ew words, because anything
that he might have done was now history; later generations, he said,
might read it but it was not for him to speak of it, because it belonged
now to the history of the country. And, after them, others spoke in the
same strain and all refused absolutely to dwell on the subject (for more
than half an hour) on the ground that anything that they might have done
was better left for future generations to investigate. And no doubt this
was very true, as to some things, anyway.

Mr. Smith, of course, said nothing. He didn't have to,--not for four
years,--and he knew it.

TWELVE. L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa

It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, the
train for Mariposa.

Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little
town--or did, long years ago.

Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there
every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you
might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not "home,"--of course
you couldn't call it "home" now; "home" means that big red sandstone
house of yours in the costlier part of the city. "Home" means, in a way,
this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me of the times that
you had as a boy in Mariposa.

But of course "home" would hardly be the word you would apply to the
little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sitting
reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.

Naturally you don't know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when you
first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew of it
well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in those days,
and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it, but sometimes
from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the station on a
Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa people getting
on the train and wish that you could go.

Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any other
single thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town in the
sunshine that it ran to.

Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to plan
that just as soon as you were rich, really rich, you'd go back home
again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine
verandah,--no stint about it, the best that money could buy, planed
lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fen