hat he saw was not
there at all, but only appeared on his retina; the two forms that he
seemed to see were not shivering through the twilight, but were
walking among dahlias and coxcombs and four-o'clocks and petunias and
poppies and hollyhocks on a wide lawn whereon newly set elm trees were
fluttering their faint green foliage in the summer breeze. Yet John
Barclay would have sworn he saw them there in the cold street, with
the mist beating upon them, and curiously corroborative of this
impression is a memory he retained of reflecting that since the
general's blue overcoat had disappeared the winter before, he had
noticed that little Thayer had a blue Sunday suit and little Elizabeth
Cady Stanton had appeared wrapped in a blue baby coat. But that only
shows how these matter-of-fact people are fooled. For though the
little Wards were caparisoned in blue, and though the general's blue
overcoat did disappear about that time, the general and Lucy Ward have
no recollection of shivering home that night, but instead they know
that they walked among the flowers.

And John, looking into the darkening street, must have seen something
besides the commonplace couple that he thought he saw; for as he
turned away to light his lamp and go to work again, he smiled. Surely
there was nothing to smile at in the thing he saw. Perhaps God was
trying to make him see the flowers. But he did not see them, and as it
was nearly an hour before six o'clock, he turned to his work under the
lamp and finished his letter to Bob Hendricks. When it was written, he
read it over carefully, crossing his "t's" and dotting his "i's," and
as no one was in the room he mumbled it aloud, thus:--

"DEAR BOB:--Don't get blue; it will be all right. Stick to it. I am
laying a wire that will get you an audience with Jay Gould. Make the
talk of your life there. You may be able to interest him--if just
for a few dollars. Offer him anything. Give him the stock if he will
let us use his name.

"Don't get uneasy about Molly, Bob. Jane and I see that she goes to
everything, and we've scared her up a kind of brevet beau--an old
rooster named Brownwell--Adrian Pericles Brownwell, who has blown in
here and bought the _Banner_ from Ezra Lane. Brownwell is from
Alabama. Do you remember, Bob, that day at Wilson's Creek after we
got separated in the Battle I ran into a pile of cavalry writhing in
a road? Well, there was one face