"Lor'! Mis' Nancy," said Ommirandy, "don't you worry yo'se'f 'bout Mr. Sinjinn. He weak an' sickly, but he done practise law an' he done been thoo de war. Any man what practise law kin take keer o' hisse'f, let alone fightin' endurin' o' de whole war. An' Mr. Sinjinn, he ain' gwi' ter furgit we-all, nuther. He got some good reason howcome he ain' writ back. Put yo' faith in de Lord, chile. Dar ain' no sparrer draps on de groun', 'scusin' He know sump'n 'bout it. How much money did young Mars' Jeems give him?”

He

Dat Dat

The amount of the loan was stated. "Well, you listen ter me, now. done been gone 'bout a mont'. money gwi' lars' him jes' 'bout one mont'. Ef you-all don't hear nothin' f'om him inside uv a week's time, you gwi' see him an' de ole black portmanty on de wharf at de tail en' o' de week. You sen' Jonas wid Baytop dar ter meet de boat dat day."

On the day named by the old woman Mr. Sinjinn walked down the gangway of the boat and handed the black portmanteau to Jonas, who stood on the wharf with young Mars' Jeems to greet him. No letter or message had come from him, but the owner of Kingsmill had been told that Ommirandy looked for Mr. Sinjinn's return on that date, and with the wish in his heart that her prognostication might prove true, and the fear in his heart that his old friend might perchance never come back, he had directed Jonas to hitch up Baytop.

When the ancient horse and his ancient driver started down the roadway young Mars' Jeems had called:

"Wait, Jonas! I think I'll go with you."

As he climbed into the rickety vehicle young Mars' Jeems said, aloud, "He might come, after all."

"Yas, sir; he gwi' sho'ly come," responded old Jonas. "M'randy, she say in de kitchen, yistiddy, he gwi' come terday, sir."

If Ommirandy had prophesied the advent of the last day, Jonas and the kitchen company would have at once begun to get ready their ascensionrobes and have advised the other darkies at Old Town, including the Rev'un', to go and do likewise.

There was a smile on young Mars' Jeems's face as he clasped Mr. Sinjinn's hand. "You can walk back, Jonas," he said. "I'll drive him."

The returned traveler smiled in response to his friend's cordial greeting, but it was a weary and half-hearted smile that indicated a state of mind which was not one of happiness.

Young Mars' Jeems surely expected Mr. Sinjinn to say that he was glad to get back to Kingsmill and to his friends there, but the words remained unspoken.

"Something very bad has happened to him, Nancy," he said to his wife that night, after the wanderer had taken his candle from the table in the hall and gone slowly up-stairs to his bedchamber. "He didn't utter one syllable about where he had been or what he had been doing. It is very extraordinary. He didn't even intimate that he was glad to get home. I don't think he spoke ten words from the wharf to the house. He seems to me a heartbroken man.”

"I wish I might comfort you about him, Jeems," she replied, "but Alston has certainly changed. He looks twenty years older than when he left, and he seemed to me very old then. I think with you that he has had some most unhappy experience.'

"I 'spec' he done been ter see his sweetheart," said Ommirandy, standing by. "Mebbe he done found de young 'oman's dead; ur mebbe she still livin', an' done kicked him!"

"Shut up, Mirandy!" said young Mars' Jeems. "You're an infernal old idiot!"'

From the hour of Mr. Sinjinn's return no one at Kingsmill failed to observe and to comment on his changed appearance and demeanor. The lines that had long been channeled in his Roman face grew deeper and more rugged, and the man's thin figure had taken on a perceptible stoop.

"He sets out dar on de po'ch," said Ommirandy to Delphy, "lookin' lak he kinder dazed. He useter always be so peart an' cheerful, an' now he don't take no notice o' nothin'. He jes' sets dar all day an' look down de ribber, same ez he was expectin' uv a ship dat don't nuver come. He done got slow in his

"I been notice he ain' take no intrus' in nothin' sence he come back," commented Simon. "He look lak he don't want me ter wait on him no mo'."

"Dat de way he do me," said Ommirandy. "He keep on thankin' me an' thankin' me. An' de mantelpiece money! 'Fo' Gord, ef I didn' see him come in his chamber-room dis mornin', whilst I was makin' up his bed, an' walk over ter de chimbly-place whar young Mars' Jeems puts de five dollars-an' he stan' dar lookin' at it! Den he groan an' say: 'My Gord! My Gord!' When he look 'roun' an' notice me he say, 'Mirandy, I was sayin' my pra'rs.' An' I say, 'Mars' Sinjinn, I hates ter think it, but it soun' ter me lak ye warn't lookin' fur de Lord ter he'p ye out on dat pra'r.' Den he say, 'Mirandy, I'm awful affeard He nuver will.' Den he hobble out de room same ez a crazy man, wid de five dollars in his han'. He meet young Mars' Jeems in de front hall, an' he say: 'Here, Jeems, take dis here money, an' don't ye nuver do it ag'in. I thank ye, dear old Jeems,' Mars' Sinjinn say, 'but it's pars' my stren'th ter b'ar it now.

"What Mars' Jeems say?" queried Simon.

"Say?" she responded. "What you reck'n he say? He say, 'Alston, don't be a damn fool! What else he gwi' say?" After some weeks, vestiges of Mr. Sinjinn's former serenity and contentment seemed to return. But the most casual observer might not fail to detect beneath his attempted cheerfulness the unreality and the futility of it all.

"He can't fool Mirandy," said the old woman. ""Tain' gwineter be long 'fo' dey puts him over yonder at Christ Church 'mongst de Kingsmill high-ups in de marvel tombs."

The autumn came and kindled the trees along the river-bank into lucent fires. For two or three days Mr. Sinjinn had failed to come down-stairs to his meals.

"Tell Jeems and Mis' Nancy that I'm feeling a little tired to-day, Mirandy," he said, wearily, to the old woman, when she came up to straighten his room and found him sitting dressed by his table,

near his chair, and a bundle of letters and papers on his knee.

They both went up to see him and to learn if he was comfortable.

"He done gone ter sleep same ez he was a little baby," the old woman said to the master of Kingsmill on the fourth day of Mr. Sinjinn's continued stay in his room.

Some days later young Mars' Jeems and Mis' Nancy together, with sorrowing hearts and tender hands, went through the bundle of papers which had lain on Mr. Sinjinn's table since his visit ended. They found the old cartes-devisite with them; and they found also three or four recorded deeds and his will.

Folded in the will was a letter addressed "To my dear James and my dear Nancy." One of the deeds, dated in 1866, conveyed to Arthur Seymour twenty-three town lots of a land-improvement company purporting to lie and be situate in the vicinity of what had since come to be a city in the West. Another deed conveyed four other lots of another company, also purporting to be located near the same city. A third deed conveyed all of these lots from Arthur Seymour to Alston St. John. Folded in the last-named deed were the tax-tickets representing the taxes which Mr. Sinjinn had paid from year to year with the monthly stipend from the mantelpiece; and there were some letters of a comparatively recent date from a firm of real-estate agents.

After they had looked through the papers they read Mr. Sinjinn's will. It devised in fee-simple his town lots in the West to his "dear and faithful friends," his hosts of Kingsmill; and they noticed that the holograph writing bore date of the first month of his visit, nine years before. The letter, scrawled in a trembling handwriting on a half-sheet of paper, had been written on the day of his recent return.

"I went out to see about the lots. They are barren sand-banks on the Kaw River, ten miles from anywhere."

The writing was signed after his constant fashion since his partner's death, "St. John, surviving.”

IVEN that the attitude of the modern community toward genius is one of suspicion modified by fear, I am inclined to wonder what a latter

day Tarquinius would do in the garden of contemporary thought. The old Superb struck off the heads of all flowers grown higher than their fellows; he was ancestor to those who persecuted Galileo, Copernicus, Hargreaves, Papin, Manet-all the people who differed from their brethren and thus engendered the greatest malevolence of which man is capable: family hatred. I think Tarquinius has but himself to blame if there are to-day so few heads to strike off. He struck off so many that in a spirit of self-protection genius bred more sparingly. All allowances made for the hope from which the thought springs, I feel that we live on a soil watered by many tears, poor ground for genius to flourish in, where now and then it may wither into success, where glory is transmuted into popularity, where beauty is spellbound into smartness. My general impression is that genius is missing, and unlikely of appearance; weakly I turn to the past and say, "Those were the days," until I remember that in all times people spoke of the past and said, "Those were the days." For the past is never vile, never ugly; it has the immense merit of being past. But, even so, I feel that in certain periods, in certain places, genius could flourish better than it does in the midst of our elevated railways and wireless telesynographs.

Our period is perhaps poor in genius because it is so rich in talent. There is so much talent that one can buy any amount of it for forty dollars a week, and a great deal more for two lines in an evening paper. Talent is the foe of genius; it is the offshoot from the big

tree, which cannot itself become a tree, and yet weakens the parent stock. Indeed, it may be that the sunset of genius and the sunrise of democracy happened all within one day. In former times so few men had access to learning that they formed a caste without jealousy, anxious to recruit from among ambitious youth. The opportunities of the common man were small; the opportunities of the uncommon man were immense. Perhaps because of this, three of the richest epochs in mankind came about; the self-made merchant, writing to his son, was not wrong to say that there is plenty of room at the top, and no elevator; but he should have added that there was a mob on the stairs and on the top a press agency.

My general impression of the Medicis is a highly select society, centering round a Platonic academy which radiated the only available culture of the day, the Latin and the Greek. War, intrigue, clerical ambition, passion and murder-all these made of a century a colored background against which stand out any flowers that knew how to bloom. The small, parochial society of the Medicis wanted flowers; to-day we want bouquets. It was the same in the period that includes Elizabeth, the period that saw Sydney, Beaumont, Sir Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, Spenser; here again a nucleus of time haloed with the golden dust of thought, as a fat comet draws its golden trail. The Elizabethan period was the heroic time of English history, the time of romance, because it sought the unknown land and the unknown truth, because if some easily went from gutter to gallows others as easily found their way from gutter to palace. This is true also of the period of Louis XIV., an inferior person, of barbarous vanity, of negligent uxoriousness, untiring stratagem, but a great man all the same because greedy of all life can give, whether beautiful women,

broad kingdoms or sharp intellects. To please him, Molière, Boileau, Racine, and many lords of less importance, danced their little dance under the umbrella of his patronage. They are still dancing, and Louis XIV., that typical bigwig, stands acquitted.

When one thinks of these periods, one is perhaps too easily influenced, for one compares them with one's own-its haste, its scurry for money, its noisy hustle. One fails to see the flaws in other times; one forgets the spurns that merit of the unworthy took, the crumb that the poor man of thought picked up from the carpet of the man of place. But still, but still . . . like an obstinate old lady, that is all one can say; one feels that those were better days for genius, because then respectability was unborn.

It may be that already my readers and I are at war, for here am I, glibly talking of genius without precisely knowing what it is, as one may talk of art, or love, without being able to define these things, and being able only to point them out when one sees them. Carlyle was much laughed at for saying that genius was an infinite capacity for taking pains. That does not sound like genius; one imagines genius as raveling its hair, whatever raveling may be, and producing the immortal Word to the accompaniment of epileptic fits; absinthe also goes with genius very well. But in reality, genius, I suspect, is a tamer affair, and arises easily enough in men like Rembrandt, who painted pictures because he liked doing it and because the sitters paid him for their portraits; much more satisfactorily to Carlyle it arises in men like Flaubert, who revealed much of his attitude in one phrase of his correspondence, "To-day I have worked sixteen hours and have at last finished my page.' Therein lies the difference between Flaubert and De Maupassant; it may be, too, that Boileau was right in advising the poet a hundred times to replace his work upon the bench, endlessly polish it, and polish it again, but many instances of almost spontaneous creation confront us; it is enough to quote that in six years, between 1602 and 1608, Shakespeare appears to have written eleven

وو

plays, among them, "Julius Cæsar," "Hamlet," "Othello,"" Macbeth," and "King Lear." What shall we say, then, of that vague thing, genius, which is to mankind what the thing we call soul is to man? For my part, I believe it to be volcanic rather than sedimentary. It is as if the spirit of the race accumulated in a creature, the spirit of life claiming to be born. Genius will out, but it is most frequent in certain periods of human history, such as the Elizabethan or Medicean, in certain places, such as France, Italy, and the Low Countries, under certain influences, such as oppression, war, revolution, or social decay. That is an interesting catalogue, and, if history repeats itself, the future for genius, as evidenced particularly in art, would be black, for there have been few periods where comfort, ease, and security bred genius. It is as if the plant needed something to push against. Every day life becomes more secure, justice more certain, property more assured; humanity grows fat, and the grease of its comfort collects round its heart. It is difficult to imagine genius flourishing in a world perfectly administered by city councils.

It was not in worlds such as ours that the geniuses of the past sped their flights, but in anxious, tortured, corrupt, starving worlds, worlds of heaping ambition and often tottering fortune. Napoleon, perhaps the greatest claimant of them all, lived in one of those periods of reconstruction, when the earth bears new life, restores what the earth has just destroyed, a period very like this war (a hopeful sign, though I make no prophecies); but if Napoleon is remembered, it is not only as a conqueror, for other men have won battles, and the dust of their fame is mingled with the dust of their bones. His genius does not lie in his military skill, in his capacity to pin a wing while piercing a center, nor in his original idea that guns should be taken from battalions and massed into artillery brigades. The genius of Napoleon lies in the generality of his mind, in his conception of war as the victory of the transport officer, in his conception of peace as the triumph of law, which is the French Civil Code. It lies in the breadth of mind which understood what

the State could derive from the tobacco monopoly, and in the middle of flaming Moscow, in a conquered country, surrounded by starving troops and massing enemies, could calmly peruse the law establishing the French state-endowed theaters and sign it upon a drum-head. That is typical, for genius is both general and particular. It is the quality to which nothing that is human can be alien, whether of mankind or of man. Lincoln was a man such as that; his passionate advocacy of the negro, his triumph at Cooper Union, his Gettysburg dedication, his administrative capacity-all that is little by the side of his one sentiment for the conquered South: "I will treat them as if they had never been away."

The detail, which is the prison-house of the little man, is the exercising ground of the great one. Such men as Galileo showed what brand it was they would set upon history's face; the soul of Galileo is not in the telescope, or in the isochronism of the pendulum oscillation, or even in the discovery (which was rather an intuition) of the movement of the earth. All of Galileo is in one phrase: when poor, imprisoned, tortured and mocked, heretic and recusant, he was able to murmur to those who bade him recant, "Still she moves.' It is in all of them, this general and this particular -in Leonardo, together painter, mathematician, architect and excellent engineer, but above all father of "La Gioconda." It is in Beethoven, not so much in the "Pathétique" or in the "Pastorale," as in the man who, through his deafness, could still hear the songs of eternity. Special and general were they all; one comes to think that genius is together an infinite capacity for seeing all things, and an infinite capacity for ignoring all things but one.

Life goes marching on. Who shall claim the laurel wreath that time cannot wither? So many, still living or recently dead, have postured so well that it is hard to say what will be left when they have been discounted at the Bank of Posterity. Politicians, writers, men of science, highly prized by their fellows what living court is cool enough to judge them? Who shall say whether Rodin

will remain upon a pedestal, or whether he will fall to a rank as low as that of Lord Leighton? Likewise Doctor Ehrlich saw the furrow he plowed crossed by other furrows; it may be that the turbulent, inquisitive mind of Mr. Edison may have developed only fascinating applications, and not have, as we think, set new frontiers to the fields of scientific thought. Those are men difficult to fix, as are also men such as Lord Kitchener and Henry James, because they are too close to us as persons to be seen entirely, and yet too far for us to imagine the diagrams of their personalities. We are closer to some others, to people such as Mr. Thomas Hardy, even though he stopped in full flight and gathered himself together only to produce the Dynasts in a medium which is not quite the one he was born to. We are fairly close, too, to M. Anatole France, to his gaiety, his malignancy, his penetration without pity. M. Anatole France is one of the great doubtfuls of our period, like the Kaiser and Mr. Roosevelt. Like both, he has something of the colossal, and like both he suggests that there were, or may be, taller giants. For as one reads M. Anatole France, as he leads one by the hand through Ausonian glades, the shadow of Voltaire haunts one, wearing a smile secure and vinegary. Likewise, when we consider the Kaiser, where depth has been transmuted into area, where responsibility to his own pride borders upon mania, appraisal is difficult. The Kaiser, judging him from his speeches and his deeds, appears to have carried the commonplace to a pitch where it attains distinction. He has become as general as an encyclopedia; he is able to embrace in a single brain theocracy and local government, official art and zoology; he has carried respect for the family to the limit of patriarchal barbarity-one loses all sense of proportion and ceases to know whether he is colossal or monstrous. In many ways one discovers brotherhood in people like Cecil Rhodes, the Kaiser, and Mr. Roosevelt. All three are warriors in a modern ring, and all three suggest displacement from their proper period, for I imagine the Kaiser better as a Frederick Barbarossa, Cecil Rhodes as an all-powerful Warren Hastings, and