rom crying out aloud;
to keep his talent from demanding, like a starving thing, bread that he
had no means to give. Sometimes, however,--sometimes, when the stimulus
of an excellent dinner, and a restful morning, when the cheer of George
Washington's droll devotion had died, then the young man's step would
lag in the streets of Albany, and with his hands behind his back and his
bright head bowed, he would creep musing, half-seeing where he went.

Taking advantage of his lassitude, like peris whose wings had been
folded against Paradise, and whose forms had been leaning hard against
the gate, his ideals, his visions, would rush in upon him, and he would
nearly sink under the beating of their wings--under their voluptuous
appeal, under their imperious demand.

On these occasions Fairfax would go home oppressed, and content himself
with a glass of milk and light food at the restaurant, and dressed as he
was even to the hat on his head, he would sink by the table in his
little room and bury his face in his hands. Then he would count up his
money. Working from May until October, he had saved only fifty dollars.
After his calculations there was no magnitude in the sum to inspire him
to new plans or to tempt him to make a fresh venture for art. He often
thought, in looking back on those days, that it was nothing but his
pride and his obstinacy that kept him there. The memory of his winter's
creations, of his work in the studio, and his beasts with their powerful
bodies and their bronze beauty, came upon him always with such cruel
resentment and made him feel so impotent against the injustice of the
great, that if drink had tempted Fairfax he would have gone to the
nearest saloon and made a beast of himself.

The working hours were long and his employment physically exhausting,
but he embraced his duties and fell in love with the great steel and
iron creature which it was his work to feed and clean and oil. And when
he left his engine silent in the shed, the roar and the motion absent,
tranquil, breathless, and yet superb, Antony left his machine with
regret, the regret of a lover for his mistress. He was fireman to a
wild-cat engineer.

CHAPTER V

Fairfax, used to the Southern climate, found no fault with the heat of
summer, bone-racking and blood-boiling though it was; but, remembering
his past experience of winds and snow in January, he wondered how winter
would seem in the yards, endured in the cab of the engin