon I had fed so mightily 
 still lived. By what right he seemed to ask had I 
 nourished him all these years if now I meant to starve him ? 
 Thus sometimes he defied me, took on Protean guises, 
 blustered, insinuated, cajoled, managed to make me believe 
 that to starve him would be to starve myself, to sap all 
 there was of power in me. Let me try and see if I could 
 do it ! Again he whispered, to what purpose had I gained 
 my liberty, if now I renounced it ? I could not live in 
 fetters, even though the fetters should be self-imposed. I 
 was lonely now, but I would get over that, and life lay before 
 me still. 
 
 Fierce and tenacious, steel in the cruelty of his desires, 
 fearful in the havoc he had wrought, could he be subdued? 
 Foiled, he tore and rent me. . . . 
 
 One morning I rode up through the shady canon, fragrant 
 with bay, to the open slopes stained smoky-blue by the wild 
 lilac, where the twisted madrona grows. As I sat gazing 
 down on tiny headlands jutting out into a vast ocean my 
 paralyzing indecision came to an end. I turned my horse 
 down the trail again. I had seen at last that life was bigger 
 than I, bigger than Maude, bigger than our individual 
 wishes and desires. I felt as though heavy shackles had 
 been struck from me. As I neared the house I spied my 
 young doctor in the garden path, his hands in his pockets,
 
 500 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 watching a humming-bird poised over the poppies. He 
 greeted me with a look that was not wholly surprise at mj 
 early return, that seemed to have in it something of gladness. 
 
 "Straffbrd," I said, "I've made up my mind to go to 
 Europe." 
 
 **I have been thinking for some time, Mr. Paret," he 
 replied, "that a sea-voyage is just what you need to set 
 you on your feet." 
 
 I started eastward the next morning, arriving in New 
 York in time to catch one of the big liners sailing for Havre. 
 On my way across the continent I decided to send a cable 
 to Maude at Paris, since it were only fair to give her an 
 opportunity to reflect upon the manner in which she would 
 meet the situation. Save for an impatience which at mo 
 ments I restrained with difficulty, the moods that succeeded 
 one another as I journeyed did not differ greatly from those 
 I had experienced in the past month. I was alternately 
 exalted and depressed; I hoped and doubted and feared; 
 my courage, my confidence rose and fell. And yet I was 
 aware of the nascence within me of an element that gave 
 me a stability I had hitherto lacked: I had made my de 
 cision, and I felt the stronger for it. 
 
 It was early in March. The annual rush of my country 
 men and -women for foreign shores had not as yet begun, 
 the huge steamer was far from crowded. The faint throbbing 
 of her engines as she glided out on the North River tide found 
 its echo within me as I leaned on the heavy rail and watched 
 the towers of the city receding in the mist; they became 
 blurred and ghostlike, fantastic in the grey distance, sad, 
 appealing with a strange beauty and power. Once the 
 sight of them, sunlit, standing forth sharply against the 
 high brae of American skies, had stirred in me that passion 
 for wealth and power of which they were so marvellously 
 and uniquely the embodiment. I recalled the bright day 
 of my home-coming with Maude, when she too had felt
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 501 
 
 that passion drawing me away from her, after the briefest 
 of possessions. . . . Well, I had had it, the power. I 
 had stormed and gained entrance to the citadel itself. I 
 might have lived here in New York, secure, defiant of a 
 veering public opinion that envied while it strove to sting. 
 Why was I flinging it all away? Was this a sudden resolu 
 tion of mine, forced by events, precipitated by a failure to 
 achieve what of all things on earth I had most desired? 
 or was it the inevitable result of the development of the 
 Hugh Paret of earlier days, who was not meant for that 
 kind of power? 
 
 The vibration of the monster ship increased to a strong, 
 electric pulsation, the water hummed along her sides, she 
 felt the swell of the open sea. A fine rain began to fall that 
 hid the land yes, and the life I was leaving. I made 
 my way across the glistening deck to the saloon where, my 
 newspapers and periodicals neglected, I sat all the morning 
 beside a window gazing out at the limited, vignetted zone 
 of waters around the ship. We were headed for the Old 
 World. The wind rose, the rain became pelting, mingling 
 with the spume of the whitecaps racing madly past : within 
 were warmth and luxury, electric lights, open fires, easy 
 chairs, and men and women reading, conversing as uncon 
 cernedly as though the perils of the deep had ceased to be. 
 In all this I found an impelling interest ; the naive capacity 
 in me for wonder, so long dormant, had been marvellously 
 opened up once more. I no longer thought of myself as 
 the important man of affairs; and when in the progress of 
 the voyage I was accosted by two or three men I had met 
 and by others who had heard of me it was only to fed amaze 
 ment at the remoteness I now felt from a world whose reali 
 ties were stocks and bonds, railroads and corporations and 
 the detested new politics so inimical to the smooth conduct 
 of "business." 
 
 It all sounded like a language I had forgotten. 
 
 It was not until near the end of the passage that we ran 
 out of the storm. A morning came when I went on deck
 
 502 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 to survey spaces of a blue and white sea swept by the white 
 March sunlight; to discern at length against the horizon 
 toward which we sped a cloud of the filmiest and most 
 delicate texture and design. Suddenly I divined that the 
 cloud was France! Little by little, as I watched, it took 
 on substance. I made out headlands and cliffs, and then 
 we were coasting beside them. That night I should be in 
 Paris with Maude. My bag was packed, my steamer trunk 
 closed. I strayed about the decks, in and out of the saloons, 
 wondering at the indifference of other passengers who sat 
 reading in steamer-chairs or wrote last letters to be posted 
 at Havre. I was filled with impatience, anticipation, 
 yes, with anxiety concerning the adventure that was now so 
 imminent; with wavering doubts. Had I done the wisest 
 thing after all? I had the familiar experience that often 
 comes just before reunion after absence of recalling intimate 
 and forgotten impressions of those whom I was about to 
 see again, the tones of their voices, little gestures. . . . 
 How would they receive me ? 
 
 The great ship had slowed down and was entering the 
 harbour, carefully threading her way amongst smaller craft, 
 the passengers lining the rails and gazing at the animated 
 scene, at the quaint and cheerful French city bathed in 
 sunlight. ... I had reached the dock and was making 
 my way through the hurrying and shifting groups toward 
 the steamer train when I saw Maude. She was standing a 
 little aside, scanning the faces that passed her. 
 
 I remember how she looked at me, expectantly, yet timidly, 
 almost fearfully. I kissed her. 
 
 " You've come to meet me ! " I exclaimed stupidly. " How 
 are the children ? " 
 
 "They're very well, Hugh. They wanted to come, too, 
 but I thought it better not." 
 
 Her restraint struck me as extraordinary; and while I 
 was thankful for the relief it brought to a situation which 
 might have been awkward, I was conscious of resenting it a 
 little. I was impressed and puzzled. As I walked along
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 503 
 
 the platform beside her she seemed almost a stranger: I 
 had difficulty in realizing that she was my wife, the mother 
 of my children. Her eyes were clear, more serious than I 
 recalled them, and her physical as well as her moral tone 
 seemed to have improved. Her cheeks glowed with health, 
 and she wore a becoming suit of dark blue. 
 
 "Did you have a good trip, Hugh?" she asked. 
 
 "Splendid," I said, forgetting the storm. We took our 
 seats in an empty compartment. Was she glad to see me? 
 She had come all the way from Paris to meet me ! All the 
 embarrassment seemed to be on my side. Was this com 
 posure a controlled one? or had she indeed attained to the 
 self-sufficiency her manner and presence implied ? Such were 
 the questions running through my head. 
 
 "You've really liked Paris?" I asked. 
 
 " Yes, Hugh, and it's been very good for us all. Of course 
 the boys like America better, but they've learned many 
 things they wouldn't have learned at home; they both 
 speak French, and Biddy too. Even I have improved. 
 
 " I'm sure of it," I said. 
 
 She flushed. 
 
 "And what else have you been doing?" 
 
 "Oh, going to galleries. Matthew often goes with me. 
 I think he quite appreciates the pictures. Sometimes I 
 take him to the theatre, too, the Fransais. Both boys 
 ride in the Bois with a riding master. It's been rather a 
 restricted life for them, but it won't have hurt them. It's 
 good discipline. We have little excursions in an automobile 
 on fine days to Versailles and other places of interest around 
 Paris, and Matthew and I have learned a lot of history. I 
 have a professor of literature from the Sorbonne come in 
 three times a week to give me lessons." 
 
 "I didn't know you cared for literature." 
 
 "I didn't know it either." She smiled. "Matthew 
 loves it. Monsieur Despard declares he has quite a gift for 
 language." 
 
 Maude had already begun Matthew's education !
 
 504 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "You see a few people?" I inquired. 
 
 "A few. And they have been very kind to us. The 
 Buffons, whom I met at Etretat, and some of their friends, 
 mostly educated French people." 
 
 The little railway carriage in which we sat rocked with 
 speed as we flew through the French landscape. I caught 
 glimpses of solid, Norman farm buildings, of towers and 
 keeps and delicate steeples, and quaint towns; of bare 
 poplars swaying before the March gusts, of green fields 
 ablaze in the afternoon sun. I took it all in distractedly. 
 Here was Maude beside me, but a Maude I had difficulty in 
 recognizing, whom I did not understand: who talked of a 
 life she had built up for herself and that seemed to satisfy 
 her; one with which I had nothing to do. I could not tell 
 how she regarded my reintrusion. As she continued to 
 talk, a feeling that was almost desperation grew upon me. 
 I had things to say to her, things that every moment of this 
 sort of intercourse was making more difficult. And I felt, 
 if I did not say them now, that perhaps I never should: 
 that now or never was the appropriate time, and to delay 
 would be to drift into an impossible situation wherein the 
 chance of an understanding would be remote. 
 
 There was a pause. How little I had anticipated the 
 courage it would take to do this thing! My blood was 
 hammering. 
 
 "Maude," I said abruptly, "I suppose you're wondering 
 why I came over here." 
 
 She sat gazing at me, very still, but there came into her 
 eyes a frightened look that almost unnerved me. She 
 seemed to wish to speak, to be unable to. Passively, she 
 let my hand rest on hers. 
 
 "I've been thinking a great deal during the last few 
 months," I went on unsteadily. "And I've changed a good 
 many of my ideas that is, I've got new ones, about things 
 I never thought of before. I want to say, first, that I do 
 not put forth any claim to come back into your life. I know 
 I have forfeited any claim. I've neglected you, and I've
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 505 
 
 neglected the children. Our marriage has been on a false 
 basis from the start, and I've been to blame for it. There 
 is more to be said about the chances for a successful marriage 
 in these days, but I'm not going to dwell on that now, or 
 attempt to shoulder off my shortcomings on my bringing 
 up, on the civilization in which we have lived. You've tried 
 to do your share, and the failure hasn't been your fault. 
 I want to tell you first of all that I recognize your right to 
 live your life from now on, independently of me, if you so 
 desire. You ought to have the children "I hesitated a 
 moment. It was the hardest thing I had to say. "I've 
 never troubled myself about them, I've never taken on 
 any responsibility in regard to their bringing up." 
 
 "Hugh!" she cried. 
 
 "Wait I've got more to tell you, that you ought to 
 know. I shouldn't be here to-day if Nancy Durrett had 
 consented to to get a divorce and marry me. We had 
 agreed to that when this accident happened to Ham, and 
 she went back to him. I have to tell you that I still love 
 her I can't say how much, or define my feelings toward 
 her now. I've given up all idea of her. I don't think I'd 
 marry her now, even if I had the chance, and you should 
 decide to live away from me. I don't know. I'm not so 
 sure of myself as I once was. The fact is, Maude, circum 
 stances have been too much for me. I've been beaten. And 
 I'm not at all certain that it wasn't a cowardly thing for 
 me to come back to you at all." 
 
 I felt her hand trembling under mine, but I had not the 
 ! courage to look at her. I heard her call my name again 
 a little cry, the very poignancy of pity and distress. It 
 almost unnerved me. 
 
 "I knew that you loved her, Hugh," she said. "It was 
 only only a little while after you married me that I 
 found it out. I guessed it women do guess such things 
 long before you realized it yourself. You ought to have 
 married her instead of me. You would have been happier 
 with her."
 
 506 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 I did not answer. 
 
 "I, too, have thought a great deal," she went on, after a 
 moment. "I began earlier than you, I had to." I looked 
 up suddenly and saw her smiling at me, faintly, through 
 her tears. "But I've been thinking more, and learning 
 more since I've been over here. I've come to see that 
 that our failure hasn't been as much your fault as I once 
 thought, as much as you yourself declare. You have done 
 me a wrong, and you've done the children a wrong. Oh, 
 it is frightful to think how little I knew when I married 
 you, but even then I felt instinctively that you didn't love 
 me as I deserved to be loved. And when we came back 
 from Europe I knew that I couldn't satisfy you, I couldn't 
 look upon life as you saw it, no matter how hard I tried. 
 I did try, but it wasn't any use. You'll never know how 
 much I've suffered all these years. 
 
 "I have been happier here, away from you, with the 
 children ; I've had a chance to be myself. It isn't that I'm 
 much. It isn't that I don't need guidance and counsel 
 and sympathy. I've missed those, but you've never 
 given them to me, and I've been learning more and more 
 to do without them. I don't know why marriage should 
 suddenly have become such a mockery and failure in our 
 time, but I know that it is, that ours hasn't been such an 
 exception as I once thought. I've come to believe that 
 divorce is often justified." 
 
 "It is justified so far as you are concerned, Maude," I 
 replied. "It is not justified for me. I have forfeited, as I 
 say, any rights over you. I have been the aggressor and 
 transgressor from the start. You have been a good wife 
 and a good mother, you have been faithful, I have had 
 absolutely nothing to complain of." 
 
 "Sometimes I think I might have tried harder," she said. 
 "At least I might have understood better. I was stupid. 
 But everything went wrong. And I saw you growing away 
 from me all the time, Hugh, growing away from the friends 
 who were fond of you, as though you were fading in the
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 507 
 
 distance. It wasn't wholly because because of Nancy 
 that I left you. That gave me an excuse an excuse for 
 myself. Long before that I realized my helplessness, I 
 knew that whatever I might have done was past doing." 
 
 "Yes, I know," I assented. 
 
 We sat in silence for a while. The train was skirting an 
 ancient town set on a hill, crowned with a castle and a Gothic 
 church whose windows were afire in the setting sun. 
 
 "Maude," I said, "I have not come to plead, to appeal 
 to your pity as against your judgment and reason. I can 
 say this much, that if I do not love you, as the word is 
 generally understood, I have a new respect for you, and a 
 new affection, and I think that these will grow. I have 
 no doubt that there are some fortunate people who achieve 
 the kind of mutual love for which it is human to yearn, 
 whose passion is naturally transmuted into a feeling that 
 may be even finer, but I am inclined to think, even in such 
 a case, that some effort and unselfishness are necessary. 
 At any rate, that has been denied to us, and we can never 
 know it from our own experience. We can only hope that 
 there is such a thing, yes, and believe in it and work for it." 
 
 "Work for it, Hugh?" she repeated. 
 
 "For others for our children. I have been thinking 
 about the children a great deal in the last few months 
 especially about Matthew." 
 
 "You always loved him best," she said. 
 
 "Yes," I admitted. "I don't know why it should be so. 
 And in spite of it, I have neglected him, neglected them, 
 failed to appreciate them all. I did not deserve them. I 
 have reproached myself, I have suffered for it, not as much as 
 I deserved. I came to realize that the children were a bond 
 between us, that their existence meant something greater 
 than either of us. But at the same time I recognized that 
 I had lost my right over them, that it was you who had proved 
 yourself worthy. ... It was through the children that I 
 came to think differently, to feel differently toward you. I 
 have come to you to ask your forgiveness."
 
 508 A FAR COUNTRY 
 
 "Oh, Hugh! "she cried. 
 
 "Wait," I said. . . . " I have come to you, through them. 
 I want to say again that I should not be here if I had obtained 
 my desires. Yet there is more to it than that. I think I 
 have reached a stage where I am able to say that I am glad 
 I didn't obtain them. I see now that this coming to you was 
 something I have wanted to do all along, but it was the cow 
 ardly thing to do, after I had failed, for it was not as though I 
 had conquered the desires, the desires conquered me. At any 
 rate, I couldn't come to you to encumber you, to be a drag 
 upon you. I felt that I must have something to offer you. 
 I've got a plan, Maude, for my Me, for our lives. I don't 
 know whether I can make a success of it, and you are entitled 
 to decline to take the risk. I don't fool myself that it will 
 be all plain sailing, that there won't be difficulties and dis 
 couragements. But I'll promise to try." 
 
 "What is it?" she asked, in a low voice. "I I think I 
 know." 
 
 "Perhaps you have guessed it. I am willing to try to 
 devote what is left of my life to you and to them. And I 
 need your help. I acknowledge it. Let us try to make more 
 possible for them the life we have missed." 
 
 "The life we have missed !" she said. 
 
 "Yes. My mistakes, my failures, have brought us to the 
 edge of a precipice. We must prevent, if we can, those mis 
 takes and failures for them. The remedy for unhappy mar 
 riages, for all mistaken, selfish and artificial relationships in 
 life is a preventive one. My plan is that we try to educate 
 ourselves together, take advantage of the accruing knowledge 
 that is helping men and women to cope with the problems, 
 to think straight. We can then teach our children to think 
 straight, to avoid the pitfalls into which we have fallen." 
 
 I paused. Maude did not reply. Her face was turned 
 away from me, towards the red glow of the setting sun above 
 the hills. 
 
 "You have been doing this all along, you have had the 
 vision, the true vision, while I lacked it, Maude. I offer to.
 
 A FAR COUNTRY 509 
 
 help you. But if you think it is impossible for us to live 
 together, if you believe my feeling toward you is not enough, 
 if you don't think I can do what I propose, or if you have 
 ceased to care for me " 
 
 She turned to me with a swift movement, her eyes filled 
 with tears. 
 
 "Oh, Hugh, don't say any more. I can't stand it. How 
 little you know, for all your thinking. I love you, I always 
 have loved you. I grew to be ashamed of it, but I'm 
 not any longer. I haven't any pride any more, and I never 
 want to have it again.'* 
 
 "You're willing to take me as I am, to try?" I said. 
 
 "Yes," she answered, "I'm willing to try." She smiled 
 at me. "And I have more faith than you, Hugh. I think 
 we'll succeed." . . . 
 
 At nine o'clock that night, when we came out through the 
 gates of the big, noisy station, the children were awaiting us. 
 They had changed, they had grown. Biddy kissed me 
 shyly, and stood staring up at me. 
 
 " We'll take you out to-morrow and show you how we can 
 ride," said Moreton. 
 
 Matthew smiled. He stood very close to me, with his 
 hand through my arm. 
 
 "You're going to stay, father?" he asked. 
 
 "I'm going to stay, Matthew," I answered, "until we all 
 go back to America." . . . 
 
 Printed in the United States of America.
 
 THE NOVELS OF 
 
 WINSTON CHURCHILL 
 
 THE INSIDE OF THE CUP. Illustrated by Howard Giles. 
 
 The Reverend John Hodder is called to a fashionable church in 
 a middle- western city. He knows little of modern problems and in 
 his theology is as orthodox as the rich men who control his church 
 could desire. But the facts of modern life are thrust upon him; an 
 awakening follows and in the end he works out a solution. 
 A FAR COUNTRY. Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer. 
 
 This novel is concerned with big problems of the day. As The 
 Inside of the Cup gets down to the essentials in its discussion of re 
 ligion, so A Far Country deals in a story that is intense and dra 
 matic, with other vital issues confronting the twentieth century. 
 A MODERN CHRONICLE. Illustrated by J. H. Gardner Soper. 
 
 This, Mr. Churchill's first great presentation of the Eternal 
 Feminine, is throughout a profound study of a fascinating young 
 American woman. It is frankly a modern love story. 
 MR. CREWE'S CAREER. Illus. by A. I. Keller and Kinneys. 
 
 A new England state is under the political domination of a rail 
 way and Mr. Crewe, a millionaire, seizes a moment when the cause 
 of the people is being espoused by an ardent young attorney, to fur- 
 ther his own interest in a political way. The daughter of the rail- 
 way president plays no small part in the situation. 
 THE CROSSING. Illustrated by S. Adamson and L. Baylis. 
 
 Describing the battle of Fort Moultrie, the blazing of the Ken- 
 tucky wilderness, the expedition of Clark and his handful of follow 
 ers in Illinois, the beginning of civilization along the Ohio and 
 Mississippi, and the treasonable schemes against Washington. 
 CONISTON. Illustrated by Florence Scovel Shinn. 
 
 A deft blending of love and politics. A New Englander is the 
 hero, a crude man who rose to political prominence by his own pow. 
 ers, and then surrendered all for the love of a woman. 
 THE CELEBRITY. An episode. 
 
 An inimitable bit of comedy describing an interchange of per 
 sonalities between a celebrated author and a bicycle salesman. It 
 is the purest, keenest fun and is American to the core. 
 
 THE CRISIS. Illustrated with scenes from the Photo-Play. 
 
 A book that presents the great crisis in our national life with 
 splendid power and with a sympathy, a sincerity, and a patriotism 
 that are inspiring. 
 
 RICHARD CARVEL. Illustrated by Malcolm Frazer. 
 
 An historical novel which gives a real and vivid picture of Co 
 lonial times, and is good, clean, spirited reading in all its phases and 
 interesting throughout. 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
 
 JACK LONDON'S NOVELS 
 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list 
 
 JOHN BARLEYCORN. Illustrated by H. T. Dunn. 
 
 This remarkable book is a record of the author's own amazing 
 experiences. This big, brawny world rover, who has been ac 
 quainted with alcohol from boyhood, comes out boldly against John 
 Barleycorn. It is a string of exciting adventures, yet it forcefully 
 conveys an unforgetable idea and makes a typical Jack London book. 
 
 THE VALLEY OF THE MOON. Frontispiece by George Harper. 
 
 The story opens in the city slums where Billy Roberts, teamster 
 and ex-prize fighter, and Saxon Brown, laundry worker, meet and 
 love and marry. They tramp from one end of California to the 
 other, and in the Valley of the Moon find the farm paradise that is 
 to be their salvation. 
 
 BURNING DAYLIGHT. Four illustrations. 
 
 The story ot an adventurer who went to Alaska and laid the 
 foundations of his fortune before the gold hunters arrived. Bringing 
 his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money 
 kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts 
 out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to 
 drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time 
 he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not 
 her hand and then but read the story! 
 
 A SON OF THE SUN. Illustrated by A. O.Fischer and C.W. Ashley. 
 
 David Grief was once a light-haired, blue-eyed youth who came 
 from England to the South Seas in search of adventure. Tanned 
 like a native and as lithe as a tiger, he became a real son of the sun. 
 The life appealed to him and he remained and became very wealthy. 
 
 THE CALL OF THE WILD. Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin and 
 Charles Livingston Bull. Decorations by Charles E. Hooper. 
 A book ot dog adventures as exciting as any man's exploits 
 could be. Here is excitement to stir the blood and here is pictur 
 esque color to transport the reader to primitive scenes. 
 
 THE SEA WOLF. Illustrated by W. J. Aylward. 
 
 Told by a man whom Fate suddenly swings from his fastidious 
 life into the power of the brutal captain of a sealing schooner. A 
 novel of adventure warmed by a beautiful love episode that every 
 reader will hail with delight. 
 
 WHITE FANG. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull. 
 
 "White Fang" is part dog, part wolf and all brute, living in the 
 frozen north ; he gradually comes under the spell of man's com 
 panionship, and surrenders all at the last in a fight with a bull dog. 
 Thereafter he is man's loving slave. 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS', NEW YORK.
 
 NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY 
 
 WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE 
 
 HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap's list 
 
 MAVERICKS. 
 
 A tale of the western frontier, where the "rustler," whose dep 
 redations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the range, 
 abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told./ 
 
 A TEXAS RANGER. 
 
 How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried 
 law into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a series 
 of thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, and then 
 passed through deadly peril to ultimate happiness. 
 
 WYOMING. 
 
 In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured 
 the breezy charm of "cattleland," and brings out the turbid life of 
 the frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor. 
 
 RIDGWAY OF MONTANA. 
 
 The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where poli 
 tics and mining industries are the religion of the country. The 
 political contest, the love scene, and the fine character drawing give 
 this story great strength and charm. ; 
 
 BUCKY O'CONNOR. 
 
 Every chapter teems with "wholesome, stirring adventures, re 
 plete with the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash 
 and absorbing fascination of style and plot. 
 
 CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT. 
 
 A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of 
 a bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine 
 s a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination 
 that is fittingly characteristic of the great free West. 
 
 BRAND BLOTTERS. 
 
 A r.tory of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid 
 life of the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with a charm 
 ing love interest running through its 320 pages. 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
 
 ZANE GREY'S NOVELS 
 
 May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset & Dunlap's list 
 
 THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS 
 Colored frontispiece by W. Herbert Dunton. 
 
 Most of the action of this story takes place near the turbulent 
 Mexican border of the present day. A New York society girl buys 
 a ranch which becomes the center of frontier warfare. Her loyal 
 cowboys defend her property from bandits, and her superintendent 
 rescues her when she is captured by them. A surprising climax 
 brings the story to a delightful close. 
 
 DESERT GOLD 
 
 Illustrated by Douglas Duer. 
 
 Another fascinating story of the Mexican border. Two men, 
 lost in the desert, discover gold when, overcome by weakness, they 
 can go no farther. The rest of the story describes the recent uprising 
 along the border, and ends with the finding of the gold which the 
 two prospectors had willed to the girl who is the story's heroine. 
 
 RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE 
 
 Illustrated by Douglas Duer. 
 
 A picturesq ue romance of Utah of some forty j'ears ago when 
 Mormon authority ruled. In the persecution of Jane Withersteen, a 
 rich ranch owner, we are permitted to see the methods employed by 
 the invisible hand of the Mormon Church to break her will. 
 
 THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN 
 
 Illustrated with photograph reproductions. 
 
 This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo 
 Jones, known as the preserver of the American bison, across the 
 Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that wonderful country of yellow 
 crags, deep canons and giant pines." It is a fascinating story. 
 
 THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT 
 Jacket in color. Frontispiece. 
 
 This big human drama is played in the Painted Desert. A 
 lovely girl, who has been reared among Mormons, learns to love a 
 young New Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands 
 that the girl shall become the second wife of one of the Mormons- 
 Well, that's the problem of this sensational, big selling story. / 
 
 BETTY ZANE 
 
 Illustrated by Louis F. Grant. 
 
 This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beauti 
 ful young sister of old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest pioneers. 
 Life along the frontier, attacks by Indians, Betty's heroic defense 
 of the beleaguered garrison at Wheeling, the burning of the Fort, 
 and Betty's final race for life, make up this never-to-be-forgotten story. 
 
 GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY, LOS ANGELES 
 
 COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below. 
 
 KhC'D COL. Lib. 
 CJpr '$> - p 
 
 SEP 2 11970 
 
 Book Slip-25m-9,'60(.B2<936s4)4280
 
 UCLA-College Library 
 
 PS 1297 F22 
 
 L 005 671 836 4 
 
 Library 
 
 97 
 2 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 001313029 9