a
steady stream into boundless bins, and money flowing in golden ripples
over it all. Sometimes Bob Hendricks' head rises above the tide long
enough to gasp or cry for help and beg to come home, but John's golden
flood sweeps over him again, and he's gone. And here's your world,
Martin, wherein every one is kind and careless, and generous and good,
and full of smiles and gayety. And there's Lige Bemis' world, full of
cunning and hypocrisy, and meanness and treachery and plotting--a
hell of a world it is, with its foundations on hate and deceit--but
it's his world, and he has the same right to it that I have to mine.
And there's old Watts' world--" The general sighted along the poker
over his toe to the stove side whereon a cornucopia wriggled out of
nothing and poured its richness of fruit and grain into nothing.
"There's Watts' world, full of stuffed Personifications, Virtue,
Pleasure, Happiness, Sin, Sorrow, and God knows what of demigods, with
the hay of his philosophy sticking out of their eyeholes. You know
about his maxims, Mart; he actually lives by 'em, and no matter how
common sense yells at him to get off the track, old Watts just goes on
following his maxims, and gets butted into the middle of next week."

The colonel was making a hole in the stick in his hands, and his
attention was fixed on the whittling, but he added, "And your own
world, General--how about your own world?"

"My world," replied the general, as he pulled at the bows of his
rather soiled white tie, and evened them, "My world--" the general
jabbed the poker spear-like into the floor, "I guess I'm a kind of a
transcendentalist!"

The colonel blew the chips through the hole in his stick; he bored it
round in the pause that followed before he spoke.

"A transcendentalist, eh? Well, pintedly, General, that is what I may
call a soft impeachment, as the poet says--a mighty soft impeachment.
I've heard you called a lot worse names than that--and I may say,"
here the crow's-feet began scratching for a smile around the colonel's
eyes, "proved, sir, with you as the prosecuting witness."

The two men chuckled. Then the general, balancing himself, with the
poker point on the floor, as he tilted back went on: "My world, Mart
Culpepper, is a world in which the ideal is real--a world in a state
of flux with thoughts of to-day the matter of to-morrow; my world is a
world of faith that God will crystallize to-day's aspirations into
to-morrow's justice;