ght have
served as a motto for the whole: "Here you buy your dollar's worth of
fashion for your dime of cash."

"Ah!" cried the captain, "no ghostly work here!--the last place where
one would look for any miraculous stoppage of the laws of Nature."

"Stoppage, you should say, of the social laws of 'gents' and their
ladies, which are much more inexorable," said his companion. "Oh I know
them!" glancing in at the windows, as she tramped through the yellow
mud, with keen, amused eyes. "I know just what life must be in one of
these houses--the starving music-teacher on one side of you, and the
soapboiler on the other: the wretched small servant going the rounds of
the block to whiten the steps every evening, while the mistresses sit
within in cotton lace and sleazy silks, tinkling on the piano, or
counting up the greasy passbook from the grocer's. Imagine such a life
broken in upon by a soul from the other world!"

"Yet souls go out from it into the other world. And I've known good
women who wore cheap finery and aped gentility. Of course," with a
sudden gusty energy, "_I_ don't endorse that sort of thing; and I don't
believe the dead will come back to-day. Don't mistake me," shaking his
head. The captain was always gusty and emphatic. His high-beaked,
quick-glancing face and owlish eyes were ready to punctuate other men's
thoughts with an incessant exclamation-point to bring out their true
meaning. Since he was a boy he had known that he was born a
drill-sergeant and the rest of mankind raw recruits. "Now, there's
something terribly pathetic to me," he said, "in this whole expedition
of ours. The idea of poor Will in his last days trying to catch a
glimpse of the country to which he is going!"

Cornelia Fleming nodded, and let the subject drop. She never wasted her
time by peering into death or religion. She belonged to this world, and
she knew it. A wise racer keeps to the course for which he has been
trained, and never ventures into the quagmires beyond. She stopped
beside a tiny yard where a magnolia tree spread its bare stalks and dull
white flowers over the fence, and stood on tiptoe to break a bud. The
owner of the house, an old man with a box of carpenter's tools in his
hand, opened the door at the moment. She nodded brightly to him. "I am
robbing you, sir. For a sick friend yonder," she said.

He came down quickly and loaded her with flowers, thinking he had never
heard a voice as peculiar and pleasant. The ca