the promise of all.  Something like that Lorne Murchison felt about it as he stood for a moment in the passage I have mentioned and looked across the road.  The spectacle never failed to cheer him; he was uniformly in gayer spirits, better satisfied with life and more consciously equal to what he had to do, on days when the square was full than on days when it was empty.  This morning he had an elation of his own; it touched everything with more vivid reality.  The familiar picture stirred a joy in him in tune with his private happiness; its undernote came to him with a pang as keen.  The sense of kinship surged in his heart; these were his people, this his lot as well as theirs.  For the first time he saw it in detachment.  Till now he had regarded it with the friendly eyes of a participator who looked no further.  Today he did look further:  the whole world invited his eyes, offering him a great piece of luck to look through.  The opportunity was in his hand which, if he could seize and hold, would lift and carry him on.  He was as much aware of its potential significance as anyone could be, and what leapt in his veins till he could have laughed aloud was the splendid conviction of resource.  Already in the door of the passage he had achieved, from that point he looked at the scene before him with an impulse of loyalty and devotion.  A tenderness seized him for the farmers of Fox County, a throb of enthusiasm for the idea they represented, which had become for him suddenly moving and pictorial.  At that moment his country came subjectively into his possession; great and helpless it came into his inheritance as it comes into the inheritance of every man who can take it, by deed of imagination and energy and love.  He held this microcosm of it, as one might say, in his hand and looked at it ardently; then he took his way across the road.

A tall thickly built young fellow detached himself from a group, smiling broadly at the sight of Murchison, and started to meet him.

“Hello, Lorne,” he said.  He had smiled all the way anticipating the encounter.  He was obviously in clothes which he did not put on every day, but the seriousness of this was counteracted by his hard felt hat, which he wore at an angle that disregarded convention.

“Hello, Elmore!  You back?”

“That’s about it.”

“You don’t say!  Back to stay?”

“Far’s I can see.  Young Alf’s made up his mind to learn the dentist business, and the old folks are backin’ him; so I don’t see but I’ve got to stop on and run the show.  Father’s gettin’ up in years now.”

“Why, yes.  I suppose he must be.  It’s a good while since you went West.  Well, what sort of a country have they got out Swan River way?  Booming right along?”