dying, and sadly changed; the hair that had been so black and curly that summer morning long before, had grown thin and white; the face, sadly lined with weariness, was sublimated by a new expression. There was the same courage in the classic profile, and the old smile was there. He was writing his memoirs with a courage as grim as that of General Grant—and he had the equanimity of Antoninus Pius. And on his countenance there was the expression of a purified ideal. So he had won; his was the victory after all.
XXXI
The best of life, no doubt, is made up of memories,
as M. George Cain says, and perhaps that is
why I have lingered so long over these little incidents
of Sam Jones and Tom Johnson. I have told them
in no sort of related order; Jones died years before
Johnson; but somehow they seem to me to have appeared
simultaneously, like twin stars in our northern
sky, to have blazed a while and then gone out together.
Different as their personalities were, different
as two such great originals must have been,
they were one in ideal, and even in their last words
they expressed the vast toil and strain of the efforts
they put forth to attain it.
"Was it worth while?" asked Tom Johnson of his friend Newton Baker, a day or two before he died. And Sam Jones on that last day turned to his sister Nell, the noble spirit who had conducted the settlement work at Golden Rule House, and said: