It was a proud moment when he found himself one afternoon sitting, at Schoolmaster Grimshaw’s invitation, on the platform in the recitation-room of the Temple Grammar School—­sitting on the very platform with the green baize-covered table to which he had many a time marched up sideways to take a feruling.  Something of the old awe and apprehension which Master Grimshaw used to inspire crept over him.  There were instants when Dutton would have abjectly held out his hand if he had been told to do it.  He had been invited to witness the evolutions of the graduating class in history and oratory, and the moisture gathered in his honest blue eyes when a panic-stricken urchin faltered forth—­

      “We were not many, we who stood
       Before the iron sleet that day.”

Dutton listened to it all with unruffled gravity.  There was never a more gentle hero, or one with a slighter sense of humor, than the hero of Chapultepec.

Dutton’s lot was now so prosperous as to exclude any disturbing thoughts concerning the future.  The idea of applying for a pension never entered his head until the subject was suggested to him by Postmaster Mugridge, a more worldly man, an office-holder himself, with a carefully peeled eye on Government patronage.  Dutton then reflected that perhaps a pension would be handy in his old age, when he could not expect to work steadily at his trade, even if he were able to work at all.  He looked about him for somebody to manage the affair for him.  Lawyer Penhallow undertook the business with alacrity; but the alacrity was all on his side, for there were thousands of yards of red tape to be unrolled at Washington before anything in that sort could be done.  At that conservative stage of our national progress, it was not possible for a man to obtain a pension simply because he happened to know the brother of a man who knew another man that had intended to go to the war, and didn’t.  Dutton’s claims, too, were seriously complicated by the fact that he had lost his discharge papers; so the matter dragged, and was still dragging when it ceased to be of any importance to anybody.

Whenever James Dutton glanced into the future, it was with a tranquil mind.  He pictured himself, should he not fall out of the ranks, a white-haired, possibly a bald-headed old boy, sitting of summer evenings on the doorstep of his shop, and telling stories to the children—­the children and grandchildren of his present associates and friends.  He would naturally have laid up something by that time; besides, there was his pension.  Meanwhile, though he moved in a humble sphere, was not his lot an enviable one?  There were long years of pleasant existence to be passed through before he reached the period of old age.  Of course that would have its ailments and discomforts, but its compensations, also.  It seemed scarcely predictable that the years to come held for him either great sorrows or great felicities:  he would never marry, and though he might have to grieve over a fallen comrade here and there, his heart was not to be wrung by the possible death of wife or child.  With the tints of the present he painted his simple future, and was content.