“Not round-up times?” asked Sid.

“Not round-up times, nor other times, if God will help me,” said Dave, soberly.

“He will,” said Sid.  “Oh, I’m so glad!”

THE MAN WHO LOST HIS MEMORY.

It was on a morning of May, 1613, that a lady, still young, might be seen, followed by her two children, going toward the cemetery of a village near Haerlem.  The pale cheeks of this lady, her eyes red with weeping, her very melancholy face, bespoke one of those deep sorrows over which Time might fling its flowers, but it would be all in vain.  Her children, the elder of whom was barely four years old, accompanied her, with the carelessness natural to their age.  Indeed, they were astonished to see their noble mansion still in mourning, and their mother and themselves in mourning also, though a melancholy voice had said to them one day, when they were shown a bier covered with funereal pall, “Children, you have no more a father.”

A month after this they were playing as gaily as ever.  Can it be that the griefs of our early years are so terrible that heaven will not permit them to dwell in remembrance?  It may be so; but at all events those children forgot for whom they had been put into mourning.

As that lady arrived at the little cemetery gate, the passers-by asked aloud (for curiosity respects neither modesty nor grief) who might be that lady who passed on so sadly, and who it seemed had good cause for her sadness.

And an old beggar-woman said, “That lady passing by is the widow of John Durer, who died this three months gone, and who was in his time Minister to his Majesty the Emperor.”

II.

John Durer belonged to the family of a poor shepherd.  He worked hard as a scholar, but even when he was at play he showed a violent disposition to domineer over the rest.  He seemed to be devoured with ambition:  at all events he carried off every prize at school.  By the time he was fifteen he was the admiration, he was the pride, of all his masters.  But John was not loved by his schoolmates; he displayed a vanity which repelled them, which sometimes provoked them.  He made few friendships, spoke freely with few, and looked haughtily down on such of his little companions as were less happily gifted than he was.  His words were short, his look was cold, and the pride in which he shut himself up on purpose, made him unapproachable.  He lived by himself.

One evening this young Durer, feeling, even more than usually, the necessity of solitude and meditation, went out into the country, dreaming, no doubt, of the grandeur to which his pride aspired, and which he was hopeless of ever reaching; for his face was sad, and he walked with a slow step, as does some discouraged traveler on a road without end, toward something in the distance that perpetually escapes him.  At last he stopped in a hollow, called the Valley of Bushes, on account of the gigantic white-thorn trees that grew there.  He sat down in their shadow:  a small bird was fluttering about, and singing blithely overhead; but he did not hear her.