Bible
and the yellow journal with equal velocity."

"I don't mean science. Take our institutions."

"Well, we've accomplished hospitals and the stock market--a pretty even
set-off between God and the devil."

He laughed. "You don't take a high view of us!"

"Nor a low one. I don't play ostrich with any of the staring permanences
of human nature. We're just as noble to-day as David was sometimes,
and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we've every
possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or
wear steel armor or starched shirts."

"Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world."

"Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses,
sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into
disorder, and disorder into new order--how many times?"

"But better each time."

"How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?"

"I know we have a higher ideal."

"Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave
his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross."

Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. "I can't
answer you, but I don't believe it."

This brought me to gayety. "That's unanswerable, anyhow!"

He still stared at the graves. "Those people in there didn't think all
these uncomfortable things."

"Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our
national soul, before the bloom was off us."

"That's an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?"

"Only the second."

"Since when?"

"Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!"

"I don't see how that took the bloom off us."

"It didn't. It merely waked Europe up to the facts."

"Our battleships, you mean?"

"Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence."

"And our very accurate shooting!" he insisted; for he was a Southerner,
and man's gallantry appealed to him more than man's industry.

I laughed. "Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our
first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the
virgin wilderness, for it's explored; to the Indian, for he's conquered;
to the pioneer, for he's dead; we've finished our wild, romantic
adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty
million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime
over."

I think, John Mayrant now asserted, "that it is going too far to say the