In the Heart of a Fool

This story, first of all, and last of all, is a love story. The emotion called love and its twin desire hunger, are the two primal passions of life. From love have developed som...

The next morning at eight o'clock, Grant Adams came hurrying into Brotherton's store. As he strode down the long store room, Brotherton thought that Grant in his street clothes...

A story is a curious thing, that grows with a kind of consciousness of its own. Time was, in its invertebrate period of gestation when this story was to be Amos Adams's story. I...

Once in a while an item appeared in the Harvey _Tribune_ that might have been found nowhere else, and for reasons. For instance, the issue of the _Tribune_ that contained the ac...

A war, being an acute stage of discussion about the ownership of property, is a war even though "the lead striker calls it a strike," and even though he proposes to conduct the...

Perhaps the sound of their laughter drowned the mournful voices of the bells in Grant Adams's heart. But the bells of the New Year left within him some stirring of their eternal...

During those years in the late seventies and the early eighties, the genii on the Harvey job grunted and grumbled as they worked, for the hours were long and tedious and the mat...

The most dramatic agency in life is time--time that escapes the staged drama. The passing years, the ceaseless chiselling of continuous events upon a soul, the reaction of a cre...

The soup had come and gone; great platters of fried chicken had disappeared, with incidental spinach and new peas and potatoes. A bowl of lettuce splashed with a French dressing...

The world into which Kenyon Adams came was a busy and noisy and ruthless world. The prairie grass was leaving Harvey when Grant Adams came, and the meadow lark left in the year...

For a long and weary night and a day of balancing doubt, and another dull night, little Ben Bowman lay limp and crumpled on his cot--a broken lump of clay hardly more than anima...

Now it was in the year of these minor conquests when Henry Fenn and Violet Hogan were enjoying their little Heavens that great things began to stir in Harvey and the Wahoo Valle...

The new Century brought to Harvey such plenitude that all night and all day the smelter fires painted the sky up and down the Wahoo Valley; all night long and all day long the m...

Grant Adams sat in his cell, with the jail smell of stone and iron and damp in his nostrils. As he read the copy of Tolstoy's "The Resurrection," which his cell-mate had left in...

In the ebb and flow of life every generation sees its waves of altruism washing in. But in the ebb of altruism in America that followed the Civil War, Amos Adams's ship of dream...

The business of life largely resolves itself into a preparation for the next generation. The torch of life moves steadily forward. For children primarily life has organized itse...

Grant Adams and Henry Fenn were among the first to arrive at the scene of the explosion. Henry Fenn had tried to stop Grant from going so quickly, thinking his presence at the s...

It was an old complaint in Harvey that the Harvey _Tribune_ was too much of a bulletin of the doings of the Adams family and their friends. But when a man sets all the type on a...

Going home from the Adamses that afternoon, John Dexter mused: "Curious--very curious." Then he added: "Of course this phase will pass. Probably it is gone now. But I am wonderi...

It was the last day of the last year of the Nineteenth Century--and a fair, beautiful day it was. The sun shone over Harvey in spite of the clouds from the smelter in South Harv...

A year and a month and a day, an exceedingly hot day, after Judge Thomas Van Dorn had fallen upon the stair leading to his office and had cut that gash in his forehead which lef...

Mr. Brotherton had been pacing the deck of his store like the captain of a pirate ship in a storm. Nothing in the store suited him; he found Miss Calvin's high façade of hair to...

Harvey tried sincerely to believe in Tom Van Dorn up to the very day when it happened. For the town had accepted him gladly and unanimously as its most distinguished citizen. Bu...

Mrs. Nesbit tried to put the Doctor into his Sunday blacks the day of her daughter's wedding, but he would have none of them. He appeared on Market Street and went his rounds am...

The journey around the sun is a long and tumultuous one. Many of us jolt off the earth as we ride, others of us are turned over and thrown into strange and absurd positions, and...

Here and now this story must pause for a moment. It has come far from the sunshine and prairie grass where it started. Tall elm trees have grown from the saplings that were stuc...

Coal and oil and gas and lead and zinc. The black sprite, the brown sprite, the invisible sprite, the two gray sprites--elemental sprites they were--destined to be bound servant...

The Van Dorns opened their new house without ostentation the day after their marriage in October. There was no reception; the handsomest hack in town waited for them at the rail...

After arguments of counsel, after citation of cases, after the applause of Market Street at some incidental _obiter dicta_ of Judge Van Dorn's about the rights of property, afte...

Henry Fenn and Margaret Müller sat naming their wedding day, while Grant Adams walked home with his burden. Henry Fenn had been fighting through a long winter, against the lust...

Laura Van Dorn stood watching her husband pass down the street. She silenced the child by clasping her close in the tender motherly arms. No tears rose in the wife's eyes, as sh...

"Life," writes Mr. Left, using the pseudonym of the Peachblow philosopher, "disheartens us because we expect the wrong things of it. We expect material rewards for spiritual vir...

When Mortimer Sands came down town Saturday morning, two hours before the convention met, he found the courthouse yard black with prospective delegates and also he found that th...

How light a line divides comedy from tragedy! When the ass speaks, or the man brays, there is comedy. Yet fate may stop the mouth of either man or ass, and in the dumb struggle...

"My dear," quoth the Doctor to his daughter as he sat poking his feet with his cane in her little office at the Kindergarten, after they had discussed Lila's adventure of the ni...

A tall, spare, middle-aged person was Thomas Van Dorn in the latter years of the first decade of the twentieth century; tall and spare and tight-skinned. The youthful olive text...

This chapter must devote itself chiefly to a bargain. In the bargain, Judge Thomas Van Dorn is party of the first part, and Margaret Fenn, wife of Henry Fenn, is party of the se...

But he entreated, "Won't you let me talk with Tom? In half an hour--I'll go. You and Lila slip over to mother's for half an hour--come back at half past twelve. I'll tell him wh...

Spring in Mrs. Nesbit's garden, even in those days when a garden in Harvey meant chiefly lettuce and radishes and peas, was no casual event. Spring opened formally for the Nesbi...

"The idea of hell," wrote the Peach Blow Philosopher in the Harvey _Tribune_, "is the logical sequence of the belief that material punishments must follow spiritual offenses. Fo...

The formal announcement of the engagement of Laura Nesbit and Thomas Van Dorn came when Mrs. Nesbit began tearing out the old floors on the second story of the Nesbit home and r...

On Market Street nearly opposite the Traders' National Bank during the decades of the eighties and nineties was a smart store front upon which was fastened a large, black and go...

An empty, lonely house was that on Quality Hill in Elm Street after the daughter's marriage. It was not that the Doctor and Mrs. Nesbit did not see their daughter often; but whe...

George Brotherton took the Captain to the street car that night. They rode face to face and all that the Captain had seen and more, outside the Vanderbilt House, and all that Ge...

When Grant Adams had told and retold his story to the reporters and had eaten what Dr. Nesbit would let him eat, it was late in the afternoon. He lay down to sleep with the sun...

That evening in the late twilight, two women stood at the wicket of a cell in the jail and while back of the women, at the end of a corridor, stood a curious group of reporters...

Towns are curiously like individuals. They take their character largely from their experiences, laid layer upon layer in their consciousnesses, as time moves, and though the exp...

"And the fool said in his heart, there is no God!" And this fable teaches, if it teaches anything, that the fool was indeed a fool. Now do not think that his folly lay chiefly i...

The changing seasons moved from autumn to winter, from winter to spring. One gray, wet March day, Grant Adams stood by the counter asking Mr. Brotherton to send to the city for...

The great strike in the Wahoo Valley now is only an episode in the history of this struggle of labor for its rights. The episode is receding year by year further and more dimly...

The stage is dark. In the dim distance something is moving. It is a world hurrying through space. Somewhat in the foreground but enveloped in the murk sit three figures. They ar...

Sunshine and prairie grass--well in the foreground. For the background, perhaps a thousand miles away or more than half a decade removed in time, is the American Civil War. In t...

XLI HERE WE SEE GRANT ADAMS CONQUERING HIS THIRD AND LAST DEVIL 454 XLII A CHAPTER WHICH IS CONCERNED LARGELY WITH THE LOVE AFFAIRS OF "THE FULL STRENGTH OF THE COMPANY" 468 XLI...