AT FIRE 581
XXII. A CONWAY AGAIN 588
XXIII. DIED FOR THE LAW 596
XXIV. THE ATONEMENT 611
XXV. THE SHADOWS AND THE CLOUDS 624
XXVI. THE MODEL MILL 633

[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors, have been silently
corrected. For clarity, have added new paragraphs with respect to
dialogue within paragraphs. The name Hillard and Hilliard have
been uniformly changed to Hillard. Corrected incorrect usages of
'its' and 'it's.' All other inconsistencies (i.e. The inconsistent
spellings--sombre/somber, gray/grey, hyphen/no hyphen) have been
left as they were in the original.]

PART FIRST--THE BLOOM

THE COTTON BLOSSOM

The cotton blossom is the only flower that is born in the shuttle of
a sunbeam and dies in a loom.

It is the most beautiful flower that grows, and needs only to become
rare to be priceless--only to die to be idealized.

For the world worships that which it hopes to attain, and our ideals
are those things just out of our reach.

Satiety has ten points and possession is nine of them.

If, in early August, the delicately green leaves of this most
aristocratic of all plants, instead of covering acres of Southland
shimmering under a throbbing sun, peeped daintily out, from among the
well-kept beds of some noble garden, men would flock to see that
plant, which, of all plants, looks most like a miniature tree.

A stout-hearted plant,--a tree, dwarfed, but losing not its dignity.

Then, one morning, with the earliest sunrise, and born of it, there
emerges from the scalloped sea-shell of the bough an exquisite,
pendulous, cream-white blossom, clasping in its center a golden
yellow star, pinked with dawn points of light, and, setting high up
under its sky of milk-white petals flanked with yellow stars, it
seems to the little nestling field-wrens born beneath it to be the
miniature arch of daybreak, ere the great eye of the morning star
closes.

Later, when the sun rises and the sky above grows pink and purple,
it, too, changes its color from pink to purple, copying the sky from
zone to zone, from blue to deeper blue, until, at late evening the
young nestlings may look up and say, in their bird language: "It is
twilight."

What other flower among them can thus copy Nature, the great master?

Under every sky is a sphere, and under this sky picture, when night