ltivated circles. Both were
acquaintances made by Mr. Hamilton on a recent visit to Harvard.
He found it agreeable to have a few friends with whom he could have
scholarly talk.

The three watched the procession winding through the mourning streets.
Every house was draped in funeral black, the passing bell tolled from
every church, and the minute-guns boomed at the City Hall and on Capitol
Hill. Mr. Hamilton regarded the cortege at first with a critical eye.
The events of the past week had wrought in him a great expectation,
which he feared would be disappointed. It needed a long tradition to do
fitting honour to the man who had gone. Had America such a tradition? he
asked himself.... The coloured troops marching at the head of the line
pleased him. That was a happy thought. He liked, too, the business-like
cavalry and infantry, and the battered field-pieces.... He saw his Chief
among the foreign Ministers, bearing a face of portentous solemnity....
But he liked best the Illinois and Kentucky delegates; he thought the
dead President would have liked them too.

Major Endicott was pointing out the chief figures. "There's Grant...
and Stanton, looking more cantankerous than ever. They say he's
brokenhearted." But Mr. Hamilton had no eye for celebrities. He was
thinking rather of those plain mourners from the west, and of the
poorest house in Washington decked with black. This is a true national
sorrow, he thought. He had been brought up as a boy from Eton to see
Wellington's funeral, and the sight had not impressed him like this. For
the recent months had awakened odd emotions in his orderly and somewhat
cynical soul. He had discovered a hero.

The three bared their heads as the long line filed by. Mr. Lowell said
nothing. Now and then he pulled at his moustaches as if to hide some
emotion which clamoured for expression. The mourners passed into the
Capitol, while the bells still tolled and the guns boomed. The cavalry
escort formed up on guard; from below came the sound of sharp commands.

Mr. Hamilton was shaken out of the admirable detachment which he had
cultivated. He wanted to sit down and sob like a child. Some brightness
had died in the air, some great thing had gone for ever from the world
and left it empty. He found himself regarding the brilliant career
which he had planned for himself with a sudden disfavour. It was
only second-rate after all, that glittering old world of courts and
legislatures and embassie