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The Right of Way: Grant

Jethro went to Washington and contrived to have an apparently chance meeting between President Grant and Eph. Grant was attracted by Eph's simplicity. They talked over the battles they had fought together with a modesty which furnished another instance that the noisiest patriots are not always the greatest. Grant appointed Eph. When the news of the victory reached home Jethro's prestige was much increased.

He placed Cynthia in a finishing school in Boston. Being a young woman of high spirit, she was not happy there. The fact that she came from a remote country place and of an unknown family very likely had something to do with the treatment she received in those primitive days before finishing schools had been made wholly safe for democracy. One day a paper controlled by Isaac Worthington, the head of the corporation party, made a savage attack upon Jethro as a lobbyist and a "boss." The paper found its way into Cynthia's hands and gave her the greatest distress. She went to Jethro and asked him if the story was true. He said, "They hain't put it just as they'd ought to be, perhaps, but that's the way I done it in the main." His manly confession caused her to love him even more than before. She withdrew from the finishing school and went to teach in Brampton, the town in which Worthington lived. Jethro, shaken by the effect on Cynthia, determined to withdraw from politics. The state was in a ferment. Would the corporations be able to down Jethro? For the first time in nearly forty years Jethro did not appear at the Coniston town meeting. The enemy won by default. The news heartened the corporations everywhere. Worthington had always been an enemy of Jethro's, although he had accepted his help more than once, and, while indulging in very virtuous speeches, had practised essentially the same methods. His son, Bob, was madly in love with Cynthia, but she subordinated her own love for Bob completely to her fidelity to Jethro. Bob proposed to her and she refused. He declared that he would leave his father and earn his own living and then claim her on account of what he had himself done. He wrote his father, telling him his purpose. When the latter received the letter he flew into a rage. Learning that Cynthia was a teacher in his own town, he called the committee together, the majority of whom he controlled, and had them pass a vote ignominiously dismissing her from the school. This action aroused Jethro and he straightway took up the battle again against the corporation magnate responsible for the outrage. He swooped down upon the Capitol like an eagle. His genius for political generalship flashed out with its old-time brightness. Messages went to the valley towns and to the north country. The "throne room" was open again, and, although the battle had been apparently lost through Jethro's withdrawal, it became evident that the corporations were destined to defeat. Finally Worthington was willing to surrender and asked Jethro's terms. Jethro said, "Consent to the marriage of Cynthia and Bob." Worthington complied in some high-flown letters and the marriage took place. Jethro withdrew from the fight and from politics and passed his old age near Cynthia, blessed by her love and that of her children. (With apologies to Mr. Winston Churchill.) HARDY THOMAS HARDY has been reviled by critics and public as a pessimist, determined to look upon the dark side of life. Careful reading reveals him dispassionately true to the realities of life. He depicts with matchless skill the struggle of human beings against fate--the fate of an inner weakness or a cruel and inescapable circumstance.

He paints these struggles with a background of nature which is beautiful or sinister, gentle or ugly, but is always inevitable and organic. Yet his own "solitary, brooding, strongly colored mind" dominates men and landscape. This is especially true in his most famous novel, "Tess." It is at once the most tragically pitiful of his books and, if deeply read, the most hopeful, for the sorrows of Tess are due to stupidities in our civilization which may be done away with. "Jude the Obscure" is a far more terrible and depressing book, for in its tragedy man is more at the mercy of chance and the inherent weakness of human nature.