A Certain Rich Man Part 38

We will give our cinematograph one more whirl. A day, a week, a month, have gone, and we may glimpse the parliament for the last time. Watts McHurdie is reading aloud, slowly and rather painfully, a news item from the _Banner_. Two vacant chairs are formally backed to the wall, and in a third sits General Ward. At the end of a column-long article Watts drones out:--

"And there was considerable adverse comment in the city over the fact that the deceased was sent here for burial from the National Soldiers'

Home at Leavenworth, in a shabby, faded blue army uniform of most ancient vintage. Surely this great government can afford better shrouds than that for its soldier dead."

Watts lays down the paper and wipes his spectacles, and finally he says:--

"And Neal wrote that?"

"And Neal wrote that," replies the general.

"And was born and bred in the Ridge," complains McHurdie.

"Born and bred in the Ridge," responds the general.

Watts puts on his gla.s.ses and fumbles for some piece of his work on the bench. Then he shakes his head sadly and says, after drawing a deep breath, "Well, it's a new generation, General, a new generation."

There follows a silence, during which Watts works on mending some bit of harness, and the general reads the evening paper. The late afternoon sun is slanting into the shop. At length the general speaks.

"Yes," he says, "but it's a fine town after all. It was worth doing. I wake up early these days, and often of a fine spring morning I go out to call on the people on the Hill."

McHurdie nods his comprehension.

"Yes," continues the general, "and I tell them all about the new improvements. There are more of us out on the Hill now than in town, Watts; I spent some time with David Frye and Henry Schnitzler and Jim Lord Lee this morning, and called on General Hendricks for a little while."

"Did you find him sociable?" asks the poet, grinning up from his bench.

"Oh, so-so--about as usual," answers the general.

"He was always a proud one," comments Watts. "Will Henry Schnitzler be stiff-necked about his monument there by the gate?" asks the little Scotchman.

"Inordinately, Watts, inordinately! The pride of that man is something terrible."

The two old men chuckle at the foolery of the moment. The general folds away the evening paper and rises to go.

"Watts," he says, "I have lived seventy-eight years to find out just one thing."

"And what will that be?" asks the harness maker.

"This," beams the old man, as he puts his spectacle case in his black silk coat; "that the more we give in this world, the more we take from it; and the more we keep for ourselves, the less we take." And smiling at his paradox, he goes through the shop into the sunset.

The air is vocal with the home-bound traffic of the day. Cars are crowded; delivery wagons rattle home; buggies clatter by on the pavements; one hears the whisper of a thousand feet treading the hot, crowded street. But Watts works on. So let us go in to bid him a formal good-by. The tinkling door-bell will bring out a bent little old man, with grimy fingers, who will put up his gla.s.ses to peer at our faces, and who will pause a moment to try to recollect us. He will talk about John Barclay.

"Yes, yes, I knew him well," says McHurdie; "there by the door hangs a whip he made as a boy. We used to play on that accordion in the case there. Oh, yes, yes, he was well thought of; we are a neighbourly people--maybe too much so. Yes, yes, he died a brave death, and the papers seemed to think his act of sacrifice showed the world a real man--and he was that,--he was surely that, was John; yes, he was a real man. You ask about his funeral? It was a fine one--a grand funeral--every hack in town out--every high-stepping horse out; and the flowers--from all over the world they came--the flowers were most beautiful. But there are funerals and funerals. There was Martin Culpepper's--not so many hacks, not so many high-stepping horses, but the old buggies, and the farm wagons, and the little n.i.g.g.e.r carts--and man, man alive, the tears, the tears!"

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