Jewel Weed

								

boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora,
but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods.
Hods are uninspiring objects.
Dick stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the
rhythmic strokes of his mother's hand upon his well-thatched head as she
watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow
classmen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped
with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward.
Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies
that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and
then more cities and rivers and hills and lakes, and now the blessed
restfulness of home and twilight. He had seen it all many times
before--two thousand miles of space to be covered between New Haven and
St. Etienne. On this last journey it had taken on a new significance to
his eyes,--a significance which matched his dreams. It was instinct
with meaning of which he was a part.
This was his country, huge, half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was
not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness
of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and
it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty
race who would master those miles of inert earth.
God breathed His spirit into the earth and it became a living man.
Man--His image--must breathe the spirit into the earth and make it a
living civilization.
His father, with a Gettysburg bullet bruising his life, had nevertheless
played the part, and done his share toward turning a frontier village
into a noble city. With a thrill Dick saw himself building the structure
higher on its firm foundations, making it great enough to match the wide
fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that
hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his
own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the
thing seemed done--vague and yet, somehow, concrete.
"Pooh, what is time? A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed Dick
suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight
hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed
time,--just add hot water and it swells to six times its original bulk."
His mother smiled indulgently at her son's vagaries of speech, and he
went on:
"Moreover, I've been away four years,--years of vast importance, it
seems to me. I come back and everything is going on in the same old way.
Every one is interested in the same old things. They don't seem to think
anything exciting has happened, except that the city has doubled in size
and there has been another presidential election. They aren't a bit
stirred up over me. They aren't even deeply moved because Ellery over
there is wielding an inexperienced editorial pen. Everything is