med circle; the poet with the brow of Jove and
Minerva's lips; the rugged warrior at his side, with the dignity of
Mars himself; perhaps some Croesus with his gold, drawn by the spell
of Wisdom's enchantment into the magic circle; and this your humble
disciple of Thucydides, sitting spellbound under the drippings of the
sacred font, getting the material for these pages. That was the Golden
Age; there were giants in those days."

And so there were, Colonel Martin Culpepper of the Great Heart and the
"large white plumes"--so there were.

CHAPTER X

It was a cold raw day in March, 1874. Colonel Culpepper was sitting in
the office of Ward and Barclay over the Exchange National Bank waiting
for the junior member of the firm to come in; the senior member of the
firm, who had just brought up an arm load of green hickory and dry
hackberry stove wood, was standing beside the box-shaped stove,
abstractedly brushing the sawdust and wormwood from his sleeves and
coat front. The colonel was whistling and whittling, and the general
kept on brushing after the last speck of dust had gone from his shiny
coat. He walked to the window and stared into the ugly brown street.

Two or three minutes passed, and Colonel Culpepper, anxious for the
society of his kind, spoke. "Well, General, what's the trouble?"

"Nothing in particular, Martin. I was just questioning the reality of
matter and the existence of the universe as you spoke; but it's not
important." The general shivered, and turned his kind blue eyes on his
friend in a smile, and then bethought him to put the wood in the
stove.

While he was jamming in a final stick, Colonel Culpepper inquired,
"Well, am I an appearance or an entity?"

The general put the smoking poker on the floor, and turned the damper
in the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You
know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until
he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking
about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all--or just
my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on:
"All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real world, whose
world is it, your world or my world? Here is John Barclay, for
instance. Sometimes I get a peek at his world." Ward picked up the
poker and sat down and hammered the toe of a boot with it as he went
on: "John's world is the Golden Belt Wheat Company, wheat pouring