re side by side, the one representing a patience that never failed,
yet something more than patience. For the face of this man bore no token
of defeat. It was rather triumph that looked at moments from the clear
eyes that had also an almost divine pity as they turned toward the
neighbor who poured out his story between paroxysms of coughing, and
having told it once, proceeded to tell it again, his sole and final
satisfaction in life being the arraignment of all living. The visitor
who came into the ward was pinned on the instant, the fiery eyes
demanding the hearing which was the last gift time held for him. It was
a common story often told, this slow, inevitable descent into poverty.
Its force lay in the condensed fury of the speaker, who looked on the
men he had known as sworn conspirators against him, and cursed them in
their going out and coming in with a relish that no argument could
affect. What his neighbor might have to tell was a matter of the purest
indifference. It was impossible even to ask his story; and it remained
impossible until a day when arraignment was cut short and the
disappointed, bitter soul passed on to such conditions as it had made
for itself.

"You've got the best of me. They all do," he said in dying, with a last
turn of the sombre eyes toward his neighbor. "You ought to have gone
first by a week, and there you are. But this time I guess it's just as
well. I don't seem to want to fight any longer, and I'm glad I'm done.
It's your turn next. Good--"

The words had come with gasps between and long pauses. Here they stopped
once for all. Good had found him; the only good for the child of earth,
who, having failed to learn his lesson here, must try a larger school
with a different system of training. The empty bed was not filled at
once. A screen shut it off. There was time now to hear other words than
the passionate railings that had monopolized all time. The sick man
mended a little, and in one of the days in which speech was easier gave
this record of his forty years:--

"It's a fact, I believe, that the sons of reformers seldom walk in the
same track. My father was one of the old Abolitionists, and an honest
one, ready to give money when he could and any kind of work when he
couldn't. It was a great cause. I cried over the negroes down South and
went without sugar a year or so, and learned to knit so that I could
knit some stockings for the small slaves my own size. But by the time I
was