man without first asking my opinion of him."

"Then you're fortunate," commented Cyrus dryly, "for I don't believe
Susan would give a red cent for what I'd think if she once took a fancy.
She'd as soon elope with that wild-eyed scamp as eat her dinner, if it
once entered her head."

A knock came at the door, and Smithson entered and conferred with his
employer over a telegram, while Gabriel rose to his feet.

"By the way," said Cyrus, turning abruptly from his secretary and
stopping the rector as he was about to pass out of the door, "I was just
wondering if you remembered the morning after Lee's surrender, when we
started home on the road together?"

"Why, yes." There was a note of surprise in Gabriel's answer, for he
remembered, also, that he had sold his watch a little later in the day
to a Union soldier, and had divided the eighty dollars with Cyrus. For
an instant, he almost believed that the other was going to allude for
the first time to that incident.

"Well, I've never forgotten that green persimmon tree by the roadside,"
pursued the great man, "and the way you stopped under it and said, 'O
Lord, wilt Thou not work a miracle and make persimmons ripen in the
spring?'"

"No, I'd forgotten it," rejoined Gabriel coolly, for he was hurt by the
piece of flippancy and was thinking the worst of Cyrus again.

"You'd forgotten it? Well, I've a long memory, and I never forget.
That's one thing you may count on me for," he added, "a good memory. As
for John Henry--I'll see James about it. I'll see what James has to
say."

When Gabriel had gone, accompanied as far as the outer door by the
secretary, Cyrus turned back to the window, and stood gazing over a
steep street or two, and past the gabled roof of an old stone house, to
where in the distance the walls of the new building of the Treadwell
Tobacco Company were rising. Around the skeleton structure he could see
the workmen moving like ants, while in a widening circle of air the
smoke of other factories floated slowly upward under a brazen sky.
"There are too many of them," he thought bitterly. "It's competition
that kills. There are too many of them."

So rapt was his look while he stood there that there came into his face
an expression of yearning sentiment that made it almost human. Then his
gaze wandered to the gleaming tracks of the two great railroads which
ran out of Dinwiddie toward the north, uncoiling their length like
serpents between the broad fiel