They had all been stricken down, here in this strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them.

Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its "R.I.P.," or "Pray for the Soul of," half to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the passing of the planets overhead.

He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his ten children were.

He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.
One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his fellows met and knew him.

Mr.Madden kept his griefs, racial and individual, for his own use.