The general put the smoking poker on the floor, and turned the damper in the pipe as he answered: "That's what I can't seem to make out. You know old Emerson says a man doesn't amount to much as a thinker until he has doubted the existence of matter. And I just got to thinking about it, and wondering if this was a real world after all--or just my idea of one." The two men smiled at the notion, and Ward went on: "All right, laugh if you want to, but if this is a real world, whose world is it, your world or my world? Here is John Barclay, for instance. Sometimes I get a peek at his world." Ward picked up the poker and sat down and hammered the toe of a boot with it as he went on: "John's world is the Golden Belt Wheat Company, wheat pouring a steady stream into boundless bins, and money flowing in golden ripples over it all. Sometimes Bob Hendricks' head rises above the tide long enough to gasp or cry for help and beg to come home, but John's golden flood sweeps over him again, and he's gone. And here's your world, Martin, wherein every one is kind and careless, and generous and good, and full of smiles and gayety. And there's Lige Bemis' world, full of cunning and hypocrisy, and meanness and treachery and plotting--a hell of a world it is, with its foundations on hate and deceit--but it's his world, and he has the same right to it that I have to mine. And there's old Watts' world--" The general sighted along the poker over his toe to the stove side whereon a cornucopia wriggled out of nothing and poured its richness of fruit and grain into nothing. "There's Watts' world, full of stuffed Personifications, Virtue, Pleasure, Happiness, Sin, Sorrow, and God knows what of demigods, with the hay of his philosophy sticking out of their eyeholes. You know about his maxims, Mart; he actually lives by 'em, and no matter how common sense yells at him to get off the track, old Watts just goes on following his maxims, and gets butted into the middle of next week." The colonel was making a hole in the stick in his hands, and his attention was fixed on the whittling, but he added, "And your own world, General--how about your own world?" "My world," replied the general, as he pulled at the bows of his rather soiled white tie, and evened them, "My world--" the general jabbed the poker spear-like into the floor, "I guess I'm a kind of a transcendentalist!" The colonel blew the chips through the hole in his stick; he bored it round in the pause that followed before he spoke. "A transcendentalist, eh? Well, pintedly, General, that is what I may call a soft impeachment, as the poet says--a mighty soft impeachment. I've heard you called a lot worse names than that--and I may say," here the crow's-feet began scratching for a smile around the colonel's eyes, "proved, sir, with you as the prosecuting witness."