And now there still fared on the swift, sane empire of the West.  The rapid changes, the strivings, the accomplishments, the pretensions and the failures of the new town blended in the product of human progress.  Each man fell into his place in the community as though appointed thereto, and the eyes of all were set forward.  There was no retrospection, there were no imaginings, no fears, no disbeliefs.  The people were as ants, busy building their hill, underletting it with galleries, furnishing it with chambers, storing it with riches, providing it with defences; yet no individual ant looked beyond his own antennae, or dreamed that there might be significance in the tiny footprints which he left.  There were no philosophers to tell these busy actors that they were puppets in a great game, ants in a giant hill.  They lived, loved, and multiplied; which, after all, is Life.

To Franklin the days and months and years went by unpunctuated, his life settling gradually into the routine of an unhappy calm.  He neglected too much the social side of life, and rather held to his old friends than busied himself with the search for new.  Battersleigh was gone, swiftly and mysteriously gone, though with the promise to return and with the reiteration of his advice and his well wishes.  Curly was gone—­gone up the Trail into a far and mysterious country, though he, too, promised to remember Ellisville, and had given hostage for his promise.  His friends of the Halfway House were gone, for though he heard of them and knew them to be prosperous, he felt himself, by reason of Mary Ellen’s decision, in propriety practically withdrawn from their personal acquaintance.  Of the kaleidoscope of the oncoming civilization his eye caught but little.  There had again fallen upon his life a season of blight, or self-distrust, of dull dissatisfaction with the world and with living.  As in earlier years he had felt unrest and known the lack of settled purpose, so now, after having seen all things apparently set in order before him for progressive accomplishment, he had fallen back once more into that state of disbelief, of that hopeless and desperate awakening properly reserved only for old age, when the individual realizes that what he does is of itself of no consequence, and that what he is or is not stops no single star an atom in its flight, no blade of grass an iota in its growing.

Paralysis of the energies too often follows upon such self-revelations; and indeed it seemed to Franklin that he had suffered some deep and deadly benumbing of his faculties.  He could not welcome the new days.  His memory was set rather on the old days, so recent and in some way so dear.  He loved the forgotten thunder of the buffalo, but in his heart there rose no exultation at the rumble of the wheels.  Still conscientious, he plodded, nor did he cease to aspire even in his own restricted avocations.  Because of his level common sense, which is the main