to be a breach of etiquette of unpardonable grossness.

One day he had started in Nicholas his old political dreams of
Jeffersonian lustre.

"Virginia is not dead but sleepeth," the judge had said, as a prelude to
denunciation of the Readjuster party then in power.

Nicholas was looking at a collection of autograph letters that lay on
the judge's desk. He glanced up with an impulsive start.

"Oh, but I should like to have lived then!" he exclaimed.

The older man shook his head.

"It is not the times, but the man," he answered. "The time makes the
man, the great man makes his time."

He leaned his massive old head against the carved back of his chair and
looked at the other in his kindly, unambitious optimism. He had lost
most that the world accounts of worth, but life had dealt gently by him,
on the whole, since it had never infringed upon the sensitiveness of his
self-esteem.

"It's rough on the man," Nicholas returned brusquely, and a little later
he went out into the night. He had his periods of depression, when
desire seemed greater than duty, as he had his periods of exaltation,
when duty seemed greater than desire. Neither affected, to outward
seeming, the course of his life, but each left its mark upon his mental
forces. The chief thing was that he did the work he hated as thoroughly
as he did the work he loved.

The spring ripened into summer and the summer chilled into autumn. He
had kept rigidly to his way and to his resolutions. From neither had he
swerved in one regard. His stepmother, fixing sharp, tired eyes upon him
mentally drafted, "After all's said an' done, the Lord knows best." She
believed him to be content, as she had reason to, for he gave no outward
uneasy sign. When his small savings had paid off Amos Burr's little
debt, and they started, unhandicapped, upon their shaky progress, it
seemed to her that she was justified in commending, for the second time,
the visible methods of Providence--a commendation which faltered only
before a threatening twinge of neuralgia.

Early in October the judge, whose practice was drawn largely from other
sections of the State, left home for an absence of several weeks. Upon
his return he sent for Nicholas in the early afternoon, an unusual
happening. The young man, dropping in at two o'clock, found him at work
in his library before the early dinner, a generous mint julep upon a
silver tray on his desk. Caesar was an acknowledged artist in the mixing