If our education did not merely feed prejudices instead of removing them, I should say not long. As it is, I expect to "leave the world as wicked and as foolish as I found it." At any rate, until the millenium, I shall continue to play the game under the rules of human nature--instead of under the rules of human ideals, as does my esteemed friend Scarborough. And I claim that we practical men are as true and useful servants of our country and of our fellow men as he. If men like him are the light, men like us are the lantern that shields it from the alternating winds of rapacity and resentment. But, in running on about myself, I have got away from my point, which was how slight and even flimsy a pretense of fairness will shelter a man in high place--and therefore a Burbank. "He will fool the people as easily as he fools himself," said I. And more than ever it seemed to me that I must keep out of the game of his administration. My necessity of party regularity made it impossible for me to oppose him; my equal necessity of not outraging my sense of the wise, not to speak of the decent, made it impossible for me to abet him. At last Woodruff came in person. When his name was brought to me, I regretted that I could not follow my strong impulse to refuse to see him. But at sight of his big strong body and big strong face, with its typically American careless good humor--the cool head, the warm heart, the amused eyes and lips that could also harden into sternness of resolution--at sight of this old friend and companion-in-arms, my mood began to lift and I felt him stirring in it like sunshine attacking a fog. "I know what you've come to say," I began, "but don't say it. I shall keep to my tent for the present." "Then you won't have a tent to keep to," retorted he. "Very well," said I. "My private affairs will give me all the occupation I need." He laughed. "The general resigns from the command of the army to play with a box of lead soldiers." "That sounds well," said I. "But the better the analogy, the worse the logic. I am going out of the business of making and working off gold bricks and green goods--and that's no analogy." "Then you must be going to kill yourself," he replied. "For that's life." "Public life--active life," said I. "Here, there are other things." And I looked toward my two daughters, whose laughter reached us from their pony-cart just rounding a distant curve in the drive. His gaze followed mine and he watched the two children until they were out of sight, watched them with the saddest, hungriest look in his eyes. "Guess you're right," he said gruffly. After a silence I asked: "What's the news?"