side him was strewn a meager peddler's kit. On his knees was
a tablet of paper; in his left hand was a pencil tightly gripped. On the
tablet in a fine, even hand were the words: "I am here, Amos," and his
old eyes, stark and wide, were drooped, perhaps to look at the tri-color
of the Loyal Legion that shone on his shrunken chest and told of a great
dream of a nation come true, or perhaps in the dead, stark eyes was
another vision in another world.

And so as in the beginning, there was blue sky and sunshine and prairie
grass at the end.

CHAPTER LII

NOT EXACTLY A CHAPTER BUT RATHER A Q E D OR A HIC FABULA DOCET

"And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!" And this fable
teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do
not think that his folly lay chiefly in glutting his life with drab
material things, with wives and concubines, with worldly power and
glory. That was but a small part of his folly. For that concerned
himself. That turned upon his own little destiny. The vast folly of the
fool came with his blindness. He could not see the beautiful miracle of
progress that God has been working in this America of ours during these
splendid fifty years that have closed a great epoch.

And what a miracle it was! Here lay a continent--rich, crass, material,
beckoning humanity to fall down and worship the god of gross and
palpable realities. And, on the other hand, here stood the American
spirit--the eternal love of freedom, which had brought men across the
seas, had bid them fight kings and principalities and powers, had forced
them into the wilderness by the hundreds of thousands to make of it "the
homestead of the free"; the spirit that had called them by the millions
to wage a terrible civil war for a great ideal.

This spirit met the god of things as they are, and for a generation
grappled in a mighty struggle.

And men said: The old America is dead; America is money mad; America is
a charnel house of greed. Millions and millions of men from all over the
earth came to her shores. And the world said: They have brought only
their greed with them. And still the struggle went on. The continent was
taken; man abolished the wilderness. A new civilization rose. And
because it was strong, the world said it was not of the old America, but
of a new, soft, wicked order, which wist not that God had departed from
it.

Then the new epoch dawned; clear and strong came the call to Americans