ordered
the men to probe the hay with their bayonets. The soldiers reached over
and jabbed again and again, going down deep until they touched the floor
of the cart. But they found nothing and at length, turning about, put
spurs to their steeds and galloped away. "When we reached the coast, and
my good friend and comrade unloaded his hay, I lay there safe and
sound," the old man would end impressively. "For it was not always the
floor of the cart that they touched, but sometimes the board that I had
put above my body as I lay huddled against the planks."

But while the first William had showed an adventurous spirit, the third
of the name was content with a quiet and orderly existence. His
grandfather became an intensely patriotic American, who fought through
the Civil War, and to his death never voted any but the Republican
ticket. To do otherwise would have seemed to him to doubt his adopted
but intensely beloved land. He was impatient of any criticism of
America. "It is only those who have fled from a despotism," he would
say, "who can appreciate the United States." And so his grandson had
taken things much as they came, and had done nothing more startling in
his life than at twenty to come to New York where he found better
opportunity for advancement than in the town of his birth. He obtained a
position as bookkeeper, and for fifteen years, with absolute regularity,
appeared at eight o'clock in the little stationer's shop, tucked among
the great office buildings on the downtown street, to remain until
half-past five when, with equal regularity, he returned to his well-kept
boarding house, his only home in New York.

His annual vacation of two weeks for some years was spent in his western
town, but marriage and death broke up the home there, the house was
sold, and those remaining to him moved to the Pacific coast. After this,
he rarely left the city, staying to care for the flowers that in the
summer his landlady allowed him to plant in her back yard--though they
were a trouble Monday with the wash--and to play long hours on the piano
that stood against the wall by the further window in his south room.
Sometimes he went for a day to a beach, but night found him in his bed
at home. Vacation over, he was quite ready to take up work. His German
singing society was the greatest excitement in his methodical life, and
if the chorus master assigned him a solo part, never an ambitious one,
he practised at home night after