ood a moment in silence before the woman said
emphatically, "No--no! Martin Culpepper, God is keeping your books!"

The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes.
"Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so," he said. The smile fell into his
countenance as he added, "That is why I have gone so long without a
settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too." Then he turned
to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk,
broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a
fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart.

And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich
Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain
delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a
shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in
this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his
life here, and as for the others,--the colonel and Jake and the general
and Watts, and even Molly,--what do these people mean to you, these
common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their
rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not
scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden
your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in
evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there
is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair,
sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the basement of the court-house, with
the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat.
Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through,
patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and
without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending
an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the basement of a
court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of
Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly
inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and
is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of
a little table beside the cot,--a table with Bob Hendricks' picture,
framed in plush, sitting on the top,--now Mr. Dolan takes from the
drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his
particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it