man and nature
seemed utterly oblivious of the great event that had happened. The
course of human events was not changed; the great world rolled on, while
Priscilla Winthrop went home to a broken shrine to sit among the
potsherds.

XV

"And Yet a Fool"

The exchanges that come to a country newspaper like ours become familiar
friends as the years pass. One who reads these papers regularly comes to
know them even in their wrappers, though to an unpracticed eye the
wrappers seem much alike. But when he has been poking his thumb through
the paper husks in a certain pile every morning for a score of years, he
knows by some sort of prescience when a new paper appears; and, when the
pile looks odd to him, he goes hunting for the stranger and is not happy
until he has found it.

One morning this spring the stranger stuck its head from the bottom of
the exchange pile, and when we had glanced at the handwriting of the
address and at the one-cent stamp on the cover we knew it had been
mailed to us by someone besides the publisher. For the newspaper "hand"
is as definite a form of writing as the legal hand or the doctor's. The
paper proved to be an Arizona newspaper full of saloon advertising,
restaurant cards, church and school meeting notices, local items about
the sawmill and the woman's club, land notices and paid items from wool
dealers. On the local page in the midst of a circle of red ink was the
announcement of the death of Horace P. Sampson. Every month we get
notices like this, of the deaths of old settlers who have gone to the
ends of the earth, but this notice was peculiar in that it said:

"One year ago our lamented townsman deposited with the firm of Cross &
Kurtz, the popular undertakers and dealers in Indian goods and general
merchandise, $100 to cover his funeral expenses, and another hundred to
provide that a huge boulder be rolled over his grave on which he desired
the following unusual inscription: '_Horace P. Sampson, Born Dec. 6,
1840, and died ----." And is not this a rare fellow, my lord? He's good
at anything and yet a fool._"'"

We handed the paper to Alphabetical Morrison, who happened to be in the
office at the time, pawing through the discarded exchanges in the
waste-basket, looking for his New York _Sun_, and, after Colonel
Morrison had read the item, he began drumming with his finger-nails on
the chair-seat between his knees. His eyes were full of dreams and no
one disturbed him as he