I went back into the counting-house, and was struck with the grim sadness of face of our junior partner.  He had taken up a paper and affected to be reading, but, as I saw, was staring into space.  Our senior said something to him about Old Tom, but he answered in an absent way, as one who half hears or half heeds.  In a few moments he looked up at the clock, which was on the stroke of twelve, and seeing me ready, hat in hand, to return home for our one-o’clock dinner, he gathered himself up, as it were, limb by limb, and taking his wide-brimmed hat brushed it absently with his sleeve.  Then he looked at it a moment with a half smile, put it on decisively and went out and away up Arch street with swifter and swifter strides.  By and by he said, “You do not walk as well as usual.”

“But,” said I, “no one could keep up with you.”

“Do not try to:  leave a sore man to nurse his hurts.  I suppose you saw my folly on the wharf—­saw how I forgot myself?”

“Ach!” said Schmidt, who had toiled after us hot and red, and who now slipped his quaint form in between us—­“Ach!  ‘You forgot yourself.’  This say you.  I do think you did remember your true self for a time this morning.”

“Hush!  I am a man ashamed.  Let us talk no more of it.  I have ill kept my faith,” returned Wholesome impatiently.

“You may believe God doth not honor an honest man,” said Schmidt; “which is perhaps a God Quaker, not the God I see to myself.”

I had so far kept my peace, noting the bitter self-reproach of Wholesome, and having a lad’s shyness before an older man’s calamity; but now I said indignantly, “If it be Friends’ creed to see the poor and old and feeble hurt without raising a hand, let us pray to be saved from such religion.”

“But,” said Wholesome, “I should have spoken to him in kindness first.  Now I have only made of him a worse beast, and taught him more hatred.  And he of all men!”

“There is much salvation in some mistakes,” said Schmidt smiling.

Just then we were stopped by two middle-aged Friends in drab of orthodox tint, from which now-a-days Friends have much fallen away into gay browns and blacks.  They asked a question or two about an insurance on one of our ships; and then the elder said, “Thee hand seems bleeding, friend Richard;” which was true:  he had cut his knuckles on his opponent’s teeth, and around them had wrapped hastily a handkerchief which showed stains of blood here and there.

“Ach!” said Schmidt, hastening to save his friend annoyance.  “He ran against something.—­And how late is it!  Let us go.”

But Wholesome, who would have no man lie ever so little for his benefit, said quietly, “I hurt it knocking a man down;” and now for the first time to-day I observed the old amused look steal over his handsome face and set it a-twitching with some sense of humor as he saw the shock which went over the faces of the two elders when we bade them good-morning and turned away.