torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached, stretching to find some break before the dull russet faded into the amber of the horizon and was lost.  An American landscape:  of few features, simple, grand in outline as a face of one of the early gods.  It lay utterly motionless before him, not a fleck of cloud in the pure blue above, even where the mist rose from the river; it only had glorified the clear blue into clearer violet.

Holmes stood quietly looking; he could have created a picture like this, if he never had seen one; therefore he was able to recognize it, accepted it into his soul, and let it do what it would there.

Suddenly a low wind from the far Pacific coast struck from the amber line where the sun went down.  A faint tremble passed over the great hills, the broad sweeps of color darkened from base to summit, then flashed again,—­while below, the prairie rose and fell like a dun sea, and rolled in long, slow, solemn waves.

The wind struck so broad and fiercely in Holmes’s face that he caught his breath.  It was a savage freedom, he thought, in the West there, whose breath blew on him,—­the freedom of the primitive man, the untamed animal man, self-reliant and self-assertant, having conquered Nature.  Well, this fierce masterful freedom was good for the soul, sometimes, doubtless.  It was old Knowles’s vital air.  He wondered if the old man would succeed in his hobby, if he could make the slavish beggars and thieves in the alleys yonder comprehend this fierce freedom.  They craved leave to live on sufferance now, not knowing their possible divinity.  It was a desperate remedy, this sense of unchecked liberty; but their disease was desperate.  As for himself, he did not need it; that element was not lacking.  In a mere bodily sense, to be sure.  He felt his arm.  Yes, the cold rigor of this new life had already worn off much of the clogging weight of flesh, strengthened the muscles.  Six months more in the West would toughen the fibres to iron.  He raised an iron weight that lay on the steps, carelessly testing them.  For the rest, he was going back here; something of the cold, loose freshness got into his brain, he believed.  In the two years of absence his power of concentration had been stronger, his perceptions more free from prejudice, gaining every day delicate point, acuteness of analysis.  He drew a long breath of the icy air, coarse with the wild perfume of the prairie.  No, his temperament needed a subtiler atmosphere than this, rarer essence than mere brutal freedom.  The East, the Old World, was his proper sphere for self-development.  He would go as soon as he could command the means, leaving all clogs behind. All?  His idle thought balked here, suddenly; the sallow forehead contracted sharply, and his gray eyes grew in an instant shallow, careless, formal, as a man who holds back his thought.  There was a fierce warring in his brain for a moment.  Then he brushed his Kossuth hat with his arm, and put it on, looking