THE TEMPERING



more and more the purpose meant in the blind gropings
of existence toward some end. Otherwise there was noth-
in.
  But one day long after all this, when the months had
run to seasons, Boone broke his law of self-appointed exile
and went to Louisville. He did not go from Marlin Town
but came the other way-from Washington.
  For now the mountain man had his place on Capitol
Hill and no longer felt the uncertainty of diffidence in
answering when he heard himself recognized from the
speaker's chair as "the gentleman from Kentucky."
  It was not at all the Washington he had pictured. In
many ways it was a more wonderful, and in many a less
wonderful, place than that known from photographs and
print and fancy.
  Life had caught him out of meagre and primitive be-
ginnings and led him, for a while, through corridors of
romanticism. Before his eyes, imagination-kindled, had
been the colours of dreams and the beckoning of an evening
star. The colours had been evanescent, and the star had
set. The corridor of visionary promise had come to an
end, and its door had opened on Commonplace.
  Ile told himself that he was done with romance. In his
life it had been, perhaps, necessary as a stage through
which experience must lead him. Henceforth his deity
was to be Reason, a cold and austere goddess but a con-
stant one.
  But Boone did not quite know himself. Sentiment still
lay as strong in him as the spring life that sleeps under
the winter sleet. The man in whom it does not survive is
one whose spiritual arteries have hardened.
  One lesson he modestly believed he had learned out of
his journeying from his log-cabin down to the Bluegrass
and up to Capitol Hill. He had become an apostle of
Life's mutability, chained to no fixed post of unplastic
thought.
  Upon these things his reflections had been running as Ile



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