ed out together into the deep black night.

"Come, take my arm: we will call together for your brother."

"He has so much to make him happy! There are the little ones and his
wife! Could you not delay a little?"

"He must come with us to-night."

Dick was attending a banquet which was being given in his honour to
celebrate his recent election as a Common Councilman, and the lust of
life was in his every vein. But in the act of responding to the toast of
the evening he was suddenly attacked by a fit of apoplexy. He
staggered, and fell back--and they perceived that he was dead.

* * * * *

It was a bleak and a very depressing journey to pass nakedly and alone
from the warm, well-lighted, and flattering banquet, and, most of all,
from the comfortable and familiar earth, up to the Doom's-man and the
Bar beside the Gates. If he could only have had a friend or two at his
side!

On the way up, just as he was nearing the gates, Dick overtook Rick, who
was a little way ahead of him.

"Come, let us go up together," said Rick.

At the gates, however, Dick began to grow uneasy. His brother's
reputation on earth among "the godly" was a curiously unwelcome memory
to Dick now the Bar was so near and the Doom's-man was in sight.

"You go first," said Dick to his brother; falling behind as if to
dissociate himself from him.

Rick passed the gate and stood silently at the Bar.

"Place the brothers side by side," said the Doom's-man sternly.

"If you please," began Dick, stumbling in his speech, so afraid was he
of being confounded in the judgment of his brother; "If you please. . . ."

Said the Doom's-man: "Let the Advocates state the case."

The Black-robed Advocate claimed Rick boldly. The verdict of Rick's
fellow-citizens, he asserted, was emphatic on the point that Rick was
legitimately his. And he went with the majority, and claimed a verdict
accordingly.

The White-robed Advocate advanced, more hesitatingly, that Dick
presumably should go with _him_. The Community, he averred, had long ago
decided that only in this way would justice have its due.

The Doom's-man's verdict was simplicity itself.

A nature so contented, and so little given to fault-finding, would be
the typical one for the Black Advocate's household, said the Doom's-man,
humorously contemplating Dick. "Take him away with you," said he to the
Black Advocate: "the man will give you no trouble, _as you know_.

"But t