ly. It's a miserable business for this April day. Now,
I don't want to advise, but shall we drive out on the Wissahickon and
fish a bit? You'll catch a perch, and Jane shall broil it over the
coals, eh?"

"Oh, of course I'm going through with it," scowling and blinking through
his eye-glasses. "But we are ten minutes before the time. I can't sit in
a draughty room waiting. Tell David to drive slowly down the road until
four, Captain Swendon."

"Certainly, certainly," with the nervous conciliatory haste of a man
long used to being snubbed.--"You hear Mr. Laidley, David?--We'll
arrange it in this way, then. Miss Fleming and I will stroll down the
road, William, until the time is up.--No, Jane," as his daughter was
going to leave the carriage. "Stay with your cousin." The captain was
his peremptory self again. Like every man conscious of his own
inability, he asserted himself by incessant managing and meddling for
his neighbors.

The carriage jolted down the rutted road. The little man inside tossed
on the well-padded cushions, and moaned and puffed spasmodically at his
cigar.

Buff and David, stiff in green and gold on the box, nodded significantly
at each other. "He's nigh unto de end," said Buff. "De gates of glory am
creakin' foh him."

"Creakin', shore nuff. But 'bout de glory I'm not so shore. Yoh see, I
knows," rubbing his gray whiskers with the end of the whip. "I have him
in charge. Mass' Swendon gib orders: 'Yoh stick by him, Dave.' 'S got no
friends: 's got no backbone. Why, wid a twinge ob toothache he squirms
like an eel in de fire--swears to make de debbil turn pale. It'll be an
awful sight when Death gits a holt on him. But I'll stick."

Captain Swendon and Miss Fleming, left alone under the pines, both
turned and looked at the house as if it were an open grave.

"So it is here the dead are to come back?" said the captain with a
feebly-jocular giggle. "We'll go down the road a bit. 'Pon my soul, the
atmosphere here is ghastly."

They struck into the meadows, sauntered through a strip of woodland
where the sparrows were chirping in the thin green boughs overhead, and,
crossing some newly-ploughed fields, came suddenly upon a row of
contract-houses, bold, upright in the mud, aggressively new and genteel.
They were tricked out with thin marble facings and steps. A drug-shop
glittered already at one end of the block, and a milliner's furbelowed
window closed the other with a red-lettered sign, which mi