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 see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the beauty of the scene to act on him.  Suffered:  in a man, according to his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty, pain, religion, permitted to act under orders.  Of course.

It was a peculiar landscape,—­like the man who looked at it, of a thoroughly American type.  A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of scarlet and flame and crimson.  Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose into the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet.  At the base of the hills lay the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far edge flowed the Wabash,—­deep here, tinted with green, writhing and gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and mud-covered rock.  Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,—­the Prairies.  Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west.  A plain dark russet in hue,—­for the grass was sun-scorched,—­stretching away into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and puny streams that only made the vastness and silence more wide and heavy.  Its limitless