staged nor
told.

But something of the living through is marked on the man. Here he stands
toward the close of the century that bore him--a tall, spare,
red-haired, flint-visaged, wire-knit man, prematurely middle-aging in
late youth. Under his high white forehead are restless blue eyes--deep,
clear, challenging, combative blue eyes, a big nose protrudes from under
the eyes that marks a willful, uncompromising creature and a big strong
mouth, not finely cut, but with thick, hard lips, often chapped, that
cover large irregular teeth. The face is determined and dogged--almost
brutal sometimes when at rest; but when a smile lights it, a charm and
grace from another being illumines the solemn countenance and Grant
Adams's heart is revealed. The face is Puritan--all Adams, dour New
England Adams, and the smile Irish--from the joyous life of Mary Sands.

We may only see the face: here and there on it is the mark of the
sculptor's tool: now and then a glare or a smile reveals what deep
creases and gashes the winds of the passing years have made in the soul
behind the mask. Here and there, as a rising strident voice in
passionate exhortation lifts, we may hear the roar of the narrowing
channel into which his life is rushed with augmented force as he hurries
forward into his destiny. In that tumult, family, home, ambition, his
very child itself that was his first deep wellspring of love, are
slipping from him into the torrent. The flood washes about him; his one
idea dominates him. He is restless under it--restless even with the
employment of the hour. The unions, for which he has been working for
more than half a decade, do not satisfy him. His aim is perfection and
mortality irritates him, but does not discourage him. For even vanity is
slipping from him in the erosion of the waters rushing down their
narrowing groove.

But it is only his grim flint face we see; only his high strident, but
often melodiously sympathetic voice we hear; only his wiry, lank body
with its stump of a right arm that stands before us. The minutes--awful
minutes some of them--the hours, painful wrestling hours, the days,
doubt-ridden days, and the long monotonous story of the years, we may
not know. For the living through of life still escapes us, and only
life's tableau of the moment is before us.

* * * * *

Now whatever gloss of gayety Dr. Nesbit might put upon his opinion of
Grant Adams and his work