chief citizens, and finds their gray hairs crowned with it,—­the very men he has looked up to, believed in, his ideals, his examples, the merchant prince, the railroad magnate, the president of insurance companies—­all dirty rascals!  Presently he faces worldly success or failure, and then, in the new ocean of mind that has swallowed morals up, he sinks with his isolated honesty, like a fool, or swims to respectability with his brother knaves.  And into this mess the immigrant sewage of Europe is steadily pouring.  Such is our continent to-day, with all its fair winds and tides and fields favorable to us, and only our shallow, complacent, dishonest selves against us!  But don’t let these considerations make you gloomy; for (I must say it again) nothing is final; and even if we rot before we ripen—­which would be a wholly novel phenomenon—­we shall have made our contribution to mankind in demonstrating by our collapse that the sow’s ear belongs with the rest of the animal, and not in the voting booth or the legislature, and that the doctrine of universal suffrage should have waited until men were born honest and equal.  That in itself would be a memorable service to have rendered.”

We had come into the divine, sad stillness of the woods, where the warm sunlight shone through the gray moss, lighting the curtained solitudes away and away into the depths of the golden afternoon; and somewhere amid the miles of sleeping wilderness sounded the hoarse honk of the automobile.  The Replacers were abroad, enjoying what they could in this country where they did not belong, and which did not as yet belong to them.  Once again we heard their honk off to our left, from a farther distance, and I am glad to say that we did not see them at all.

“If,” said John Mayrant, “what you have said is true, the nation had better get on its knees and pray God to give it grace.”

I looked at the boy and saw that his countenance had grown very fine.  “The act,” I said, “would bring grace, wherever it comes from.”

“Yes,” he assented.  “If in the stars and awfulness of space there’s nothing, that does not trouble me; for my greater self is inside me, safe.  And our country has a greater self somewhere.  Think!”

“I do not have to think,” I replied, “when I know the nobleness we have risen to at times.”

“And I,” he pursued, “happen to believe it is not all only stars and space; and that God, as much as any ship-builder, rejoices to watch every tiniest boat meet and brave the storm.”

Out of his troubles he had brought such mood, sweetness instead of bitterness; he was saying as plainly as if his actual words said it, “Misfortune has come to me, and I am going to make the best of it.”  His nobleness, his moral elegance, compelled him to this, and I envied him, not sure if I myself, thus placed, would acquit myself so well.  And there was in his sweetness a contagion that strangely reconciled me to the troubled aspects of our national hour.