wn that far, he should
want to go on down, down, down till he struck the bottom and got on the
General Staff; and why, being stripped of this livery, or set free
and reinvested with his self-respect by any other quick and thorough
process, let it be what it might, he should wish to return to his
strange serfage. But no matter: the estimate put upon these things by
the fifteen hundred and sixty millions is no proper measure of their
value: the proper measure, the just measure, is that which is put upon
them by Dreyfus, and is cipherable merely upon the littleness or the
vastness of the disappointment which their loss cost him. There you have
it: the measure of the magnitude of a dream-failure is the measure of
the disappointment the failure cost the dreamer; the value, in others'
eyes, of the thing lost, has nothing to do with the matter. With this
straightening out and classification of the dreamer's position to
help us, perhaps we can put ourselves in his place and respect his
dream--Dreyfus's, and the dreams our friends have cherished and reveal
to us. Some that I call to mind, some that have been revealed to me, are
curious enough; but we may not smile at them, for they were precious to
the dreamers, and their failure has left scars which give them dignity
and pathos. With this theme in my mind, dear heads that were brown when
they and mine were young together rise old and white before me now,
beseeching me to speak for them, and most lovingly will I do it.
Howells, Hay, Aldrich, Matthews, Stockton, Cable, Remus--how their young
hopes and ambitions come flooding back to my memory now, out of the
vague far past, the beautiful past, the lamented past! I remember it so
well--that night we met together--it was in Boston, and Mr. Fiends was
there, and Mr. Osgood, Ralph Keeler, and Boyle O'Reilly, lost to us
now these many years--and under the seal of confidence revealed to each
other what our boyhood dreams had been: reams which had not as yet been
blighted, but over which was stealing the grey of the night that was to
come--a night which we prophetically felt, and this feeling oppressed us
and made us sad. I remember that Howells's voice broke twice, and it
was only with great difficulty that he was able to go on; in the end
he wept. For he had hoped to be an auctioneer. He told of his early
struggles to climb to his goal, and how at last he attained to within a
single step of the coveted summit. But there misfortune after