Over the Hills


So the old man and the young man made the round of the Bines
properties. The former nursed a forlorn little hope of exciting an
interest in the concerns most vital to him; to the latter the leisurely
tour in the private car was a sportive prelude to the serious business
of life, as it should be lived, in the East. Considering it as such he
endured it amiably, and indeed the long August days and the sharply
cool nights were not without real enjoyment for him.

To feel impartially a multitude of strong, fresh wants--the imperative
need to live life in all its fulness, this of itself makes the heart to
sing. And, above the full complement of wants, to have been dowered by
Heaven with a stanch disbelief in the unattainable,--this is a fortune
rather to be chosen than a good name or great riches; since the name
and riches and all things desired must come to the call of it.

Our Western-born youth of twenty-five had the wants and the sense of
power inherited from a line of men eager of initiative, the product of
an environment where only such could survive. Doubtless in him was the
soul and body hunger of his grandfather, cramping and denying through
hardship year after year, yet sustained by dreaming in the hardest
times of the soft material luxuries that should some day be his.
Doubtless marked in his character, too, was the slightly relaxed
tension of his father; the disposition to feast as well as the capacity
to fast; to take all, feel all, do all, with an avidity greater by
reason of the grinding abstinence and the later indulgence of his
forbears. A sage versed in the lore of heredity as modified by
environment may some day trace for us the progress across this