AND now those who have avoided the gray unpainted
shame of these unimportant people of the Ridge may here
take up again for a moment the trailing clouds of glory
that shimmer over John Barclay's office in the big City.
For here there is the sounding brass and tinkling cymbal
of great worldly power. Here sits John Barclay, a little
gray-haired, gray-clad, lynx-eyed man, in a big light
room at the corner of a tower high over the City in the
Corn Exchange Building, the brain from which a million
nerves radiate that run all over the world and move
thousands of men.Forty years before, when John was
playing in the dust of the road leading up from the Syca-
more, no king in all the world knew so much of the day's
doings as John knows now, sitting there at the polished
mahogany table with the green blotting paper upon it,
under the green vase adorned with the red rose.A blight
may threaten the wheat in Argentine, and John Barclay
knows every cloud that sails the sky above that wheat,
and when the cloud bursts into rain he sighs, for it means
something to him, though heaven only knows what, and
we and heaven do not care.But a dry day in India or
a wet day in Russia or a cloudy day in the Dakotas are
all taken into account in the little man's plans.And if
princes quarrel and kings grow weary of peace, and money
bags refuse them war, John Barclay knows it and puts
the episode into figures on the clean white pad of paper
before him.

It is a privilege to be in this office; one passes three
doors to get here, and even at the third door our statesmen
often cool their toes. Mr. Barclay is about to admit one
now.And when Senator Myton comes in, deferentially
of course, to tell Mr. Barclay the details of the long fight
in executive session which ended in the confirmation by the

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