beside the chauffeur as he used to sit behind the
horseman, and they know that he has a mortgage in his pocket, and can
foreclose it any time on the house they have hypothecated to buy their
car. Ah!" The old man started forward with the involuntary impulse of
rescue. But it was not one of the people who singly, or in terrorized
groups, had been waiting at the roadside to find their way across; it
was only a hapless squirrel of those which used to make their way
safely among the hoofs and wheels of the kind old cabs and carriages,
and it lay instantly crushed under the tire of a motor. "He's done
for, poor little wretch! They can't get used to the change. Some day a
policeman will pick _me_ up from under a second-hand motor. I wonder
what the great Daniel from his pedestal up there would say if he came
to judgment."

"He wouldn't believe in the change any more than that squirrel. He
would decide that he was dreaming, and would sleep on, forgetting and
forgotten."

"Forgotten," the elder sage assented. "I remember when his fame filled
the United States, which was then the whole world to me. And now I
don't imagine that our hyphenated citizens have the remotest
consciousness of him. If Daniel began delivering one of his
liberty-and-union-now-and-forever-one-and-inseparable speeches, they
wouldn't know what he was talking about." The sage laughed and champed
his toothless jaws together, as old men do in the effort to compose
their countenances after an emotional outbreak.

"Well, for one thing," the younger observed, "they wouldn't understand
what he said. You will notice, if you listen to them going by, that
they seldom speak English. That's getting to be a dead language in New
York, though it's still used in the newspapers." He thought to hearten
the other with his whimsicality, for it seemed to him that the elder
sage was getting sensibly older since their last meeting, and that he
would be the gayer for such cheer as a man on the hither side of
eighty can offer a man on the thither. "Perhaps the Russian Jews would
appreciate Daniel if he were put into Yiddish for them. They're the
brightest intelligences among our hyphenates. And they have the
old-fashioned ideals of liberty and humanity, perhaps because they've
known so little of either."

His gaiety did not seem to enliven his senior much. "Ah, the old
ideals!" he sighed. "The old ideal of an afternoon airing was a gentle
course in an open carriage on a soft dri