al apathy had deserted him, and he had reached the painful
decision that when you looked things squarely in the face there was
precious little that was worth living for--a conclusion to which he had
been brought by the simple accident of an overdose of Kentucky rye in
his mint julep after church. The overdose had sent him to sleep too soon
after his Sunday dinner, and when he had awakened from his heavy and by
no means quiet slumber, he had found himself confronting a world of
gloom.

"I'm damned tired making the best of things, if you want to know what is
the matter with me," he had remarked crossly to his wife.

"The idea, Mr. Peachey! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!" that
sprightly lady had responded while she prepared herself for her victory
over Cyrus.

"Well, I ain't," honest Tom had retorted. "I've gone on pretending for
fifty years and I'm going to stop it. What good has it done, anyway? It
hasn't put a roof on, has it?"

"I told you you oughtn't to go to sleep right on top of your dinner,"
she had replied soothingly. "I declare you're perfectly purple. I never
saw you so upset. Here, take this palm-leaf fan and go and see if you
can't find a draught. You know it's downright sinful to talk that way
after the Lord has been so good to you."

But Philosophy, though she is unassailable when she clings to her
safeguard of the universal, meets her match whenever she descends to an
open engagement with the particular.

"W-what's He done for me?" demanded not Tom, but the whiskey inside of
him.

Driven against that bleak rock of fact upon which so many shining
generalizations have come to wreck, Mrs. Peachey had cast about
helplessly for some floating spar of logic which might bear her to the
firm ground of established optimism. "I declare, Tom, I believe you are
out of your head!" she exclaimed, adding immediately, "You ought to be
ashamed of yourself to be so ungrateful when the good Lord has kept you
out of the poorhouse. If you weren't tipsy, I'd give you a hard shaking.
Now, you take that palm-leaf fan and go right straight downstairs."

So Tom had gone, for his wife, who lacked the gift of argument,
possessed the energy of character which renders such minor attributes
unnecessary; and Oliver, passing through the hall a couple of hours
later, found him still helplessly seeking the draught towards which she
had directed him.

"Any chance of a breeze springing up?" inquired the young man as they
move