y
chop; and a few facts and hopes, may be, gathered outside of the market,
which, Josiah says, absorb all of the real world. All day, sitting here
at my desk in Wirt's old counting-house, these notions of Josiah's have
dogged me. These sums that I jotted down, the solid comforts they
typified, the homes, the knowledge, the travel they would buy,--these
were, then, the real gist of this thing we called life, were they? The
great charities money had given to the world,--Christ's Gospel preached
by it.--Did it cover all, then? Did it?

What a wholesome (or unwholesome) scorn of barter Knowles had! The old
fellow never collected a debt; and, by the way, as seldom paid one. The
"dirty dollar" came between him and very few people. Yet the heart in
his great mass of flesh beat fiercely for an honor higher than that
known to most men. I have sat here all the afternoon, staring out at the
winter sky, scratching down a figure now and then, and idly going back
to the time when I was a younger man than now, but even then with
neither wife nor child, and no home beyond an eating-house; thinking how
I caught old Knowles's zest for things which lay beyond trade-laws; how
eager I grew in the search of them; how he inoculated me with
Abolitionism, Communism, every other fever that threatened to destroy
the commercial status of the world, and substitute a single-eyed regard
for human rights. It occurred to me, too, that some of those odd,
one-sided facts, which it used to please me to gather then,--queer bits
of men's history, not to be judged by Josiah's rules,--it might please
others to hear. What if I wrote them down these winter evenings? Nothing
in them rare or strange; but they lay outside of the market, and were
true.

Not one of them which did not bring back Knowles, with his unwieldy heat
and bluster. He found a flavor and meaning in the least of these hints
of mine, gloating over the largess given and received in the world, for
which money had no value. His bones used to straighten, and his eye
glitter under the flabby brow, at the recital of any brave, true deed,
as if it had been his own; as if, but for some mischance back yonder in
his youth, it might have been given to even this poor old fellow to
strike a great, ringing blow on Fate's anvil before he died,--to give
his place in the life-boat to a more useful man,--to help buy with his
life the slave's freedom.

Let me tell you the story of our acquaintance. Josiah, even