entle as a woman, tender in
knightly honor. He was an old man, with a rusty brown coat and rustier
wig, who spent his life in a dingy village office. You poets would have
laughed at him. Well, well, his history never will be written. The kind,
sad, blue eyes are shut now. There is a little farm-graveyard overgrown
with privet and wild grape-vines, and a flattened grave where he was
laid to rest; and only a few who knew him when they were children care
to go there, and think of what he was to them. But it was not in the far
days of Chivalry alone, I think, that true and tender souls have stood
in the world unwelcome, and, hurt to the quick, have turned away and
dumbly died. Let it be. Their lives are not lost, thank God!

I meant only to ask you, How can I help it, if the people in my story
seem coarse to you,--if the hero, unlike all other heroes, stopped to
count the cost before he fell in love,--if it made his fingers thrill
with pleasure to touch a full pocket-book as well as his mistress's
hand,--not being withal, this Stephen Holmes, a man to be despised? A
hero, rather, of a peculiar type,--a man, more than other men: the very
mould of man, doubt it who will, that women love longest and most madly.
Of course, if I could, I would have blotted out every meanness or
flaw before I showed him to you; I would have given you Margaret an
impetuous, whole-souled woman, glad to throw her life down for her
father without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might have
been; I would have painted her mother tender as she was, forgetting how
pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do? I must show you men
and women as they are in that especial State of the Union where I live.
In all the others, of course, it is very different. Now, being prepared
for disappointment, will you see my hero?

He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through
the hills, as Margaret went, going home, but on the other side, to
the river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana,
remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the
true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a
man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used
the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't
they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,--a red,
flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to
it, he could not