be, and perhaps in Washington they disguise some of the matters
which we treat bluntly and openly. There's Kitty Dunlevy, you know,
and she is a little proud."

The glazed, whitish eye of Jabel bore the similitude of a beam of
satisfaction.

"It's nothing agin you boys," he said, "that Jim MacNair, your father,
didn't do well. He wronged nobody but himself, as I made the
stonecutter say over his grave. _That_ cost me upwards of eleven
dollars, so I did _my_ duty by him. You boys don't seem to have his
appetite for liquor. You are a member of Congress, and Elk was one of
the bravest ginerals in the war; and I don't see, if he saves his
money and his health, but he is good enough even for Judge Dunlevy's
girl."

Judge Dunlevy was the beau ideal of Jabel Blake, as the one eminent
local statesman of the region round Ross Valley--the County Judge when
Jabel was a child, the Supreme Justice of the State, and now a
District Justice of the United States in a distant field. His
reputation for purity, dignity, original social consideration, moral
intrepidity, and direct Scotch sagacity had made his name a tower of
strength in his native State. To Jabel's clannish and religious nature
Judge Dunlevy represented the loftiest possibilities of human
character; and that one of the two poor orphans--the sons of a
wood-cutter and log-roller on the Alleghenies, and the victim of
intemperance at last--whom Jabel had watched and partly reared,
should now be betrothed to Catharine Dunlevy, the judge's only
daughter, affected every remaining sentiment in Jabel's heart.

Absorbed in the contemplation of this honorable alliance, Jabel took
out his account-book and absently cast up the additions, and so the
long delay at Baltimore caused no remarks and the landscapes slipped
by until, like the sharp oval of a colossal egg, the dome of the
Capitol arose above the vacant lots of the suburbs of Washington.

A tall, handsome, manly gentleman in citizen black, standing
expectantly on the platform of the station, came up and greeted
MacNair with the word,

"Arthur!"

"Elk!"

And the brothers, legislator and soldier, stood contrasted as they
clasped hands with the fondness of orphans of the same blood. They had
no superficial resemblances, Arthur being small, clerical, freckled,
and red-haired, with a staid face and dress and a stunted, ill-fed
look, like the growth of an ungracious soil; Elk, straight and tall,
with the breeding and clothi