he would have put
cupid in side whiskers and a white necktie and set the fat little god to
measuring shingle nails, cod-fish and calico on week days and sitting
around in a tail coat and mouse-colored trousers on Sunday, reading the
_Christian Evangel_ and the _Price Current_. And again there
was Daniel Sands who married five women in a long and more or less
useful life. He would have defined love as the apotheosis of comfort.
Finally there was Henry Fenn to whom love became the compelling force of
his being. Love is many things: indeed only this seems sure. Love is the
current of our lives, and like minnows we run in schools through it,
guided by instinct and by herd suggestions; and some of us are washed
ashore; some of us are caught and devoured, and others fare forth in joy
and reach the deep.

One rainy day when the conclave in Brotherton's cigar store was weary of
discussing the quarrel of Mr. Conklin and Mr. Blaine and the
eccentricities of the old German Kaiser, the subject of love came before
the house for discussion. Dr. Nesbit, who dropped in incidentally to buy
a cigar, but primarily to see George Brotherton about some matters of
state in the Third ward, found young Tom Van Dorn stroking his new silky
mustache, squinting his eyes and considering himself generally in the
attitude of little Jack Horner after the plum episode.

"Speaking broadly," squeaked the Doctor, breaking irritably into the
talk, "touching the ladies, God bless 'em--from young Tom's angle,
there's nothing to 'em. Broad is the petticoat that leadeth to
destruction." The Doctor turned from young Van Dorn, and looked
critically at some obvious subject of Van Dorn's remarks as she picked
her way across the muddy street, showing something more than a wink of
striped stockings, "Tom, there's nothing in it--not a thing in the
world."

"Oh,--I don't know," returned the youth, wagging an impudent, though
good-natured head at the Doctor; "what else is there in the world if not
in that? The world's full of it--flowers, trees, birds, beasts, men and
women--the whole damn universe is afire with it. It's God; there is no
other God--just nature building and propagating and perpetuating
herself."

"I suppose," squeaked the Doctor with a sigh, as he reached for his
morning paper, "that if I had nothing else to do for a living except
practice law with Joe Calvin on the side and just be twenty-five years
old three hundred days in the year, and no other