“That’s just it,” returned John Fenton in his deep, penetrating voice. “That statue of Nathan Hale is what might be called an emphasis in bronze of the warning,--a warning as old as human tyranny,--to keep off the grass. Hale failed to obey it, and went to an early death. Take warning, Richard, by the lesson the statue teaches. Don’t let your dreamy and unpractical enthusiasm carry you into the enemy’s camp. They’ll hang you if you do.” “Your words are enigmatical,” commented Stoughton, as the two men seated themselves in an elevated train bound up-town. “I had looked to you for comfort and warmth, and you give me a shower-bath.” “Poor boy!” smiled Fenton, less cynically than was his wont. “When did the youthful warrior ever gain anything of value by consulting the battle-scarred and defeated veteran? I have the decayed root of a conscience somewhere that troubles me now and then. It gave a little twinge just now, and causes me to doubt the wisdom and justice of my effort to open your eyes to the truth.” “But why,” asked the younger man earnestly, “should there be anything to offend your conscience in telling me the truth?” “Ah, there, my boy, you ask a question that the wisest men have failed to answer. There are certain truths that the universe holds in its secret heart and refuses to divulge. As a microcosm, every man cherishes in his innermost being some bitter certainty that he must defend from the gaze of the curious. If he draws the veil, even by a hair’s-breadth, that exposed nerve known as conscience will throb for an instant, and close his mouth.” “But,” persisted the younger man, whose clear-cut face looked, in contrast with his companion’s, like a delicate cameo beside a mediæval gargoyle, “I had placed so much value on your advice and sympathy.” “My sympathy you certainly have,” said Fenton rather harshly; “but giving you my advice would be--to take a liberty with a time-honored illustration--like casting swine among pearls. Is it not some word-juggler, who uses epigrams to conceal the truth, who says that the only vice that does not cling to youth is advice?” Richard Stoughton’s face flushed, and his dark gray eyes glanced questioningly at his companion. “I sometimes think,” he said rather sadly, “that you are all brains and no heart, John Fenton.” “You are mistaken, my boy,” answered Fenton quickly. “In that case I would have been a millionnaire long ago. I was afflicted with just enough heart to hamper my brain. The result is that I’m an assistant city editor in the prime of life, with a very short hill to roll down to the grave. But never mind what I am, or what I might have been. You are the only interesting personage present. You have come, like Nathan Hale, out of the ‘Down East,’ so to speak, to New York, to offer your youthful enthusiasm to a world that has too little of that sort of thing; so little, in fact, that it immortalizes Hale’s sacrifice, and forgets his mission.” Fenton was silent for a moment.