If Knowles shunned the hospital, there was another place he shunned
more,--the place where his communist buildings were to have stood. He
went out there once, as one might go alone to bury his dead out of his
sight, the day after the mill was burnt,--looking first at the smoking
mass of hot bricks and charred shingles, so as clearly to understand how
utterly dead his life-long scheme was. He stalked gravely around it,
his hands in his pockets; the hodmen who were raking out their winter's
firewood from the ashes remarking, that "old Knowles didn't seem a bit
cut up about it." Then he went out to the farm he had meant to buy, as I
told you, and looked at it in the same stolid way. It was a dull day in
October. The Wabash crawled moodily past his feet, the dingy prairie
stretched drearily away on the other side, while the heavy-browed
Indiana hills stood solemnly looking down the plateau where the
buildings were to have risen.
Well, most men have some plan for life, into which all the strength and
the keen, fine feeling of their nature enter; but generally they try to
make it real in early youth, and, balked then, laugh ever afterwards at
their own folly. This poor old Knowles had begun to block out his dream
when he was a gaunt, gray-haired man of sixty. I have known men so build
their heart's blood and brains into their work, that, when it tumbled
down, their lives went with it. His fell that dull day in October; but
if it hurt him, no man knew it.
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