He went out there once, as one might go alone to bury his dead out of his sight, the day after the mill was burnt,--looking first at the smoking mass of hot bricks and charred shingles, so as clearly to understand how utterly dead his life-long scheme was.

He stalked gravely around it, his hands in his pockets; the hodmen who were raking out their winter's firewood from the ashes remarking, that "old Knowles didn't seem a bit cut up about it." Then he went out to the farm he had meant to buy, as I told you, and looked at it in the same stolid way.

It was a dull day in October.

The river crawled moodily past his feet, the dingy prairie stretched drearily away on the other side, while the heavy-browed Indiana hills stood solemnly looking down the plateau where the buildings were to have risen.
Well, most men have some plan of life, into which all the strength and the keen, fine feeling of their nature enter; but generally they try to make it real in early youth, and, balked then, laugh ever afterwards at their own folly.

This poor old Knowles had begun to block out his dream when he was a gaunt, gray-haired man of sixty.