I think, John Mayrant now asserted, “that it is going too far to say the bloom is off us.”

“Oh, you’ll find snow in the woods away into April and May.  The freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the far recesses.  But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their pavements.  And when he doesn’t go to them, they come to him.  The Wall Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One for Volume Two’s electric unrest.  In Volume One our wagon was hitched to the star of liberty.  Capital and labor have cut the traces.  The labor union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill prompt him.  If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a ‘scab.’  Don’t let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on.  We’re all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays.  Eternal vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

“Well,” said John Mayrant, “we’re not thinking about our pockets in Kings Port, because” (and here there came into his voice and face that sudden humor which made him so delightful)—­“because we haven’t got any pockets to think of!”

This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold clouds.

He continued:  “Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?”

“Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant—­but never mind!  I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—­the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—­my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases.  For stronger even than his kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation.  He’s going to stand up for the ‘open shop’ and sit down on the ‘trust’; and I assure you that I don’t in the least resemble the Evening Post.”

A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant’s features.

“The New York Evening Post,” I repeated with surprise.  Still the inquiry of his face remained.

“Oh, fortunate youth!” I cried.  “To have escaped the New York Evening Post!”

“Is it so heinous?”

“Well! ... well! ... how exactly describe it? ... make you see it? ...  It’s partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses.  Habitual over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting praise; it’s the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious; it’s the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it’s our Republic’s common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a country.”