s, and quartered them into the appropriate
check-square with as much grave satisfaction as he felt for the far-off
patch of Hohenzollern, or of Hapsburg in sinister chief. Pinckney had
laughed at it and referred them to the Declaration of Independence,
clause the first; but his wife had copied them from some spoon or sugar
bowl. She was very fond of Pinckney, and no more questioned him why
they always lived in Carlsruhe than a Persian would the sun for rising
east. Now and then they went to Baden, and her cup was full.

Pinckney died of a cold, unostentatiously, and was buried like a
gentleman; though the Grand Duke ac tually wanted to put the court in
mourning for three days, and consulted with his chamberlain whether it
would do. Mrs. Pinckney had preceded him by some six years; but she was
an appendage, and her husband's deference had always seemed in
Carlsruhe a trifle strained. It was only in these last six years that
any one had gossiped of remorse, in answer to the sphinx-like question
of his marble brow. Such questions vex the curious. Furrows trouble
nobody--money matters are enough f them; but white smoothness in old
age is a bait, and tickles curiosity. Some said at home he was a devil
and beat his wife.

But Pinckney never beat his wife. Late in the last twilight of her life
she had called him to her, and excluded even the four daughters, with
their stout and splendid barons; then, alone with him, she looked to
him and smiled. And suddenly his gentleman's heart took a jump, and the
tears fell on her still soft hands. I suppose some old road was opened
again in the gray matter of his brain. Mrs. Pinckney smiled the more
strongly and said--not quite so terribly as Mrs. Amos Barton: "Have I
made you happy, dearest Charles?" And Charles, the perfect-mannered,
said she had; but said it stammering. "Then," said she, "I die very
happily, dear." And she did; and Pinckney continued to live at
Carlsruhe.

The only activities of Pinckney's mind were critical. He was a
wonderful orator, but he rarely spoke. People said he could have been a
great writer, but he never wrote, at least nothing original. He was the
art and continental-drama critic of several English and American
reviews; in music, he was a Wagnerian, which debarred him from writing
of it except in German; but the little Court Theatre at Carlsruhe has
Wagner's portrait over the drop-curtain, and the consul's box was never
empty when the mighty heathen lege