"I tell you it looked like----" she said, and paused,
hesitating. Vague recollections of hymn-book phraseology came into her
mind, the only form of literary expression she knew; but they were
dismissed as being sacrilegious, and also not sufficiently forcible.
Finally, "I tell you it looked real _well!_" she assured them, and sat
staring into the fire, on her tired old face the supreme content of an
artist who has realized his ideal.

PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER

I

The news of Professor Gridley's death filled Middletown College with
consternation. Its one claim to distinction was gone, for in spite of the
excessive quiet of his private life, he had always cast about the obscure
little college the shimmering aura of greatness. There had been no
fondness possible for the austere old thinker, but Middletown village, as
well as the college, had been touched by his fidelity to the very moderate
attractions of his birthplace. When, as often happened, some famous figure
was seen on the streets, people used to say first, "Here to see old Grid,
I suppose," and then, "Funny how he sticks here. They say he was offered
seven thousand at the University of California." In the absence of any
known motive for this steadfastness, the village legend-making instinct
had evolved a theory that he did not wish to move away from a State of
which his father had been Governor, and where the name of Gridley was like
a patent of nobility.

And now he was gone, the last of the race. His disappearance caused the
usual amount of reminiscent talk among his neighbors. The older people
recalled the bygone scandals connected with his notorious and popular
father and intimated with knowing nods that there were plenty of other
descendants of the old Governor who were not entitled legally to bear the
name; but the younger ones, who had known only the severely ascetic life
and cold personality of the celebrated scholar, found it difficult to
connect him with such a father. In their talk they brought to mind the man
himself, his quiet shabby clothes, his big stooping frame, his sad black
eyes absent almost to vacancy as though always fixed on high and distant
thoughts; and those who had lived near him told laughing stories about the
crude and countrified simplicity of his old aunt's housekeeping--it was
said that the president of Harvard had been invited to join them once in a
Sunday evening meal of crackers and milk--but the general tenor of feel