the press (The Setting Splendors of the East) had
recalled me to the land of the free and the home of the brave. Two
hours after I had landed from the steamship, thirty seconds after I had
entered the club, there was Peter, in his green coat and brass
buttons, standing in the vast, cool hall among the immense columns of
verd-antique, with my telegram on a silver tray, which he presented to
me with a discreet expression of welcome in his well-trained face, as
if he hesitated to inquire where I had been, but ventured to hope that
I had enjoyed my holiday and that there was no bad news in my despatch.
The perfection of the whole thing brought me back with a mild surprise
to my inheritance as an American, and made me dimly conscious of the
point to which New York has carried republicanism and the simple life.

But the telegram--read hastily in the hall, and considered at leisure
while I took a late breakfast at my favorite table in the long, stately,
oak-panelled dining-room, high above the diminished roar of Fifth
Avenue--the telegram carried me out to Eastridge, that self-complacent
overgrown village among the New York hills, where people still lived in
villas with rubber-plants in the front windows, and had dinner in
the middle of the day, and attended church sociables, and listened
to Fourth-of-July orations. It was there that I had gone, green from
college, to take the assistant-editorship of that flapping sheet The
Eastridge Banner; and there I had found Cyrus Talbert beginning his work
in the plated-ware factory--the cleanest, warmest, biggest heart of a
man that I have known yet, with a good-nature that covered the bed-rock
of his conscience like an apple orchard on a limestone ridge. In
the give-and-take of every day he was easy-going, kindly, a lover of
laughter; but when you struck down to a question of right and wrong,
or, rather, when he conceived that he heard the divine voice of duty, he
became absolutely immovable--firm, you would call it if you agreed with
him, obstinate if you differed.

After all, a conscience like that is a good thing to have at the bottom
of a friendship. I could be friends with a man of almost any religion,
but hardly with a man of none. Certainly the intimacy that sprang up
between Talbert and me was fruitful in all the good things that cheer
life's journey from day to day, and deep enough to stand the strain of
life's earthquakes and tornadoes. There was a love-affair that might
hav