It is indeed a queer, queer world, and our blindness is the queerest thing in it. Here a few weeks, later sit John and Jane Barclay on the terrace before their house one June night, listening to singing on the water. Suddenly they realize that there is youth in the world--yet there has been singing on the mill-pond ever since it was built. It has been the habitat of lovers for a quarter of a century, this mill-pond, yet Jane and John Barclay have not known it, and not until their own child's voice came up to them, singing "Juanita," did they realize that the song had not begun anew after its twenty years' silence in their own hearts, but always had been on the summer breeze. And this is strange, too, considering how rich and powerful John Barclay is and how by the scratch of his pen, he might set men working by the thousands for some righteous cause. Yet so it is; for with all the consciousness of great power, with all the feeling of unrestraint that such power gives a man, driving him to think he is a kind of god, John Barclay was only a two-legged man, with a limp in one foot, and a little mad place in his brain, wherein he kept the sense of his relation to the rest of this universe. And as he sat, blind to the moon, dreaming of a time when he would control Presidents and dominate courts if they crossed his path, out on the mill-pond under an elm tree that spread like a canopy upon the water, a boy, letting the oars hang loosely, was playing the mandolin to a girl--a pretty girl withal, blue as to eyes, fair as to hair, strong as to mouth and chin, and glorious as to forehead--who leaned back in the boat, played with the overhanging branches, and listened and looked at the moon, and let God's miracle work unhindered in her heart. And all up and down those two miles of mill-pond were other boats and other boys and other maidens, and as they chatted and sang and sat in the moonlight, there grew in their hearts, as quietly as the growing of the wheat in the fields, that strange marvel of life, that keeps the tide of humanity ceaselessly flowing onward. And it is all so simply done before our eyes, and in our ears, that we forget it is so baffling a mystery.