to know that I didn't go West after all."

Fifteen minutes later, Edward Bok left his editorial office for the last
time.

But as he went home his thoughts were not of his last day at the office,
nor of his last acts as editor, but of his last caller--the soldier-boy
whom he had left seemingly so surely on his way "West," and whose eyes
had burned into his memory on that fearful night a year before!

Strange that this boy should have been his last visitor!

As John Drinkwater, in his play, makes Abraham Lincoln say to General
Grant:

"It's a queer world!"

XXXVII. The Third Period

The announcement of Edward Bok's retirement came as a great surprise to
his friends. Save for one here and there, who had a clearer vision, the
feeling was general that he had made a mistake. He was fifty-six, in the
prime of life, never in better health, with "success lying easily upon
him"--said one; "at the very summit of his career," said another--and
all agreed it was "queer," "strange,"--unless, they argued, he was
really ill. Even the most acute students of human affairs among his
friends wondered. It seemed incomprehensible that any man should want to
give up before he was, for some reason, compelled to do so. A man should
go on until he "dropped in the harness," they argued.

Bok agreed that any man had a perfect right to work until he did "drop
in the harness." But, he argued, if he conceded this right to others,
why should they not concede to him the privilege of dropping with the
blinders off?

"But," continued the argument, "a man degenerates when he retires from
active affairs." And then, instances were pointed out as notable
examples. "A year of retirement and he was through," was the picture
given of one retired man. "In two years, he was glad to come back," and
so the examples ran on. "No big man ever retired from active business
and did great work afterwards," Bok was told.

"No?" he answered. "Not even Cyrus W. Field or Herbert Hoover?"

And all this time Edward Bok's failure to be entirely Americanized was
brought home to his consciousness. After fifty years, he was still not
an American! He had deliberately planned, and then had carried out his
plan, to retire while he still had the mental and physical capacity to
enjoy the fruits of his years of labor! For foreign to the American way
of thinking it certainly was: the protestations and arguments of his
friends proved that to him. After all, he was st