and full of dreams, broad over the eyes, and as
delicately modelled at the temples as a woman's where the curly brown
hair is brushed away from it. But the wonderful feature about the
portrait is the right hand. The artist obviously asked Barclay to
assume a natural attitude, and then seeing him lean forward with his
hand stretched out in some gesture of impatience, persuaded him to
take that pose. It is the sort of vital human thing that would please
Barclay--no sham about it; but he did not realize what the Russian
was putting into that hand--a long, hard, hairy, hollow, grasping,
relentless hand, full in the foreground and squarely in the light--a
horrible thing with artistic fingers, and a thin, greedy palm
indicated by the deep hump in the back. It reaches out from the
picture, with the light on the flesh tints, with the animal hair thick
upon it, and with the curved, slender, tapering fingers cramped like a
claw; and when one follows up the arm to the crouching body, the
furtive mouth, the bold, shrewd eyes, and then sees that forehead full
of visions, one sees in it more than John Barclay of Sycamore Ridge,
more than America, more than Europe. It is the menace of
civilization--the danger to the race from the domination of sheer
intellect without moral restraint.

General Ward, who was on the committee that received the picture
fifteen years after it was painted, stood looking at it the morning it
was hung there on the turn of the stairs. As the light fell
mercilessly upon it, the general, white-haired, white-necktied,
clean-shaven, and lean-faced, gazed at the portrait for a long time,
and then said to his son Neal who stood beside him, "And Samson wist
not that the Lord had departed from him."

It will pay one to stop a day in Sycamore Ridge to see that
picture--though he does not know John Barclay, and only understands
the era that made him, and gave him that refined, savage, cunning,
grasping hand.

Barclay stopped a week in Washington on his return from Europe the
year that picture was painted, made a draft for fifty thousand dollars
on the National Provisions Company to cover "legal expenses," and came
straight home to Sycamore Ridge. He was tired of cities, he told
Colonel Culpepper, who met Barclay at the post-office the morning he
returned, with his arms full of newspapers. "I want to hear the old
mill, Colonel," said Barclay, "to smell the grease down in the guts of
her, and to get my hair full of fl