pously called) which would have given the last
convincing touch to his claims on authorship. He spoke of these stories
freely enough to me, but disclaimed all attempts at poetry: short of
that field, I believe, he really did stay his hand.

Well, perhaps too many good fairies--good only to the pitch of
velleity--buzzed and brushed, like muses, or pseudo-muses, about his
brows. All this unsettled him--and sometimes annoyed his daily
associates. But how, without these instinctive young passes at Art,
could the unceasing, glamorous and needful rebirth of the world get
itself accomplished?

II

As for Johnny McComas, he found one year of our Academy enough. It was
the getting in, not the staying in, that provoked his young powers. Our
school, moreover, was explicitly classical in a day when the old
classical ideal still ruled respected everywhere; and Johnny, much as he
liked being with us and of us, could not see the world in terms of
Latin paradigms. He wanted to be "doing something"; he wanted to be "in
business." During the summer following his year at Dr. Grant's I heard
of him as somebody's office-boy somewhere downtown, and then quite lost
sight of him for the five years that succeeded.

It occurred to me that Johnny must be doing just the right thing for
himself; he would make the sort of office-boy that "business men" would
contend for: easy to imagine the manoeuvres, even the feuds, that
would enliven business blocks in the downtown district for the
possession of Johnny's confident smile and dashing, forthright way. I
learned, in due season, that Johnny had cast in his lot with a
real-estate operator, and had been cherished, through periods harried by
competition, as a pearl of price.

The city was emphatically still in the "real-estate" stage. Anybody
arriving without profession or training straightway began to sell lots.
Nothing lay more openly abundant than land; the town had but to
propagate itself automatically over the wide prairies. The wild flowers
waved only to welcome the surveyor's gang; and new home-seekers--in the
jargon of the trade--were ever hurrying to rasp themselves upon the
ragged edges of the outskirts.

One Sunday morning in May, Raymond and I determined on an excursion to
the country--or, at all events, to some of the remoter suburbs. The bank
would not claim his thoughts for twenty-four hours, nor the law-school
mine. We left the train at a promising point and prepared to scuffle