st be hidden away, he rode in state to his resting-place, drawn by
four horses, in a silver hearse, his coffin covered with flowers.

But his grave was a humble one--the money from the burial-club not
being sufficient to secure him a decent privacy in decay--and very,
very deep. The clerks, crowding forward when the service was over,
could hardly read his name and the account of his few years, on the
silver plate of his coffin, so deep in the bowels of the earth they
laid him--poor Peter! "the joys of all whose life were said and sung!"
His was the first coffin in the grave destined to hold seven more.

The physician, waiting until the rest had turned away, stood for a few
minutes alone, gazing into that profundity.

"Such a chucking away of life!" the admired gentleman who had been
Peter's chief had said. But the physician had his own thought on that
matter.

The poor boy--the foolish, enthusiastic, perhaps hysterical
boy--enjoying the poor blessings that were his with the prophetic
eagerness those doomed to an early death so often exhibit, had taken
his seat upon his office-stool as upon a throne; had blessed God for
his career of junior clerk as for a high imperial lot; then had flung
away, his short race hardly begun, the life he prized. True; but in a
blind belief in his own strength; and for the high purpose, suggested
by the poetry and the books he and Cicely loved and talked over, of
giving himself for another! The physician knew that in giving all he
had but exchanged a year or two of failing power, of the pain and
weakness of daily dying, the grief of finding himself a burden again
upon unwilling shoulders for--what? For the moment of exultation when
into the dark waters of greedy Lea he had flung his poor little body,
clothed as it was in the new coat and trousers of which Cicely and he
had been so proud; the moment of absolute belief in himself and his
strength; the moment more, perhaps, of recognition that he had failed,
but in a great cause. Peter had exhibited an effusive gratitude for the
few favours Life had bestowed upon him; for this last favour of Death's
according the physician knew he might well have been thankful.

That beautiful "floral tribute" for which Clomayne's clerks had
contributed their shillings, had been lowered upon the coffin, together
with one or two humbler, and obviously home-made, wreaths. As the
physician turned away he noticed, lying almost at his feet, a little
bunch of vi