or the upholder of a court etiquette for whose use he has
chosen to desecrate the name of justice!

To return to Dr. Anderson. I have had little opportunity of knowing his
history in India. He returned from it half-way down the hill of life,
sad, gentle, kind, and rich. Whence his sadness came, we need not
inquire. Some woman out in that fervid land may have darkened his
story--darkened it wronglessly, it may be, with coldness, or only with
death. But to return home without wife to accompany him or child to
meet him,--to sit by his riches like a man over a fire of straws in a
Siberian frost; to know that old faces were gone and old hearts changed,
that the pattern of things in the heavens had melted away from the face
of the earth, that the chill evenings of autumn were settling down
into longer and longer nights, and that no hope lay any more beyond the
mountains--surely this was enough to make a gentle-minded man sad, even
if the individual sorrows of his history had gathered into gold and
purple in the west. I say west advisedly. For we are journeying, like
our globe, ever towards the east. Death and the west are behind us--ever
behind us, and settling into the unchangeable.

It was natural that he should be interested in the fine promise of
Robert, in whom he saw revived the hopes of his own youth, but in a
nature at once more robust and more ideal. Where the doctor was refined,
Robert was strong; where the doctor was firm with a firmness he had
cultivated, Robert was imperious with an imperiousness time would
mellow; where the doctor was generous and careful at once, Robert
gave his mite and forgot it. He was rugged in the simplicity of his
truthfulness, and his speech bewrayed him as altogether of the people;
but the doctor knew the hole of the pit whence he had been himself
digged. All that would fall away as the spiky shell from the polished
chestnut, and be reabsorbed in the growth of the grand cone-flowering
tree, to stand up in the sun and wind of the years a very altar of
incense. It is no wonder, I repeat, that he loved the boy, and longed to
further his plans. But he was too wise to overwhelm him with a cataract
of fortune instead of blessing him with the merciful dew of progress.

'The fellow will bring me in for no end of expense,' he said, smiling to
himself, as he drove home in his chariot. 'The less he means it the more
unconscionable he will be. There's that Ericson--but that isn't
worth thinking