er get.... Then they went to look at houses, a more
interesting occupation to the child. Her aunt seemed much concerned in
the comparative size and location and number of rooms of different
houses and this Adelle could understand. The family was going to move
sometime from the Church Street house.... In these simple ways the two
passed a quiet vacation of ten days. Then came a telegram, and three
days later arrived the remains of Veteran John Clark, accompanied by
members of the local G. A. R. post who had brought back the body of
their dead comrade. John Clark had kept his boasting word to his wife
that "this time he would show the boys a good time and prove to 'em that
his talk about his property wasn't all hot air!" He had in truth shown
himself such a good time that he could not stand a spell of excessively
hot weather, to which he succumbed like a sapped reed. A very
considerable funeral was arranged and conducted by the members of G. A.
R. Post Number I of Alton, to which John Clark had belonged. There was a
military band and the post colors, and a number of oldish men in blue
uniforms trailed behind the hearse all the way to the cemetery where the
veteran was laid away in the lot with his mother and father. Little
Adelle, riding in the first carriage with her aunt, observed all this
military display over the dead veteran, and concluded that she had done
her uncle an injustice during his life. It seemed that he was really a
much more important person than she had supposed him to be. This burial
was the last benefit poor John Clark received from a grateful country
for that spurt of patriotism or willfulness that had led him to run away
from the Clark farm to the war forty years before.

And here really concludes the history of the Clarks in the story of
Clark's Field. For Adelle, upon whom the burden of the inheritance was
to fall, was only half a Clark at the most, and had largely escaped the
deadly tradition of family expectations under which Addie had been
blighted; while her aunt, of course, had no Clark blood in her veins and
had been cured of the Clark habit of expecting.

IV

It may easily be imagined that the veteran's untimely death at the Grand
Army Reunion caused more uneasiness in certain other quarters than it
did in the Church Street house, where John's going had its mitigations.
The lawyers who had arranged the purchase of the Clark interest in the
great Field did not really fear that their