the hoarse hoot of the
steamboat whistle at the landing. His farm's edge had been marked by the
Mississippi rolling grandly by.

Since they had moved into town he had found only one city sound that he
really welcomed: the rattle and clink that marked the milkman's
matutinal visit. The milkman came at six, and he was the good fairy who
released Ben Westerveld from durance vile--or had been until the winter
months made his coming later and later, so that he became worse than
useless as a timepiece. But now it was late March, and mild. The
milkman's coming would soon again mark old Ben's rising hour. Before he
had begun to take it easy six o'clock had seen the entire mechanism of
his busy little world humming smoothly and sweetly, the whole set in
motion by his own big work-calloused hands. Those hands puzzled him now.
He often looked at them curiously and in a detached sort of way as if
they belonged to someone else. So white they were, and smooth and soft,
with long, pliant nails that never broke off from rough work as they
used to. Of late there were little splotches of brown on the backs of
his hands and around the thumbs.

"Guess it's my liver," he decided, rubbing the spots thoughtfully. "She
gets kind of sluggish from me not doing anything. Maybe a little spring
tonic wouldn't go bad. Tone me up."

He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted
Street near Sixty-third. A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated
and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store. The
reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly--while it
lasted. He had two bottles of it. But on discontinuing it he slumped
back into his old apathy.

Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his
incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago's teeming, gritty
streets, was a tragedy. Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply
from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely
unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning
great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body
suggested power unutilized. All these spelled tragedy. Worse than
tragedy--waste.

For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set,
eyes wary, shoulders squared. He had fought wind and sun, rain and
drought, scourge and flood. He had risen before dawn and slept before
sunset. In the process he had taken on something of th