s to have had any special form of burial, the old patriarch at once
recalled his promise.

"Where is his body?" he asked.

"Why, they buried it under the old white oak over at Mt. Horeb Church,"
was the answer.

"What!" he exclaimed, too astonished to think of anything save his lost
privilege of mercy, "who told them to bury him there?"

"Why, _he_ did," said the friend. "It was his last wish, I believe."

"The confounded villain," he shouted, amusingly enough. "He led me to
believe that I was the only one he told. I alone was to have looked
after his burial, and now look at him--going and having himself buried
without a word. The scoundrel! Would you believe that an old friend like
Uncle Bobby would do anything like that? However," he added after a
time, "I think I know how it was. He got so old and feeble here of late
that he must have lost his mind--otherwise he would never have done
anything like that to me."

And with this he was satisfied to rest and let bygones be bygones.

_De Maupassant, Junior_

He dawned on me in the spring of 1906, a stocky, sturdy, penetrative
temperament of not more than twenty-four or -five years of age, steady of
eye, rather aloof and yet pervasive and bristling; a devouring type.
Without saying much, and seeming to take anything I had to say with a
grain of salt, he managed to impress himself on me at once. Frankly, I
liked him very much, although I could see at a glance that he was not so
very much impressed with me. I was an older man than he by, say, ten
years, an editor of an unimportant magazine, newly brought in (which he
did not know) to turn it into something better. In order to earn a few
dollars he had undertaken to prepare for the previous editor a most
ridiculous article, some silly thing about newspaper writing as a career
for women. It had been ordered or encouraged, and I felt that it was but
just that it should be paid for.

"Why do you waste your time on a thing like that?" I inquired, smiling
and trying to criticize and yet encourage him at one and the same time,
for I had been annoyed by many similar assignments given out by the old
management which could not now be used. "You look to me to have too much
force and sense for that. Why not undertake something worth your time?"

"My time, hell!" he bristled, like a fighting sledge-dog, of which by
the way he reminded me. "You show me a magazine in this town that would
buy anything that I thought worthy