ghts are
merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so "through all the world
she followed him."

But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched
his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob--look, look." When the
awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp,
"Don't you see Ellen--there--there by the table?" But whatever it
was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob
Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him.

Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was
dead.

Now death--the vast baffling mystery of death--is Fate's strongest
lever to pry men from their philosophy. And death came into this boy's
life before his creed was set and hard, and in those first days while
he walked far afield, he turned his face to the sky in his lonely
sorrow, and when he cried to Heaven there was a silence.

So his heart curdled, and you kind gentlemen of the jury who are to
pass on the case of John Barclay in this story, remember that he was
only twenty years old, and that in all his life there was nothing to
symbolize the joy of sacrifice except this young girl. All his boyish
life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,--the self that
might have learned to give and be glad in the giving. And when she
went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money
in his purse.[1]

There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream. But she
lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed
the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle
life with the other girls of her age. And even when the little
headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs. Culpepper's old
eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates. And she never saw
John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen--and and what she would
have made of him.

And what would she have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of
dreams--surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in
this world.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] To the Publisher.--"In returning the Mss. of the life of John
Barclay, which you sent for my verification as to certain dates and
incidents, let me first set down, before discussing matters pertaining
to his later life, my belief that your author has found in the death
of Ellen Culpepper an incident, humble though it is, that explains
much in the character of