act manner of one so complimented.

"Horace, what are you going to do with that thirty thousand dollars?"

"Thirty thousand!" Horace looks at me and smiles, and I look at Horace
and smile.

"Honest now!"

"Waal, I'll tell ye--a little peace and comfort for me and Josie in our
old age, and a little something to make the children remember us when
we're gone. Isn't that worth working for?"

He said this with downright seriousness. I did not press him further,
but if I had tried I could probably have got the even deeper admission
of that faith that lies, like bed rock, in the thought of most men--that
honesty and decency here will not be without its reward there, however
they may define the "there." Some "prophet's paradise to come!"

"I knew it!" I said. "Horace, you're a dreamer, too. You are dreaming of
peace and comfort in your old age, a little quiet house in town where
you won't have to labour as hard as you do now, where you won't be
worried by crops and weather, and where Mrs. Horace will be able to rest
after so many years of care and work and sorrow--a kind of earthly
heaven! And you are dreaming of leaving a bit to your children and
grandchildren, and dreaming of the gratitude they will express. All
dreams, Horace!"

"Oh, waal---"

"The fact is, you are working for a dream, and living on dreams--isn't
that true?"

"Waal, now, if you mean it that way----"

"I see I haven't got you beaten yet, Horace!"

He smiled broadly,

"We are all amiable enough with our own dreams. You think that what you
are working for--your dream--is somehow sounder and more practical than
what I am working for."

Horace started to reply, but had scarcely debouched from his trenches
when I opened on him with one of my twenty-fours.

"How do you know that you are ever going to be old?"

It hit.

"And if you do grow old, how do you know that thirty thousand
dollars--oh, we'll call it that--is really enough, provided you don't
lose it before, to buy peace and comfort for you, or that what you leave
your children will make either you or them any happier? Peace and
comfort and happiness are terribly expensive, Horace--and prices have
been going up fast since this war began!"

Horace looked at me uncomfortably, as men do in the world when you shake
the foundations of the tabernacle. I have thought since that I probably
pressed him too far; but these things go deep with me.

"No, Horace," I said, "you are the dreamer--and t