Don’t sneer at Knowles.  Your own clear, tolerant brain, that reflects all men and creeds alike, like colorless water, drawing the truth from all, is very different, doubtless, from this narrow, solitary soul, who thought the world waited for him to fight down his one evil before it went on its slow way.  An intolerant fanatic, of course.  But the truth he did know was so terribly real to him, he had suffered from the evil, and there was such sick, throbbing pity in his heart for men who suffered as he had done!  And then, fanatics must make history for conservative men to learn from, I suppose.

If Knowles shunned the hospital, there was another place he shunned more,—­the place where his communist buildings were to have stood.  He went out there once, as one might go alone to bury his dead out of his sight, the day after the mill was burnt,—­looking first at the smoking mass of hot bricks and charred shingles, so as clearly to understand how utterly dead his life-long scheme was.  He stalked gravely around it, his hands in his pockets; the hodmen who were raking out their winter’s firewood from the ashes remarking, that “old Knowles didn’t seem a bit cut up about it.”  Then he went out to the farm he had meant to buy, as I told you, and looked at it in the same stolid way.  It was a dull day in October.  The Wabash crawled moodily past his feet, the dingy prairie stretched drearily away on the other side, while the heavy-browed Indiana hills stood solemnly looking down the plateau where the buildings were to have risen.

Well, most men have some plan for life, into which all the strength and the keen, fine feeling of their nature enter; but generally they try to make it real in early youth, and, balked then, laugh ever afterwards at their own folly.  This poor old Knowles had begun to block out his dream when he was a gaunt, gray-haired man of sixty.  I have known men so build their heart’s blood and brains into their work, that, when it tumbled down, their lives went with it.  His fell that dull day in October; but if it hurt him, no man knew it.  He sat there, looking at the broad plateau, whistling softly to himself, a long time.  He had meant that a great many hearts should be made better and happier there; he had dreamed——­God knows what he had dreamed, of which this reality was the foundation,—­of how much freedom, or beauty, or kindly life this was the heart or seed.  It was all over now.  All the afternoon the muddy sky hung low over the hills and dull prairie, while he sat there looking at the dingy gloom:  just as you and I have done, perhaps, some time, thwarted in some true hope,—­sore and bitter against God, because He did not see how much His universe needed our pet reform.