tely.

"That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of
being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient,
stupefying. Why, I can't even convince Jim Galway that I know more about
dry farming than he!"

Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his
host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was
the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch.
In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then,
the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his
wordy feints and thrusts.

"Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher
proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's
mail. "Florence was a devil--Florence was divine. They raised geniuses
and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst
devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a
Florence pension is all this"--with a wave of his hand to the garden and
the stars--"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which
brought us here after--after we had found that we had not as much money
as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student,
mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts
of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the
fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the
spirit of America--the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of
dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American.
Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert spaces for
her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a
settlement."

The spectator-philosopher attitude of audience to the world's stage
passed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling
on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack
listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals
between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning
leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll.
Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil.
Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them
briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they
brought to his brow.

"The honey of our pros