out in a city," his father had said, and the son had acquiesced. It was
the natural wing-trying process before large flights were attempted, and
the course commended itself to his reason. James, as well as his father,
had good reasoning power. He whistled to himself as he walked along. He
was very happy. He had a sensation as of one who has his goal in sight.
He thought of his father, his mother, and his two younger sisters, but
with no distress at absenting himself from them, although he lived in
accord with his family. Twenty-five miles to his joyous youth seemed but
as a step across the road. He had no sense of separation. "What is
twenty-five miles?" he had said laughingly to his mother, when she had
kissed him good-by. He had no conception of her state of mind with
regard to the break in the home circle. He who was the breaker did not
even see the break. Therefore he walked along, conscious of an immense
joy in his own soul, and wholly unconscious of anything except joy in
the souls of those whom he had left behind. It was a glorious morning, a
white morning. The ground was covered with white frost, the trees, the
house-roofs, the very air, were all white. In the west a transparent
moon was slowly sinking; the east deepened with red and violet tints.
Then came the sun, upheaving above the horizon like a ship of glory, and
all the whiteness burned, and glowed, and radiated jewel-lights. James
looked about with the delight of a discoverer. It might have been his
first morning. He begun to meet men going to their work, swinging tin
dinner-pails. Even these humble pails became glorified, they gave back
the sunlight like burnished silver. He smelled the odors of breakfast
upon the men's clothes. He held up his head high with a sort of
good-humored arrogance as he passed. He would have fought to the death
for any one of these men, but he knew himself, quite innocently, upon
superior heights of education, and trained thought, and ambition. He met
a man swinging a pail; he was coughing: a wretched, long rattle of a
cough. James stopped him, opened his little medicine-case, and produced