ho have avoided the gray unpainted shame of these
unimportant people of the Ridge may here take up again for a moment
the trailing clouds of glory that shimmer over John Barclay's office
in the big City. For here there is the sounding brass and tinkling
cymbal of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little
gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light room at the
corner of a tower high over the City in the Corn Exchange Building,
the brain from which a million nerves radiate that run all over the
world and move thousands of men. Forty years before, when John was
playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Sycamore, no king
in all the world knew so much of the day's doings as John knows now,
sitting there at the polished mahogany table with the green blotting
paper upon it, under the green vase adorned with the red rose. A
blight may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay knows
every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat, and when the cloud
bursts into rain he sighs, for it means something to him, though
heaven only knows what, and we and heaven do not care. But a dry day
in India or a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are all
taken into account in the little man's plans. And if princes quarrel
and kings grow weary of peace, and money bags refuse them war, John
Barclay knows it and puts the episode into figures on the clean white
pad of paper before him.

It is a privilege to be in this office; one passes three doors to get
here, and even at the third door our statesmen often cool their toes.
Mr. Barclay is about to admit one now. And when Senator Myton comes
in, deferentially of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the
long fight in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the
senate of Lige Bemis as a federal judge, the little gray man waves the
senator to a chair, and runs his pencil up a column of figures,
presses a button, writes a word on a sheet of paper, and when the
messenger appears, hands the paper to him and says, "For Judge Bemis."

"I have just dismissed a Persian satrap," expands Barclay, "who won't
let his people use our binders; that country eventually will be a
great field for our Mediterranean branch."

Myton is properly impressed. For a man who can make a senator out of
Red River clay and a federal judge out of Lige Bemis is a superhuman
creature, and Myton does not doubt Barclay's power over satraps.

When the business of t