children were born or thought of, and now I sit
here an old man looking at the moon."

"But is it the moon?" he went on after a long silence, puffing at his
pipe. "If the moon is off there, three or thirty or three hundred
million miles away in the sky, where has it been these forty years?
I've not seen it. And yet here she pops out of my memory into my eye,
and if I say the moon has always been in my eye, and is still in my
eye, Mr. Ralph Waldo Emerson says I'm drunk. But does that settle the
question of who's got the moon--me or the cosmos--as the poets call
it?" After that the two men smoked in silence, and as Hendricks threw
away the butt of his cigar, Dolan said, "'Tis a queer, queer world,
Robert--a queer, queer world."

Now do not smile at Mr. Dolan, gentle reader, for Adam must have
thought the same thing, and philosophy has been able to say nothing
more to the point.

It is indeed a queer, queer world, and our blindness is the queerest
thing in it. Here a few weeks, later sit John and Jane Barclay on the
terrace before their house one June night, listening to singing on the
water. Suddenly they realize that there is youth in the world--yet
there has been singing on the mill-pond ever since it was built. It
has been the habitat of lovers for a quarter of a century, this
mill-pond, yet Jane and John Barclay have not known it, and not until
their own child's voice came up to them, singing "Juanita," did they
realize that the song had not begun anew after its twenty years'
silence in their own hearts, but always had been on the summer breeze.
And this is strange, too, considering how rich and powerful John
Barclay is and how by the scratch of his pen, he might set men working
by the thousands for some righteous cause. Yet so it is; for with all
the consciousness of great power, with all the feeling of unrestraint
that such power gives a man, driving him to think he is a kind of god,
John Barclay was only a two-legged man, with a limp in one foot, and a
little mad place in his brain, wherein he kept the sense of his
relation to the rest of this universe. And as he sat, blind to the
moon, dreaming of a time when he would control Presidents and dominate
courts if they crossed his path, out on the mill-pond under an elm
tree that spread like a canopy upon the water, a boy, letting the oars
hang loosely, was playing the mandolin to a girl--a pretty girl
withal, blue as to eyes, fair as to hair, strong as to mouth and