t cher want?"

"My letter."

"Ain't no letter, I told cher."

"Perhaps you will be kind enough to look at the list."

The postman, in the worst of humors, went to a drawer of his desk,
and, after much hunting about and turning over of parcels, he found a
letter which he threw out at Flint without a remark. Flint took it
also in silence, turned away and resumed his place at the end of the
line. Again he returned to his old post before the little window. This
time the postman grew purple with rage.

"Get out o' this you! What cher want now?"

"I simply wish," answered Flint, in his low, clear, gentlemanly voice,
"to tell you that you have behaved like an insolent blackguard, and
deserve to be removed from office."

Flint's words were the signal for a storm of applause from the
loiterers, and he walked out a hero. He was in a more amiable frame of
mind when he climbed into the carryall. The old horse, feeling his
head turned homeward, needed less urging than usual, and the young men
lolled back, talking busily of old times and new.

Brady was a typical business-man of the West,--cheerful, practical, a
bit boastful, square-shouldered, clear-eyed and ruddy-faced, confident
of himself, proud of his surroundings, sure that there were no
problems of earth or Heaven with which America in general, and Philip
Brady in particular, were not fitted to cope.

Before he had uttered a dozen sentences, Flint began to realize how
far apart they had drifted in the ten years since they had met. He
experienced a vaguely hopeless sense of complexity in the presence of
his friend's bustling frankness. He felt almost a hypocrite, and yet
it seemed to him that any attempt at self-revelation would be useless,
because the relative value, the _chiaro-oscuro_ of life, was so
different to each. He took refuge, as we all do under such
circumstances, in objectivity--asked heartily for the health of each
member of Brady's family, listened with polite interest to the
statistics of the growth of Bison, and then began to wonder what he
should talk about next. As he cast his eye downward, a very practical
subject suggested itself, for he saw with dismay that the cork was
out of the molasses jug, from which the sticky fluid had already oozed
forth, and was rapidly spreading itself over the floor of the
carryall.

"This is what comes of being obliging. Just look at this mess! What in
time are we going to do about it, Brady?"

Brady, being a man