to
them, although he manifested a growing respect for my ability to earn
money, and especially delighted in my faculty for living within my
means. He watched the slow growth of my income with approving eyes. To
him as to my father, earning money was a struggle, saving it a virtue,
and wasting it a crime.

In almost every other characteristic he was my father's direct
antithesis--my father, whose faith approximated that of a Sioux warrior.
"I take things as they come," was one of his sayings. He was not
concerned with the theories of Evolution, the Pragmatic Philosophy or
any other formal system of learning or ethics. With him the present was
filled with duties, the remote past or the distant future was of
indifferent concern. To deal justly and to leave the world a little
better than he found it, was his creed.

The one point of contact between these widely divergent pioneers was
their love of Zulime, for my father was almost as fond of her as Don
Carlos himself, and distinctly more expressive of his love--for Father
Taft held affection to be something not quite decorous when openly
declared. He never offered a caress or spoke an affectionate word so far
as I know.

There was something pathetic in his situation in these days. Full of
learning and eager to share it with youth he could find no one willing
to listen to him--not even his children. In the midst of a vast city he
was sadly solitary. None of his children appeared interested in his
allusions to Hammurabi or Charlemagne, on the contrary, monologues of
any kind were taboo in the artistic circles where Lorado reigned. We was
too busy, we were all too busy with our small plans and daily struggles,
to take any interest in Locke or Gibbon or Hume, therefore the ageing
philosopher sat forlornly among his faded, musty books, dreaming his
days away on some abstruse ethical problem, or carving with his patient
knife some quaintly ornate piece of furniture, while my own father (at
the opposite pole of life) weeded his garden, read the daily paper or
played cinch with the men at the village drugstore.

Nevertheless, with full knowledge of these fundamental divergencies in
the lives of our sires, I urged Zulime to invite Professor Taft to spend
a few weeks in West Salem. "He and father will disagree, but the one is
a philosopher accustomed to pioneer types and the other a man of reason
and I am willing to risk their coming together if you are."

Don Carlos seemed plea