And he entertained the foreign ministers at a state dinner, did this unusual man, and he gave them to drink--what but grape-juice, grape-juice in its virginity. Plain water might have seemed the crystalline expression of a rigid puritanic spirit. Budweiser Beer, bitter and bourgeois, might have been possible though surprising. But grape-juice, served to seasoned Latin Titles and Graybeards and Gold-Braid, long tamely familiar with the Widow Clicquot: that in truth seems, after all the years, boyishly oratorical, wildly and darkly Nebraskan. Looked at as an appetizing wash for a children’s white-collared and pink-sashed party, or for anybody on a summer afternoon, grape-juice is satisfactory. In the careless hands of William Jennings Bryan with his soul so unscrupulously at peace, the virgin grape-juice becomes a vitriolic thing: a defluent purple river crushing one’s helpless spirit among its rocks and rapids. --a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and _he_ is valiantly for peace: at any price-- For that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred. Rich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred. To William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political career must seem all right. It _is_ all right, undoubtedly. Just that. --that Silver-tongued Boy Orator those Yodlers that Peerless Leader that Grape-juice-- They come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd high-seasoned abruptness. I wonder what God thinks of him. It might be God thinks well of him. But I--in my black dress and my still room--I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly: Ha! ha! ha! _Their little shoes_ To-morrow Often in windy autumn nights I lie awake in my shadowy bed and think of the children, the Drab-eyed thousands of children in this America who work in coal mines and factories. Whenever I’m wakeful and the night is windy and my room is dark and I lie in aloneness--a long aloneness: centuries--then shadows come from far-off world-wildnesses and float and flutter dimly unhappy around my bed. They tell me tales of shame and tame petty hopelessness and trifling despair. And the one that comes oftenest is the one that tells of those Drab-Eyed children distances from here, but very immediate, who work in coal mines and factories. I read about them in magazines and newspapers, but they aren’t then one one-hundredth so real as when their shadow floats as close to me in the windy autumn night.