bloom is off us."

"Oh, you'll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The
freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the
far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over
freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time
because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their
pavements. And when he doesn't go to them, they come to him. The Wall
Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles
long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One
for Volume Two's electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched
to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor
union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill
prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a 'scab.' Don't
let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on.
We're all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal
vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

"Well," said John Mayrant, "we're not thinking about our pockets in
Kings Port, because" (and here there came into his voice and face that
sudden humor which made him so delightful)--"because we haven't got any
pockets to think of!"

This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold
clouds.

He continued: "Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?"

"Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant--but never mind! I
could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and
corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees
the American man himself--the type that our eighty millions on the whole
melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more
polished and colder shores--my optimistic eye sees that American dealing
adequately with these political diseases. For stronger even than his
kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He's
going to stand up for the 'open shop' and sit down on the 'trust'; and I
assure you that I don't in the least resemble the Evening Post."

A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant's features.

"The New York Evening Post," I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry
of his face remained.

"Oh, fortunate youth!" I cried. "To have escaped the New York Evening
Post!"

"Is it so heinous?"

"Well!... well!... how exactly describe it?... make you see it?