s
recollections of his face. The long vertical upper-lip and irregular
teeth made, in repose, an unshapely mouth; its smile, though, sweetened
the whole countenance. He wore a fringe of stiff, steel-colored beard,
passing from ear to ear under his chin. His week-day clothes were as
simple as his workaday manners, fitting his short black pipe and his
steadfast devotion to his business. On Sundays he dressed with a certain
rigor of respectability, all in black, and laid aside tobacco, at least
to the public view. He never missed going to the early Low Mass, quite
alone. His family always came later, at the ten o'clock High Mass.

There had been, at one time or another, a good many members of this
family. Two wives had borne Jeremiah Madden a total of over a dozen
children. Of these there survived now only two of the first Mrs.
Madden's offspring--Michael and Celia--and a son of the present wife,
who had been baptized Terence, but called himself Theodore. This
minority of the family inhabited the great new house on Main Street.
Jeremiah went every Sunday afternoon by himself to kneel in the presence
of the majority, there where they lay in Saint Agnes' consecrated
ground. If the weather was good, he generally extended his walk through
the fields to an old deserted Catholic burial-field, which had been used
only in the first years after the famine invasion, and now was clean
forgotten. The old wagon-maker liked to look over the primitive,
neglected stones which marked the graves of these earlier exiles. Fully
half of the inscriptions mentioned his County Galway--there were two
naming the very parish adjoining his. The latest date on any stone was
of the remoter 'fifties. They had all been stricken down, here in this
strange land with its bitter winters, while the memory of their own
soft, humid, gentle west-coast air was fresh within them. Musing upon
the clumsy sculpture, with its "R.I.P.," or "Pray for the Soul of," half
to be guessed under the stain and moss of a generation, there would seem
to him but a step from this present to that heart-rending, awful past.
What had happened between was a meaningless vision--as impersonal as the
passing of the planets overhead. He rarely had an impulse to tears
in the new cemetery, where his ten children were. He never left this
weed-grown, forsaken old God's-acre dry-eyed.

One must not construct from all this the image of a melancholy man, as
his fellows met and knew him. Mr. Madd