Later, in the cool dark, Gant, rocking violently, would hold forth on the porch, his great voice carrying across the quiet neighborhood, as he held the charmed boarders by his torrential eloquence, his solution of problems of state, his prejudiced but bold opinion upon current news.
“—And what did WE do, gentlemen? We sank their navy in an action that lasted only twenty minutes, stormed at by shot and shell, Teddy and his Rough Riders took the hill at Santiago—it was all over, as you well know, in a few months. We had declared war with no thought of ulterior gain; we came because the indignation of a GREAT people had been aroused at the oppression of a smaller one, and then, with a magnanimity well worthy the greatest people of the face of the earth, we paid our defeated enemy twenty millions of dollars. Ah, Lord! That was magnanimity indeed! You don’t think any other nation would have done that, do you?”
“No, sir,” said the boarders emphatically.
They didn’t always agree with his political opinions—Roosevelt was the faultless descendant of Julius Cæsar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Abraham Lincoln—but they felt he had a fine head and would have gone far in politics.
“That man should have been a lawyer,” said the boarders.
And yet, there was surging into these chosen hills the strong thrust of the world, like a kissing tide, which swings lazily in with a slapping glut of waters, and recoils into its parent crescent strength, to be thrown farther inward once again.
It was an element of Eliza’s primitive and focal reasoning that men and women withered by the desert would seek an oasis, that those who were thirsty would seek water, and that those panting on the plains would look into the hills for comfort and relief. She had that bull’s-eye accuracy which has since been celebrated, when plum-picking’s over, under the name of “vision.”
The streets, ten years before raw clay, were being paved: Gant went into frenzies over the paving assessments, cursed the land, the day of his birth, the machinations of Satan’s children. But Eugene followed the wheeled casks of boiling tar; watched the great roller, a monster that crushed him in night-mares, powder
