f
life! It came from the beyond and it went over the rim of the wonderful
horizon, singing and laughing like a child. How often you dreamed of
following it to its end, where you were certain a glory, felt only in
your dreams, filled the land. The fishes only could do that, for they
had no feet to be tired by walking. Your first mystery was that wheel
which the water turned: a monstrous thing, a giant, ugly and deadly,
whose first movement sent you off in terror. How could it be that the
gentle, smiling, yielding water, which took any shape from a baby hand,
had power to speed that giant! The time came when you bathed in the
stream, mastered it, in spite of the terror which it gave you one day
when it swallowed the life of a comrade. Do you remember this?"

Monsignor held up his hand with two fingers stretched out beyond the
others, and gave a gentle war-whoop. Horace laughed.

"I suppose every boy in the country invited his chums to a swim that
way," he said.

"Just so. The sign language was universal. The old school on the village
green succeeded the river and the mill in your history. Miss Primby
taught it, dear old soul, gentler than a mother even, and you laughed at
her curls, and her funny ways, which hid from child's eyes a noble
heart. It was she who bound up your black eye after the battle with
Bouncer, the bully, whose face and reputation you wrecked in the same
hour for his oppression of the most helpless boy in school. That feat
made you the leader of the secret society which met at awful hours in
the deserted shanty just below the sawmill. What a creep went up and
down your spine as in the chill of the evening the boys came stealing
out of the undergrowth one by one, and greeted their chief with the
password, known by every parent in town. The stars looked down upon you
as they must have looked upon all the great conspirators of time since
the world began. You felt that the life of the government hung by a
thread, when such desperate characters took the risk of conspiring
against it. What a day was July the Fourth--what wretches were the
British--what a hero was General Washington! What land was like this
country of the West? Its form on the globe was a promontory while all
others lay very low on the plane."

"In that spirit you went to Harvard and ran full against some great
questions of life. The war was on, and your father was at the front.
Only your age, your father's orders, and your mother's need h