om
photographs and print and fancy.

Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive beginnings and led him,
for a while, through corridors of romanticism. Before his eyes,
imagination-kindled, had been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of
an evening star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had set.
The corridor of visionary promise had come to an end, and its door had
opened on Commonplace.

He told himself that he was done with romance. In his life it had been,
perhaps, necessary as a stage through which experience must lead him.
Henceforth his deity was to be Reason, a cold and austere goddess but a
constant one.

But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still lay as strong in
him as the spring life that sleeps under the winter sleet. The man in
whom it does not survive is one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.

One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of his journeying
from his log-cabin down to the Bluegrass and up to Capitol Hill. He had
become an apostle of Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of
unplastic thought.

Upon these things his reflections had been running as he made the
journey back to Kentucky, and of them he was thinking now, as, having
arrived, he stood with bared head in the billowing stretches of Cave
Hill Cemetery.

Victor McCalloway had been in Marlin County hardly at all during these
last two years and he was not there now. As usual, when the veteran was
absent, Boone had no idea to what quarter of the globe, or in response
to what mysterious call, his steps had turned. He thought, though, that
it would be his preceptor's wish to be represented as the body of
General Prince was lowered to its last rest.

He saw again in memory two figures before a cabin hearth, debating with
the heat of devotees, the calibre and qualities of today's and
yesterday's military leaders in general, of Hector Dinwiddie in
particular. He saw himself again sitting huddled in the chimney corner,
nursing the patched knees of an illiterate boy.

Now one was dead--he could not even be sure that both were not dead--and
Boone, no longer in homespun, had come from Washington to uncover his
head under the winter sky as the words of the last rites were spoken
over the body of General Prince.

Into that grave, it seemed to him, was going something unreplaceable.
This man was the embodiment of a passing tradition, almost of a dead
era, in the altering life of the nation it