He walked with his hands deep in his trousers pockets and his head down, and as General Ward was out organizing the farmers in a revolt against the dominant party in the state, Barclay was alone most of the time.

The picture of that barren office, with its insurance chromos, with its white, cobweb-marked walls, with its dirty floor partly covered with an "X" of red-bordered hemp carpet reaching from the middle to the four corners, the picture of the four tall unwashed windows letting in the merciless afternoon sun to fade the grimy black and white lithograph of William Lloyd Garrison above the general's desk, never left John Barclay's memory.

It was like a cell on a prisoner's mind.
As he paced the room that last day of the visit of the grasshoppers, General Hendricks came in.

His hair had whitened in the summer.

The panic and the plague of the locusts had literally wrung the sap out of his nerves.