and why, having got down that far, he should want to go on down, down, down till he struck the bottom and got on the General Staff; and why, being stripped of this livery, or set free and reinvested with his self-respect by any other quick and thorough process, let it be what it might, he should wish to return to his strange serfage.  But no matter:  the estimate put upon these things by the fifteen hundred and sixty millions is no proper measure of their value:  the proper measure, the just measure, is that which is put upon them by Dreyfus, and is cipherable merely upon the littleness or the vastness of the disappointment which their loss cost him.  There you have it:  the measure of the magnitude of a dream-failure is the measure of the disappointment the failure cost the dreamer; the value, in others’ eyes, of the thing lost, has nothing to do with the matter.  With this straightening out and classification of the dreamer’s position to help us, perhaps we can put ourselves in his place and respect his dream—­Dreyfus’s, and the dreams our friends have cherished and reveal to us.  Some that I call to mind, some that have been revealed to me, are curious enough; but we may not smile at them, for they were precious to the dreamers, and their failure has left scars which give them dignity and pathos.  With this theme in my mind, dear heads that were brown when they and mine were young together rise old and white before me now, beseeching me to speak for them, and most lovingly will I do it.  Howells, Hay, Aldrich, Matthews, Stockton, Cable, Remus—­how their young hopes and ambitions come flooding back to my memory now, out of the vague far past, the beautiful past, the lamented past!  I remember it so well—­that night we met together—­it was in Boston, and Mr. Fiends was there, and Mr. Osgood, Ralph Keeler, and Boyle O’Reilly, lost to us now these many years—­and under the seal of confidence revealed to each other what our boyhood dreams had been:  reams which had not as yet been blighted, but over which was stealing the grey of the night that was to come—­a night which we prophetically felt, and this feeling oppressed us and made us sad.  I remember that Howells’s voice broke twice, and it was only with great difficulty that he was able to go on; in the end he wept.  For he had hoped to be an auctioneer.  He told of his early struggles to climb to his goal, and how at last he attained to within a single step of the coveted summit.  But there misfortune after misfortune assailed him, and he went down, and down, and down, until now at last, weary and disheartened, he had for the present given up the struggle and become the editor of the Atlantic Monthly.  This was in 1830.  Seventy years are gone since, and where now is his dream?  It will never be fulfilled.  And it is best so; he is no longer fitted for the position; no one would take him now; even if he got it, he would not be able to do himself credit in it, on account of his deliberateness of speech and lack