of these earlier exiles.  Fully half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway—­there were two naming the very parish adjoining his.  The latest date on any stone was of the remoter ’fifties.  They had all been stricken down, here in this strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them.  Musing upon the clumsy sculpture, with its “R.I.P.,” or “Pray for the Soul of,” half to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.  What had happened between was a meaningless vision—­as impersonal as the passing of the planets overhead.  He rarely had an impulse to tears in the new cemetery, where his ten children were.  He never left this weed-grown, forsaken old God’s-acre dry-eyed.

One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as his fellows met and knew him.  Mr. Madden kept his griefs, racial and individual, for his own use.  To the men about him in the offices and the shops he presented day after day, year after year, an imperturbable cheeriness of demeanor.  He had been always fortunate in the selection of lieutenants and chief helpers.  Two of these had grown now into partners, and were almost as much a part of the big enterprise as Jeremiah himself.  They spoke often of their inability to remember any unjust or petulant word of his—­much less any unworthy deed.  Once they had seen him in a great rage, all the more impressive because he said next to nothing.  A thoughtless fellow told a dirty story in the presence of some apprentices; and Madden, listening to this, drove the offender implacably from his employ.  It was years now since any one who knew him had ventured upon lewd pleasantries in his hearing.  Jokes of the sort which women might hear he was very fond of though he had not much humor of his own.  Of books he knew nothing whatever, and he made only the most perfunctory pretence now and again of reading the newspapers.

The elder son Michael was very like his father—­diligent, unassuming, kindly, and simple—­a plain, tall, thin red man of nearly thirty, who toiled in paper cap and rolled-up shirt-sleeves as the superintendent in the saw-mill, and put on no airs whatever as the son of the master.  If there was surprise felt at his not being taken into the firm as a partner, he gave no hint of sharing it.  He attended to his religious duties with great zeal, and was President of the Sodality as a matter of course.  This was regarded as his blind side; and young employees who cultivated it, and made broad their phylacteries under his notice, certainly had an added chance of getting on well in the works.  To some few whom he knew specially well, Michael would confess that if he had had the brains for it, he should have wished to be a priest.  He displayed no inclination to marry.