unity because it is inherent in human nature
... we have a fine college of our own ... a fine electric plant ...
everybody's lawn is well-kept ... nobody in this town need be out of a
job ... for miles around us the land is rich in real wealth of waving
corn and wheat....

Kansas will be the centre, the Athens, of our civilisation, one day....

We have a fine Harvey Eating House at our railway station, managed by a
hustler ... you must have Ally take you there for dinner before you go
back to Laurel."

The idealisation of small comfort ... in a case like Mackworth's, fairly
unobjectionable ... but in most cases insufferably stodgy ... the
dry-rot of art, literature, life ... leading to a smug conceit that in
turn ends in that school of "two hills of corn where one cluster of
violets grew before."

No wonder that the _National Magazine_, starting with a splendid
flourish of knight-errantry, degenerated into the mere,
"let-well-enough-alone" thrift-crier it is.... "'How I Became an Expert
Tombstone Salesman' ... 'How I collected Tin Foil After Work-Hours and
Added Three Hundred a Year Extra to My Salary as Stenographer.'..."

Rather, far rather, the Rockefeller, that shrewd manipulator of
businesses ... with all his parsimony in personal economics ... his diet
of bread and milk ... and his giving away of millions to missions and
scientific institutions....

Rather the big Morgan, who knew the old masters as well as he knew the
weaknesses of men ... who hobnobbed, not as a democrat, but as
aristocratic as the best of them, with princes, kings, emperors, in his
grim, forbidding dignity.

This at least presented bigness and romance!

* * * * *

"Want to meet Uncle Bill?" and Mackworth led me into a close-shut room
blue-thick with smoke....

I coughed and choked. A fire extinguisher should have preceded our
entry.

There sat--the lumbering trot of his typewriter heard long before he
assumed visible, hazy outline--William Struthers, known to the newspaper
world as "Old Uncle Bill," the writer of daily prose-verse squibs on the
homely virtues, the exalter of the commonplaces of life, the deifier of
the ordinary.

Uncle Bill's head of strong, black hair stood upright like thick wire.
His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped
and drew up a chair for me.

"Of course I ain't calling my stuff poetry," he began deprecatingly,
"but I do a lot of good for f