Colter nodded. "I think I was with the American School at Athens for a year or two. It would seem that I had some little knowledge about soils." He hesitated in the curious way with which all who had known him had grown familiar. The intense fire-blue eyes concentrated on the placid river as on some clouded crystal of his opaque past. He seemed curiously like a fisherman watching for some bite of memory on his tremulous reaching line, lifting the empty hook time and again. "Soils," remarked the regardful lawyer, "must have their own poetry." The other hesitated, then as if quite forgetful where he was or on what errand he had come, Colter responded evenly, "They have an interest like that of a profound book, quite outside of what one assays or digs for. There are enough adventures in soils right around this Hudson River section back through the states of New York and New Jersey to make an Iliad." "Hum." Shipman inhaled his cigarette smoke, which flowed through his deep nostrils; with a curious lowering of the eyelids over the profound dark of his eyes, he let one hand drop loosely over his knee. It was the lawyer's instinctive relaxed indifferent pose of listening and watching; listening for false voice tones, watching for shifting glimmers and lights of evasion and deceit, for the curious betrayal in eyelids and lip muscles. "Soils, however, would hardly recommend themselves as exciting to the average man." The other man smiled for a second and glanced at the lawyer with a free relish of the subject. "They say young men need occasional wars to stimulate their sense of adventure." The quiet voice was ironical, and Colter waved a disparaging hand. "This river," he said; "think of the poetry and adventure of the great minds born on its banks. Think of the poetry and adventure for science and enterprise still to come along its banks as a great Water Road," he indicated a slow train of freight cars on the opposite shore, "and as one of the great verses in the Odyssey of Trade. Why, leaving out the Poem of Hauling, I suspect that back of these hills there are important contributions to history and geology and art. There must be Indian burying grounds filled with the half ossified Indian chiefs, their pottery and tribal implements." Colter, leaning on his arms, apparently lost in some pleasant fancy of his own, smoked dreamily. "To find these things is better adventure than plunging a bayonet into another man's stomach," he smiled.