ed in strange, unsolved grandeur,
like the cloud pictures that float and puzzle us and break and reform
and paint all Heaven in their beauty and then resolve themselves into
nothing. Many people think this is Kenyon Adams's most beautiful and
poetic message. Certainly in the expression of the gayety and the weird,
vague mysticism of youth and poignant joy he never reached that height
again. Death is ignored; it is all life and the aspirations of life and
the beckonings of life and the bantering of life and the deep, awful,
inexorable call of life to youth. Other messages of Kenyon Adams are
more profound, more comforting to the hearts and the minds of reasoning,
questioning men. But this Allegro in B is the song of youth, of early
youth, bidding childhood adieu and turning to life with shining
countenance and burning heart.

When he had finished playing he was in tears, and the girl sitting
before him was awestricken and rapt as she sat with upturned face with
the miracle of song thrilling her soul. Let us leave them there in that
first curious, unrealized signaling of soul to soul. And now let us go
on into this story, and remember these children, as children still, who
do not know that they have opened the great golden door into life!

CHAPTER XLI

HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS THIRD AND LAST DEVIL

In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism
washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the
Civil War, Amos Adams's ship of dreams was left high and dry in the salt
marsh. Finally a time came when the tide began to boom in. But in no
substantial way did his newspaper feel the impulse of the current. The
_Tribune_ was an old hulk; it could not ride the tide. And its
skipper, seedy, broken with the years, always too gentle for the world
about him, even at his best, ever ready to stop work to read a book,
Amos Adams, who had been a crank for a third of a century, remained a
crank when much that he preached in earlier years was accepted by the
multitude.

Amos Adams might have made the Harvey _Tribune_ a financial success
if he could have brought himself to follow John Kollander's advice. But
Amos could not abide the presence much less the counsel of the
professional patriot, with his insistent blue uniform and brass buttons.
Under an elaborate pretense of independence, John Kollander was a
limber-kneed time-server, always keen-eyed for the crumbs of Dives'