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“Last night I was an old man and dreamed dreams; this morning I am a young man and see visions. I see this thirsty plain fed by irrigating-ditches and covered with bearing orchards. I am impatient to be off on our tramp. This is an ideal spot. With five acres of orange-trees here, producing a thousand dollars per acre, one might give his entire time to scientific investigation.”

“He’d want to look after the gophers some,” yelled Dysart.

“I am astonished that this country is so little appreciated,” continued Brownell, blindly unheeding. “It is no doubt due to the reckless statements of enthusiasts. It is a wonderful country–wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!”

There was a diminuendo in the repeated adjective that told Palmerston the speaker was moving toward the house; and it was from that direction that he heard Mrs. Dysart, a little later, assuring her visitor, in a high, depressed voice, that she hadn’t found the country yet that would support anybody without elbow-grease, and she didn’t expect to till it was Gawd’s will to take her to her heavenly home.

John Dysart and his visitor returned from their trip in the mountains, that evening, tired, dusty, and exultant. The professor’s linen duster had acquired several of those triangular rents which have the merit of being beyond masculine repair, and may therefore be conscientiously endured. He sat on the camp-chair at Palmerston’s tent door, his finger-tips together and his head thrown back in an ecstasy of content.

“This is certainly the promised land,” he said gravely, “a land flowing with milk and honey. Nature has done her share lavishly: soil, climate, scenery–everything but water; yes, and water, too, waiting for the brain, the hand of man, the magic touch of science–the one thing left to be conquered to give the sense of mastery, of possession. This country is ours by right of conquest.” He waved his hands majestically toward the valley. “In three months we shall have a stream flowing from these mountains that will transform every foot of ground before you. These people seem worthy, though somewhat narrow. It will be a pleasure to share prosperity with them as freely as they share their poverty with me.”

Palmerston glanced conversationally toward the trumpet, and his companion raised it to his ear.

“Dysart is a poor man,” shouted Palmerston, “but he is the best fellow in the world. I should hate to see him risk anything on an uncertainty.”

Brownell had been nodding his head backward and forward with dreamy emphasis; he now shook it horizontally, closing his eyes. “There is no uncertainty,” he said, lowering his trumpet; “that is the advantage of science: you can count upon it with absolute certainty. I am glad the man is poor–very glad; it heightens the pleasure of helping him.”

The young man turned away a trifle impatiently.

“A reservoir will entail some expense,” the professor rambled on; “but the money will come. ‘To him that hath shall be given.'”

Palmerston’s face completed the quotation, but the speaker went on without opening his eyes: “When the water is once flowing out of the tunnel, capital will flow into it.”

“A good deal of capital will flow into the tunnel before any water flows out of it,” growled Palmerston, taking advantage of his companion’s physical defect to relieve his mind.

Later in the evening Dysart drew the young man into the family conference, relying upon the sympathy of sex in the effort to allay his wife’s misgivings.

“The tunnel won’t cost over two dollars a foot, with what I can do myself,” maintained the little man, “and the professor says we’ll strike water that’ll drown us out before we’ve gone a hundred feet. Emeline here she’s afraid of it because it sounds like a meracle, but I tell her it’s pure science. It isn’t any more wonderful than a needle traveling toward a magnet: the machine tells where the water is, and how far off it is, something like a compass–I don’t understand it, but I can see that it ain’t any more meraculous than a telegraph. It’s science.”