He got a bottle of reddish-brown mixture from the druggist on Halsted Street near Sixty-third.  A genial gentleman, the druggist, white-coated and dapper, stepping affably about the fragrant-smelling store.  The reddish-brown mixture had toned old Ben up surprisingly—­while it lasted.  He had two bottles of it.  But on discontinuing it he slumped back into his old apathy.

Ben Westerveld, in his store clothes, his clean blue shirt, his incongruous hat, ambling aimlessly about Chicago’s teeming, gritty streets, was a tragedy.  Those big, capable hands, now dangling so limply from inert wrists, had wrested a living from the soil; those strangely unfaded blue eyes had the keenness of vision which comes from scanning great stretches of earth and sky; the stocky, square-shouldered body suggested power unutilized.  All these spelled tragedy.  Worse than tragedy—­waste.

For almost half a century this man had combated the elements, head set, eyes wary, shoulders squared.  He had fought wind and sun, rain and drought, scourge and flood.  He had risen before dawn and slept before sunset.  In the process he had taken on something of the colour and the rugged immutability of the fields and hills and trees among which he toiled.  Something of their dignity, too, though your town dweller might fail to see it beneath the drab exterior.  He had about him none of the high lights and sharp points of the city man.  He seemed to blend in with the background of nature so as to be almost indistinguishable from it as were the furred and feathered creatures.  This farmer differed from the city man as a hillock differs from an artificial golf bunker, though form and substance are the same.

Ben Westerveld didn’t know he was a tragedy.  Your farmer is not given to introspection.  For that matter any one knows that a farmer in town is a comedy.  Vaudeville, burlesque, the Sunday supplement, the comic papers, have marked him a fair target for ridicule.  Perhaps even you should know him in his overalled, stubble-bearded days, with the rich black loam of the Mississippi bottom-lands clinging to his boots.

At twenty-five, given a tasselled cap, doublet and hose, and a long, slim pipe, Ben Westerveld would have been the prototype of one of those rollicking, lusty young mynheers that laugh out at you from a Frans Hals canvas.  A roguish fellow with a merry eye; red-cheeked, vigorous.  A serious mouth, though, and great sweetness of expression.  As he grew older the seriousness crept up and up and almost entirely obliterated the roguishness.  By the time the life of ease claimed him even the ghost of that ruddy wight of boyhood had vanished.

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