“ Why did you not let me fool myself—fool you? Why—and—oh, if you had only not seen it—not let me know you saw it! Love? Don't you know now that the kind I said I'd have is as I said it was? Worth life—worth death—worth all—worth all—then God help me, Jack, if I sin—God forgive me, but I'd rather hold it to my heart a helpless cripple that I am—hold it never to satisfy it—never to know what it means, helpless, bed-ridden cripple that I am than to be the well, strong thing I was without it. ”

“ It is selfishness in me at last, Eloise, selfishness that I may hold through life and forever this love of you in my heart, now that it has only memory and not your own sweet self to live on. And no greater love and more constant can there be than that which lives on memory. For the living-love, being flesh, must change with the years. But memory-love, being eternal, can never change.
I am at Iloilo; and the gap is great since that long ago June, that June of Tennessee blue grass and roses, and the old home and you, sweetheart. ”

“ There is but one balm for a heartache, and that is work.
Nothing in all my life had left me so stranded; had killed so utterly the sweetness of all my dreams as this giving up of Eloise. And with no dream there is no life.
I felt that she was lost to me now: if she were not engaged to Colonel Goff, there was nothing in me now, I thought bitterly, that could awaken in her the real love she had never felt for anyone. Yet with all her spirit, her apparent indifference, and even recklessness, I knew she had a throne in her heart of hearts for love on a higher plane than those who love easily. ”

“ And are not the still, calm depths in the eyes of the wife more satisfying to the soul than the merry frothy shoals that gleam so riotously in the eyes of the sweetheart?
No man has truly loved a woman until she has borne him children; not for the child alone, uplifting as is the first sight of this tiny sweet seed of the blossoming of their doubly growing souls, but as an evidence that there is nothing worth while in the world except love, since not only does it create every great, beautiful, sweet dream that has been given to the world, but even the dreamer himself! ”

“ She was looking again into my eyes, and I sat holding her hand.
"But Colonel Goff," she went on, "gentleman that he is, thinks he must settle the account for his blundering ride, and begs me to marry him anyway; I, a cripple for life. He forgets that God balanced it when he stopped me from the sin of selling my heart for—for—his bauble—
"I have sent him away satisfied, Jack. I believe he would love me truly," and she smiled, "now that he sees that I cannot ride. Love me for myself and not for my riding; but I shall love only you, Jack, till I die—the old crippled woman." ”

“ That cabin is now a shrine!
Here stood the giant hickories in a group, the rugged, stately trees. Why did he plant them here? Or had the old hero, with that love of his for the unbending tree for which he was named, let them stand unscathed, as Nature had placed them? They stood in a great group, cathedral-like, one taller and more stately than his fellows, like a spire.
Of all the trees the hickory is the conqueror. Its purpose in life is to withstand. It is a fighting tree, rough of dress, careless of manner, rude in its unpolished bark. To be frightened by the hails of heaven is not for it. ”

“ When you can think of me without tears, without sorrow or pity, but as one who has lived and is gone—only as the memory of a sweet dream that might have been—then, dear, dear Jack, remember the last request I made of you, remember to make Elsie happy; and in time—in time, Jack, oh, what a love-maker he is! be happy yourself. Hold me a moment, just a moment to your heart—then—kiss me again and say with me the little prayer Aunt Lucretia used to make us say, holding hands in the long ago. ”

“ Jack, as you love me and your God, never marry a woman that can't span her ankle with her thumb and forefinger—that kind of a fetlock is a scrub of the most pronounced type! It came from ancestors before them for a thousand years, who had all their weight on their ankles—just hauling plows like beasts of burden. And Eloise has great style with a fine sweep and action. Look how boldly she steps and clean and true! No loblolling, lazy ambling there—hitting even on the ground—and her hair, Jack—red-chestnut—it is beautiful and not too much. Shun the brood-mare with mane thick and heavy. ”

“ I would introduce Eloise to herself—Eloise loveless to Eloise in love.
I laughed now in the happiness of my little conceit. Very distinctly I could hear my Aunt Lucretia say: "Sure, Jack, that is the way Andrew Jackson did—took her from the toad who had deceived her, right out of his arms, and then killed every other toad who croaked about it. Sure!" ...
There was much for me to do, both of love and duty. My duty was work, and that came first. For I had faith both in God and myself, and if I did my duty and my work, God would give the rest to me.
Work—the glory and sweetness of it! ”

“ She is a trained nurse, but she rode with old Hawthorne, rode Satan, too, to the relief of the Twenty-third Regulars.
Who could have done what she did but you and Satan, clear a ten-foot fissure of a yawning volcanic abyss, outfooting the Filipino ponies when they thought they had cut her off? And her shooting! Again I saw the brown stubble of Tennessee wheatfields, the blue hills circling the sky line, the flush and whir and the crack of the sweet little twenty gauge! If you are not dead or in the hospital it was you—the only one in all the world—there can be no other! ”

“ Yet his persistency was notable, even up to now, when her engagement to Colonel Goff had been announced.
Braxton Bragg, I decided, meant to deceive Elsie, to play with her, this little creature of fun and love, this pure little flower that was as much of The Home Stretch as the flowers on the hills, the locust blossoms that perfumed all the air in spring.
He had beaten me out of my birthright by deceit and make-believe. I could stand that. I could make my own Home Stretch, as every man must make his, whether he will it or not, if he and his home shall ever become two halves that make one. ”

“ And now home again and The Home Stretch mine!
June, and writing this to you as I sit in the old sweet place under the old sweet trees, under the hickories we loved so, and afar off is the flush of old gold above the violet of the western hills.
And the same June sounds come over to me: the call of an ewe to an errant lamb; the neigh of a mare and the answering whinny of her colt; the distant staccato clatter of binders amid the wheat.
And a wood-thrush deep in our laurel thicket rinsing clear the air around with her liquid notes.... ”

“ Heaven, according to her, was a blue-grass meadow filled with pedigreed people, and hell—I remember how I had laughed when she said, "Why, Jack, if there is such a place, it's a low jockey-yard filled with scrubs!"
Pedigrees, I am certain, was her gauge of life. She was more man than woman, handsome though she was. She should have been a bewigged, knee-breeched, ruffle-shirted, horse-racing Virginia gentleman of the old school, as many of her ancestors had been. She still clung to a few blooded horses, though her immaculate dairy of Jersey cows was her greatest pride. ”

“ The bermuda runs hither and yon, sending its stolons after the fat things of earth; and the redtop grows only where it can reach the richest granaries. The stone-crop alone clings to this bare brown rock, shielding its poverty.
Seeing this, I gloried in the chance that faced me, the chance to be another type of pioneer, and to undo the wrongs and ravages of my forbears. For this I had sacrificed the love of my grandsire, the General, who had wanted me to be a soldier, and of my Aunt Lucretia, and even of Eloise, it seemed, that one sweet dream of my life. ”

“ I cried, as I saw him rise for the leap.
"STOP HER—HE'LL KILL HER," I CRIED. I expected to see him strike the fence midway, and come back on her in a heap. Instead I saw Eloise lift him, with a quick firm hand, straight up towards the sky and I saw the horse land on the other side clean, and clear, without losing a stride. Then they vanished in a whirl of dust up the pike.
"I'll ride after her," I cried to Aunt Lucretia. "He'll kill her yet."
"Don't worry," she smiled, "she's more apt to kill him. But that jump, Jack, that jump—did you see it?" ”

“ I am the son of the Æons which were. I have always been, and I shall always be. To make me it has taken fire, star-dust, and the Spirit of God—the lives of billions of people, and the lights of a million suns.
I have grown from sun and star-dust to the Thing-Which-Thinks.
It were the basest ingratitude if I were not both thankful to God and proud of my pedigree.
What has come to me has been good; what shall come will be better: for I am Evolution, and I grow ever to greater things. Life has been good; death will be better ”

“ For the real architect of our lives is God. The very shadow of our doubt becomes pictures done in beauty.
It takes shadows to make pictures. In the foreground of every shadow already stands the picture from His hand. And as for the sorrows sent of Him, they are not sorrows; rather are they crowns of Great Joy for brows chosen of Martyrdom.... So I let her dream and love and plan, knowing that whatever was coming to me would be good, that behind the Wish of our own little dreams lay the larger Will of the Great Dreamer.... ”

“ For I knew that Eloise's idea of love was a love of life and death: she who would ride a mad horse over a five-foot fence for the conquering instinct of a mastering nature, what would she not do for love—her love—and she a woman? For let it be writ both of history and life, 'tis woman at last who loves. Man knows not love. ”

“ When the train stopped for water at the little station I got out and gathered a great bunch of flowers for Eloise....
Then as we dropped down into the Middle Basin, filled with the blue grass in its spring glory, whole acres of hepaticas twinkled up at us like fallen fireflies.
At last I was home again, and home with a new mission, new ideas. For four years I had studied trees and flowers in a German university. I had prepared myself to be a forester. Now I was looking out of the car window at the wantonness that had turned hillsides into gullies and rich loam into beds of clay. ”

“ It was hard to give up my home, the old home, every tree I knew, and with them Eloise and my life-dream....
One's dream and one's home—what else is there which grips so the very tendrils of one's soul. To give up one cuts deeply into the roots of the heart, but when the blow is doubled, there is only one thing that can make one stand upright and not fall, and that is the Spirit Within. People have different ideas of God as their souls reveal. ”

“ If there's too many links in a filly's back, when the pinch of contest comes, you know, Jack, as well as I do, there will be a crumpling—and it is generally in their legs. And Eloise's, Jack—well, you should see it—thoroughbred—taut as a bow string—holding hip and head together. And not too short, either, Jack; the little dicky, short-backed ones, with schooner hips, are a sure sign of several vertebræ being lost by sitting on them for too many generations at the loom or the wheel, or carrying home the week's washing on their heads! It's the scrub sign, my boy. ”

“ Above it the grass and cedars grew down to the bare rocks, and then they stopped short, for no soil was there. Years before, pioneer men, fighting, unthinking, world-conquering, with the primal instinct of the Aryan wander-lust in their blood, had stripped that spot of earth of its clothing, leaving the naked ground beneath, lifeless and bare. In all the beautiful blue grass pasture this was the one scar: on this green shield of Nature, the one rent. The birds, which love the deep shade of the cedars, stopped at its borders and flew back from the strip of brown desert. ”

“ I walked alone in the moonlight over the grounds of the Hermitage.
How bulwarked, restful and yet martial-walled was the old brick mansion! And down the long avenues of cedars which ran from the gate to the home, I met the fighting ghosts of my ancestors.
Was it a dream or not? But what is the difference, since they are the same. What is the difference?
If a child comes into your home, smiling, from out the sunshine, is it any more your child than the one which enters from out the still, dead night, motherless and homeless, a fantastic waif, but your very own? ”

“ The spring that Little Sister was four years old, the General, as was his custom every morning before breakfast, went out to the barn and paddock to see the brood mares and colts. A stately brown mare, ankle-deep in blue grass, stood in the paddock nearest the house, under a great maple tree, its falling branches almost concealing her. She turned every now and then in a nervous, unhappy way, and, going up to the brown, new-born weakling of a colt lying in the blue grass, and which seemed unable to rise, she lowered her shapely head till her nozzle caressed it and then she whinnied softly. ”

“ Even before I left home I had secretly rebelled at his admiration for Eloise. In all her masterful ways, her riding, her fox chasing, her hunting with the men, following Goff or the General all day on her pony, and killing quail dead-straight, in the flush of the covey, he had openly admired her. Afterwards I heard him say that she was a duchess born, and the only one he had seen in America. He had humored, petted and helped to spoil her as a child. As a girl, there never was a costly thing she wanted but he gave it to her. ”

“ And if you be dead, Dear Heart, as I do deep in my mind fear, for I have not heard from you, nor Aunt Lucretia since that June day was turned into December in a night—that day when I went to the old familiar, sweet places, to find no longer there her who had made them sweet—why, what matters so much? For the passing of the soul of a dear one, when we see that it is passed, is such a natural thing at last, such a little change to make so great a transition! ”

“ For hours I could not sleep, and when I did it seemed as if I were going down a dimly remembered path, hearing a far-off call in far-away mountains, the battle cry of my ancient Aryan people rallying against the Mongrel and the Mongol. Then I awoke with the fire of battle in my heart and the hot sweat of the conflict beaded over my face, to call it a dream. But it was no dream. There are dreams, and there is that which is more than dreams. There is the spirit's walk into wayside lands. ”

“ It is the hearth. And there is that which is greater than love making. It is the home making. And there are those in every marriage that is a marriage, of far greater worth to the world—since only through them may the world's work go on—than the two who joined their lives at the altar, and they are the children who come of the marriage.
If my love for Eloise was great before, it is greater now, for in the sweet years that have passed have I not proved it a thousand times, as hath she, in the little things of life, the knight-errantries of love, the battle and the gauge that tests us all daily? ”

“ Shut the gate, Jim; I am going to make him do his best stunt to pay for this."
At the first blow from her whip he sprang up in anger, but the whip fell fast and with fury. Her lithe body sat him easily, like a part of him, her two heels buried in his flanks. He made leap after leap, but still she sat him, cutting his sides into whelks. He leaped high to dismount her; he wheeled suddenly, but never caught her off her guard. The whip never let up. Frighted, angry, he bolted for the plank fence. The gate was shut, but Eloise gave him the whip at every jump.
"Stop her—he'll kill her!" ”