en't you heard?" replied McHurdie, and to the colonel's negative
Watts replied, "Governor--the uprising's going to nominate him."

"Yes," said Frye, "and he'll go off following that foolishness and
leave his wife and children to John or the neighbours."

"Do you suppose he thinks he'll win?" asked the Colonel.

"Naw," put in McHurdie; "I was talking to him only last week in the
shop, and he says, 'Watts, you boys don't understand me.' He says, 'I
don't want their offices. What I want is to make them think. I'm
sowing seed. Some day it will come to a harvest--maybe long after I'm
dead and gone.' I asked him if a little seed wouldn't help out some
for breakfast, and he didn't answer. Then he said: 'Watts--what you
need is faith--faith in God and not in money. There are no
Christians; they don't believe in God, or they'd trust Him more. They
don't trust God; they trust money. Yet I tell you it will work. Go
ahead--do your work in the world, and you won't starve nor your
children beg in the streets.'" McHurdie stopped a moment to gnaw his
plug of tobacco. "The general's gitting kind of a crank--and I told
him so."

"What did he say?" inquired the colonel.

"Oh, he just laughed," replied McHurdie; "he just laughed and said if
he was a crank I was a poet, and neither was much good at the note
window of the bank, and we kind of made it up."

And so the winter evening grew old, and one by one the cronies rose
and yawned and went their way. Evening after evening went thus, and
was it strange that in the years that came, when the sunset of life
was gilding things for Watts McHurdie, he looked through the golden
haze and saw not the sand in the pit under the stove, not the rows of
drugs on the wall, not the patent medicine bottles in their faded
wrappers, but as he wrote many years after in "Autumn Musing":--

"Those nights when Wisdom was our guide
And Friendship was the glow,
That warmed our souls like living coals,
Those nights of long ago."

Nor is it strange that Martin Culpepper, his commentator, conning
those lines through the snows of many winters, should be a little
misty as to details, and having taken his pen in hand to write, should
set down this note:--

"These lines probably refer to the evenings which the poet passed in a
goodly company of choice spirits during the early seventies. E'en as I
write, Memory, with tender hand, pushes back the sombre curtain, and I
see them now--that char