n."

He sat down amid ecstatic cheers and Nicholas Burr came forward.

His face was grave, but there was the light of enthusiasm in his eyes
and his head was uplifted.

"There's a man who has capitalised his conscience," sneered a Webb
follower with a smile.

Across the hall Ben Galt was lighting a cigar, the tattered remains of
his fan at his feet. "There's a statesman that came a century too late,"
he remarked to Tom Bassett. "He's a leader, pure and simple, but he's
out of place in an age when every man's his own patriot."

III

The successful man was returning to Kingsborough. He had spent the week
in Richmond, where he had lived for the past ten years, and he was now
going back to receive the congratulations of the judge--as he would have
gone twice the distance.

It was the ordinary car of a Southern railroad, and leaning his head
against the harsh, bristly plush of the seat, he had before him the
usual examples of Southern passengers.

Across the aisle a slender mother was holding a crying baby, two small
children huddling beside her. In the seat in front of him slouched a
mulatto of the new era--the degenerate descendant of two races that mix
only to decay. Further off there were several men returning from
business trips, and across from them sat a pretty girl, asleep, her hand
resting on a gilded cage containing a startled canary. At intervals she
was aroused by the flitting figure of a small boy on the way to the
cooler of iced water. From the rear of the car came the amiable drawl of
the conductor as he discussed the affairs of the State with a local
drummer, whose feet rested upon a square leathern case.

Nicholas Burr leaned back and closed his eyes, crossing his long legs
which were cramped by the limited space. He had already exchanged
pleasantries with the conductor, and he had chatted for twenty minutes
with a farmer, who had gone back at last to the smoking-car.

The low, irregular landscape was as familiar to him as his own face. He
knew it so well that he could see it with closed eyes--could note each
change of expression where the daylight shifted, could tell where the
thin cornfields ended and the meadows rolled fresh and green, could
smell the stretch of young pines above the smoke of the engine, and
could follow to their ends the rain-washed roads that crawled with
hidden heads into the blue blur of the distance. He knew it all, but he
was not thinking of it now.

He was thi