sort, and the necessity for self-examination was novel and
disagreeable to him.

* * * * *

Life lived itself out at Jacob Dolph's new house whether he liked it or
not. The furniture came up-town, and was somewhat awkwardly disposed
about its new quarters; and in this unhomelike combination of two homes
old Mr. Dolph sat himself down to finish his stint of life. He awoke
each morning and found that twenty-four hours of sleep and waking lay
before him, to be got through in their regular order, just as they were
lived through by men who had an interest in living. He went to bed every
night, and crossed off one from a tale of days of which he could not
know the length.

Of course his son, in some measure, saved his existence from emptiness.
He was proud of young Jacob--fond and proud. He looked upon him as a
prince of men, which he was, indeed. He trusted absolutely in the young
man, and his trust was well placed. And he knew that his boy loved him.
But he had an old man's sad consciousness that he was not necessary to
Jacob--that he was an adjunct, at the best, not an integral part of this
younger existence. He saw Jacob the younger gradually recovering from
his grief for the mother who had left them; and he knew that even so
would Jacob some day recover from grief when his father should have
gone.

He saw this; but it is doubtful if he felt it acutely. Nature was
gradually dulling his sensibilities with that wonderful anaesthetic of
hers, which is so much kinder to the patient than it is to his watching
friends. After the first wild freak of selling the house, he showed, for
a long time, no marked signs of mental impairment, beyond his lack of
interest in the things which he had once cared about--even in the growth
of the city he loved. And in a lonely and unoccupied man, sixty-five
years of age, this was not unnatural. It was not unnatural, even, if now
and then he was whimsical, and took odd fancies and prejudices. But
nevertheless the work was going on within his brain, little by little,
day by day.

He settled his life into an almost mechanical routine, of which the most
active part was his daily walk down into the city. At first he would not
go beyond St. Paul's churchyard; but after awhile he began to take
timorous strolls among the old business streets where his life had been
passed. He would drop into the offices of his old friends, and would
read the market reports with a pre