“Condor,” continued the General, “I’ve had enough of it.  I’m going to back out.  I’d rather sweep the streets.”

General Belch spoke emphatically, and his friend turned toward him with a pleasant smile.

“Can you make so much in any other way?”

“Perhaps not.  But I’d rather make less, and more comfortably.”

“I find it perfectly comfortable,” replied William Condor.  “You take it too hard.  You ought to manage it with less friction.  The point is, to avoid friction.  If you undertake to deal with men, you ought to understand just what they are.”

Mr. Condor smoked serenely, and General Belch looked at his slim, clean figure, and his calm face, with curious admiration.

“By-the-by,” said Condor, “when you introduce the resolutions, I shall second them with a few remarks.”

And he did so.  At the meeting of the Committee he rose and enforced them with a few impressive and pertinent words.

“Gratitude,” he said, “is instinctive in the human breast.  When a man does well, or promises well, it is natural to regard him with interest and affection.  The fidelity of our departed brother is worthy of our most affectionate admiration and imitation.  If you ask me whether he had faults, I answer that he was a man.  Who so is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”

On the same day the Honorable B. Jawley Ele rose in his place in Congress to announce the calamity in which the whole country shared, and to move an adjournment in respect for the memory of his late colleague—­“a man endeared to us all by the urbanity of his deportment and his social graces; but to me especially, by the kindness of his heart and the readiness of his sympathy.”

Abel Newt was buried from his father’s house.  There were not many gathered at the service in the small, plain rooms.  Fanny Dinks was there, sobered and saddened—­the friend now of Hope Wayne, and of Amy, her Uncle Lawrence’s wife.  Alfred was there, solemnized and frightened.  The office of Lawrence Newt & Co. was closed, and the partners and the clerks all stood together around the coffin.  Abel’s mother, shrouded in black, sat in a dim corner of the room, nervously sobbing.  Abel’s father, sitting in his chair, his white hair hanging upon his shoulders, looked curiously at all the people, while his bony fingers played upon his knees, and he said nothing.

During all the solemn course of the service, from the gracious words, “I am the resurrection and the life,” to the final Amen which was breathed out of the depth of many a soul there, the old man’s eyes did not turn from the clergyman.  But when, after a few moments of perfect silence, two or three men entered quietly and rapidly, and, lifting the coffin, began to bear it softly out of the room, he looked troubled and surprised, and glanced vaguely and inquiringly from one person to another, until, as it was passing out of the door, his face was covered with a piteous