“But it shall prevail!” the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.

“Everything prevails,” I answered him.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“Neither do I,” I returned.  “But Jacob got Esau’s inheritance by a mean trick.”

“Jacob was punished for it.”

“Did that help Esau much?”

“You are a pessimist!”

“Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?”

“You’re no optimist, anyhow!”

“I hope I’m blind in neither eye.”

“You don’t give us credit—­”

“For what?”

“For what we’ve accomplished since Jacob.”

“Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance?  They spread the Bible and the yellow journal with equal velocity.”

“I don’t mean science.  Take our institutions.”

“Well, we’ve accomplished hospitals and the stock market—­a pretty even set-off between God and the devil.”

He laughed.  “You don’t take a high view of us!”

“Nor a low one.  I don’t play ostrich with any of the staring permanences of human nature.  We’re just as noble to-day as David was sometimes, and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we’ve every possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or wear steel armor or starched shirts.”

“Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world.”

“Oh, John Mayrant!  Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses, sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead.  Order has melted into disorder, and disorder into new order—­how many times?”

“But better each time.”

“How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?”

“I know we have a higher ideal.”

“Have we?  The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself.  He gave his great teacher a cup of poison.  We gave ours the cross.”

Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard.  “I can’t answer you, but I don’t believe it.”

This brought me to gayety.  “That’s unanswerable, anyhow!”

He still stared at the graves.  “Those people in there didn’t think all these uncomfortable things.”

“Ah! no!  They belonged in the first volume of the history of our national soul, before the bloom was off us.”

“That’s an odd notion!  And pray what volume are we in now?”

“Only the second.”

“Since when?”

“Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!”

“I don’t see how that took the bloom off us.”

“It didn’t.  It merely waked Europe up to the facts.”

“Our battleships, you mean?”

“Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence.”

“And our very accurate shooting!” he insisted; for he was a Southerner, and man’s gallantry appealed to him more than man’s industry.

I laughed.  “Yes, indeed!  We may say that the Spanish War closed our first volume with a bang.  And now in the second we bid good-by to the virgin wilderness, for it’s explored; to the Indian, for he’s conquered; to the pioneer, for he’s dead; we’ve finished our wild, romantic adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime over.”