to the moon--the ghost of a dead
town.

At Goodale I had sought a substantial town and found a visionary one. At
Benton I had sought a visionary town and found a substantial one.
Philosophy was plainly indicated as the proper thing. And, after all, a
steaming plate of lamp chops in a Chinese chuck-house of a substantial
though disappointing town, is more acceptable to even a dreamer than the
visionary beefsteak I ate out there in that latent restaurant of a
potential village.

This was a comfortable thought; and for a quarter of an hour, the far
weird cry of things that are no more, was of no avail. The rapid music
of knife and fork drowned out the asthmatic snoring of the ghostly
packets that buck the stream no more. How grub does win against
sentiment!

Swallowing the last of the chops, "Where will I find the ruins of the
old fort?" I asked of my bronze-faced neighbor across the wreck of
supper. He looked bored and stiffened a horny practical thumb in the
general direction of the ruins. "Over there," he said laconically.

I caught myself wondering if a modern Athenian would thus carelessly
direct you to the Acropolis. Is the comparison faulty? Surely a ruin is
sacred only for what men did there. We are indeed a headlong race. We
keep our ruins behind us. Perhaps that is why we get somewhere. And yet,
what beauty blooms flowerlike to the backward gaze! Music and
poetry--all the deepest, purest sentiments of the heart--are fed greatly
upon the memory of the things that were but can never be again.
Mnemosyne is the mother of all the Muses.

I got up and went out. By the light of a thin moon, I found the place
"over there." An odd, pathetic little ruin it is, to be sure. Nothing
imposing about it. It doesn't compel through admiration: it woos through
pity--the great, impersonal kind of pity.

"A single little turret that remains
On the plains"--

Browning tells about all there is to tell about it, though he never
heard of it; only they called it a "bastion" in the old days--the
little square adobe blockhouse that won't stand much longer. One
crumbling bastion and two gaunt fragments of adobe walls in a waste of
sand beside the river--that's Fort Benton.

A thin pale grudging strip of moon lit it up: just the moon by which to
see ruins--a moon for backward looking and regrets. A full round
love-moon wouldn't have served at all.

Out of pure moon-haze I restored the walls of the house where the
bourgeo