sed their eyes.

When the survey was done they made a large colored map of everything,
and John kept it in a long tin tube--what rare times he was not looking
at it.

"How short-sighted most men are! They'll have lands to dispose of and
yet not have maps made! How the devil do they expect ever"--etc.
Sometimes he smiled to himself as he rolled the gorgeous thing up, but
only as we smile at the oddities of one whom we admire.

He opened an office. It contained a mantel-piece, a desk, four chairs, a
Winchester rifle, and a box of cigars. The hearth and mantel-piece were
crowded with specimens of earths, ores, and building stones, and of
woods precious to the dyer, the manufacturer, the joiner and the
cabinet-maker. Inside the desk lay the map whenever he was, and a
revolver whenever he was not--"Out. Will be back in a few minutes."

On the desk's top were more specimens, three or four fat old books from
Widewood, and on one corner, by the hour, his own feet, in tight boots,
when he read Washington's Letters, Story on the Constitution, or the
Geology of Dixie. What interested Suez most of all was his sign. It
professed no occupation. "John March." That was all it proclaimed, for a
time, in gilt, on a field of blue smalts. But one afternoon when he
was--"Out of town. Will be back Friday"--some Rosemont boys scratched in
the smalts the tin word, Gentleman.

"Let it alone, John," said the next day's _Courier_. "It's a good ad.,
and you can live up to it." It stayed.

XXXVII.

WISDOM AND FAITH KISS EACH OTHER

It came to pass in those days that an effort to start a religious
revival issued from Suez "University." It seems the "Black-and-Tannery,"
as the Rosemont boys called it, was having such increase in numbers that
its president had thought well to give the national thanks-giving day
special emphasis on the devotional side. Prayer for gifts of grace to
crown these temporal good fortunes extended over into a second and third
evening, black young women and tan young men asked to be prayed for, the
president "wired" glad news to the board in New York, the board "wired"
back, "Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward!"--just
ten words, economy is the road to commendation--meetings were continued,
and the gray-headed black janitor, richest man in the institution,
leading in prayer, promised that if the Lord would "come down" then and
there, "right thoo de roof," he himself would pay for the shingle