and college-cubs, but he grappled with the time the States were too chaotic, untaught a mass for self-government; he cursed secession as anarchy, and the government at Washington for those equally anarchical, drunken whims of tyranny; he would like to see an iron heel put on the whole concern, for wholesome discipline.  The Doctor was born in one of the Border States; men there, it is said, have a sort of hand-to-mouth politics; their daily bread of rights is all they care for; so Paul seldom looked into to-morrow for anything.  In other ways, too, his birth had curdled his blood into a sensuous languor.  To-night, after McKinstry had entered the house, and he was left alone, the quaint old garden quiet, the air about him clean, pure, unperfumed, the stars distant and lonely, his limbs bedded in the clinging moss, he was rested for the moment, happy like a child, with no subtile-sensed questionings why.  The sounds of the village could not penetrate there; the content, the listless hush of the night was with him; the delicious shimmer of the trees in the starlight, the low call of the pigeon to its mate, even the fall of the catalpa-blossoms upon his hand, thrilled him with unreasoning pleasure:  a dull consciousness that the earth was alive and well, and he was glad to live with the rest.

Something in Blecker’s nature came into close rapport with the higher animal life.  If he had been born with money, and lived here in these stagnating hills, or down yonder on some lazy cotton-plantation, he would have settled down before this into a genial, child-loving, arbitrary husband and master, fond of pictures and horses, his house in decent taste, his land pleasure-giving, his wines good.  By this time he would have been Judge Blecker, with a portly voice, flushed face, and thick eyelids.  But he had scuffled and edged his way in the thin air of Connecticut as errand-boy, daguerreotypist, teacher, doctor;—­so he came into the Gurney garden that night, shrewd, defiant, priding himself on detecting shams.  His waistcoat and trousers were of coarser stuff than suited his temperament; a taint of vulgarity in his talk, his whiskers untrimmed, the meaning of his face compacted, sharpened.  It was many a year since a tear had come into his black eyes; yet tears belonged there, as much as to a woman’s.

Only for a few moments, therefore, he was contented to sit quiet in the soft gloaming:  then he puffed his cigar impatiently, watching the house.  Waiting for some one:  with no fancies about the old fort, like McKinstry.  An over-full house, with an unordered, slipshod life, hungry, clinging desperately in its poverty to an old prestige of rank, one worker inside patiently bearing the whole selfish burden.  Well, there was the history of the anxious, struggling, middle class of America:  why need he have been goaded so intolerably by this instance?  Paul’s eyes were jaundiced; he sat moodily watching the lighted window off in the darkness, through which he could