cle so charmed that it might not be entered by
things too personal to either of us. By a kind of tacit treaty we
brought thither none but those affairs which invited a not too serious
tone. Our late common life had provided an abundance of these, and they
had been hailed by my friend with an unfailing levity which the widow of
J. Rodney Potts, for one, would have found it impossible to condone. "I
am a light old woman," she had said to me; "I laugh at the world even
when I fear it most." There was a desperate sprite of banter in her eye
when she made this confession, a sprite that leaped forth to be gay when
I shrived her. But, though we sacredly observed all mirthful conventions
in our dallying, I knew that Miss Caroline had more than enough to
ponder of matters weighty. I knew that she was likely to have regretted
a too-ready sharing of Clem's easy enthusiasm over industrial conditions
in the North.

Clem believed by instinct not only that the evil thereof is sufficient
unto the day, but that the incidental good sufficeth also. His quality
of faith would have seemed a pointed rebuke to the common run of
believers in a Providence that watches and sends. Confronted by the
spectre of present want he could exorcise it neatly by the device of
beholding, in a contrary vision, future limitless pullets of a
marketable immaturity, or endless acres of garden produce ripe and ready
to sell. Moreover, his experience with "gold money" was as yet
insufficient to acquaint him with its truly volatile character. All sums
greater than a hundred dollars were blessedly alike to him--equally
prodigious. Two hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands sent the
same rays of light through the spectrum of his poetic mind, and a bank
was an institution of such abiding grace that, having once established a
connection with it, one possessed forever a stout prop in time of need.
I was sure indeed that Miss Caroline had defined these limitations of
Clem as a financier. It was one of those enjoyable topics which we had
been free to discuss. That she had discovered how lamentably his
resources had been reduced by freight tolls on her furniture I could
only infer. But I knew, at least, that she was aware of the blistering,
rainless summer that had laid Clem's high hopes of a garden in dust and
cut off half his revenue. Plainly, Miss Caroline had more than enough of
matters fit to engage her graver moments.

For my own part I, too, had matters to dwe