the rose.

Mr. John Gray went with the expedition, and distinguished himself from
the beginning. He could endure hard work; he was a good civil engineer
and comprehended the theory upon which his superiors were working, and
above all, he was an enthusiast in the thing they were undertaking, and
had independent devices of his own, to be submitted at the proper time,
for the attainment of certain mechanical ends which had puzzled the
pundits at Washington. He had ideas as to how should be flown the new
form of kite which should carry into the upper depths explosives to
shatter and compress the atmosphere and produce the condensation which
makes rain, just as concussions from below--as after the cannonading of
a great battle--produce the same effect. He had fancies about a lot of
things connected with the work of the rain-making expedition, and his
fancies were practicalities. He proved invaluable to his superiors in
office when came the experiments the reports of which at first declared
that rain-making was a success, and later admitted something to the
contrary.

There had been, as all the world knows, certain experiments of the
government rain-makers followed by rains, and certain experiments after
which the earth had remained as parched and the sky as brazen as before.
The one successful experiment had, as it chanced, been conducted under
Mr. Gray's personal and ardent supervision. He had overseen the flying
of the kites, the impudent invasion of the upper depths when a button
was touched, and then he had seen the white cumulus clouds gather and
become nimbus, followed by a brief rainfall upon a hot and yellow land.
He had felt as Moses may have felt when he smote the rock, as De
Lesseps may have felt when he brought the seas together. He thought one
of the man-helping problems of the ages almost solved.

So far John Gray, civil engineer in the service of the Government, had
been lost in his avocation. He saw no flower beside his path; he dreamed
of no woman he had known. But there came a change, for which he was not
responsible. There was delay in the shipping of additional supplies
needed for the expedition's work--as there usually is delay and bad
management in whatever is intrusted to certain encrusted bureaus in
Washington--and in the interval, with nothing to do, this civil
engineer spent necessarily most of his time in the little town about the
railroad station, and there fell in love. It was an odd location f