ed.

The place looked strange and pitiful in the hazy moonlight. It was badly
tended, and most of the headstones were only of painted wood, warped and
buckled by the weather. But in the dimness the rows of crosses and slabs
seemed to extend into the far distance, and the moon gave them a cold,
eerie whiteness as if they lay in the light of another world. A great
sign came from Lincoln, and Stanton thought that he had never seen on
mortal countenance such infinite sadness.

"Ambition!" he said. "How dare we talk of ambition, when this is the end
of it? All these people--decent people, kind people, once full of joy
and purpose, and now all forgotten! It is not the buried bodies I mind,
it is the buried hearts....I wonder if it means peace...."

He stood there with head bowed and he seemed to be speaking to himself.
Stanton caught a phrase or two and found it was verse--banal verses,
which were there and then fixed in his fly-paper memory. "Tell me, my
secret soul," it ran:

"Oh, tell me, Hope and Faith,
Is there no resting-place
From sorrow, sin, and death?
Is there no happy spot
Where mortals may be blessed,
Where grief may find a balm
And weariness a rest?"

The figure murmuring these lines seemed to be oblivious of his
companion. He stood gazing under the moon, like a gaunt statue of
melancholy. Stanton spoke to him but got no answer, and presently took
his own road home. He had no taste for histrionic scenes. And as he went
his way he meditated. Mad, beyond doubt. Not without power in him,
but unbalanced, hysterical, alternating between buffoonery and these
schoolgirl emotions. He reflected that if the American nation contained
much stuff of this kind it might prove a difficult team to drive. He was
thankful that he was going home next day to his orderly life.

II

Eighteen years have gone, and the lanky figure of Speed's store is
revealed in new surroundings. In a big square room two men sat beside a
table littered with the debris of pens, foolscap, and torn fragments
of paper which marked the end of a Council. It was an evening at the
beginning of April, and a fire burned in the big grate. One of the two
sat at the table with his elbows on the mahogany, and his head supported
by a hand. He was a man well on in middle life with a fine clean-cut
face and the shapely mobile lips of the publicist and orator. It was the
face of one habituated to platforms and assemblies, full