ve said that the
Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By
the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a
month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or
patented device of culture.

A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered
extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway
train, the intervention of the gods in all such matters being discreetly
veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were
the merest of accidents.

One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind
of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories
attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her
parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early
manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him,
the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of
even a superior woman. But the widow was not publicly anguished. She
donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but
there was no unnecessary flaunt of crape in her decently symbolic garb.
As Aunt Delia McCormick phrased it, she was not in "heavy
mourning,"--merely "in light distress."

The town was content to let it go at that, especially after the
adjustment of certain formalities which enabled the widow for a time to
suspend her work of ministering to its higher wants.

The railway company had at first, it appeared, been disposed to view
its removal of Potts very lightly indeed; not only because of his
unimposing appearance, but by reason of his well-attested mental
condition at the time of the occurrence--a condition clearly
self-induced, and one that placed him beyond those measures of safety
which a common carrier is obliged to exercise in behalf of its patrons.

But a package of letters had been discovered among the meagre belongings
of the unfortunate man, and these had placed the matter in a very
different light. They showed conclusively that the victim had been of
importance, a citizen of rare values in any community that he might
choose to favor with his presence.

Truman Baird settled the case and, after these letters had been
appraised by the corporation's attorney, he succeeded in extorting the
sum of eight hundred dollars from the railway as recompense to the widow
for the loss of her husband's services. I co