like one. I sometimes stand
and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it.
Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet
trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss
his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in
things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and
in God.

I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like
the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him
and death but a few telegraph ticks--the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly
the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great
creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into
the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile
after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a
Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a
whistle, the way Calvin believed in God.

BOOK THREE

LETTING THE CROWD BE BEAUTIFUL

TO WILBUR WRIGHT AND WILLIAM MARCONI

_"Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh
Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh,
Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust
Hast thrust
Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights,
Where are the deeds that needs must be,
The dreams, the high delights,
That I once more may hear my voice
From cloudy door to door rejoice--
May stretch the boundaries of love
Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears
To the faint-remembered glory of those years--
May lift my soul
And reach this Heaven of thine
With mine?"

"Come up here, dear little Child
To fly in the clouds and winds with me,
and play with the measureless light!"_

PART ONE

WISTFUL MILLIONAIRES

CHAPTER I

MR. CARNEGIE SPEAKS UP

As I was wandering through space the other day--just aeroplaning past on
my way over from Mars--I came suddenly upon a neat, snug little
property, with a huge sign stuck in the middle of it:

THE EARTH: THIS DESIRABLE PROPERTY TO LET. Rockefeller,
Carnegie, Morgan & Co.

I was just about to pass it by, inferring naturally that it must be a
mere bank, or wholesale house, or something, when it occurred to me it
might do no harm to stop over on it, and see. I thought I might at least
drop in and inquire