t when he had quite broken down, and that a hundred years of change
had glided by, like a watch in the night, when he opened his wife's
letter and wakened in a blaze of joy and hope and glorious activity.
Nothing he could remember of that kind could compare with his pride and
honourable satisfaction when he walked into the bank two hours
afterwards, with his head high, and said he should be glad to take up
the note he had signed yesterday and have the balance of the cheque
placed to his credit; and few surprises which the partner who had
obliged him could recollect, had equalled that worthy gentleman's
amazement when the debt was paid so soon.

"If you had only told me that you would be in funds so soon, Mr.
Overholt," he said, "I should not have thought of troubling you. Here is
your note. Will you kindly look at it and tear it up?"

"I did not know," answered Overholt, doing as he was told.

It is a curious fact that the little note lay in a locked drawer of the
partner's magnificent table, instead of being put away in the safe with
other and larger notes, where it belonged. It may seem still stranger
that, on the books, Overholt's account showed that it had been balanced
by a deposit exactly equal to the deficit, made by the partner himself,
instead of by crediting the amount of the note. But Overholt never knew
this, for a pass-book had always been a mystery to him, and made his
head ache. The banker had thought of his face some time after he had
gone out with his battered umbrella and his shabby shoulders rounded as
under a burden, and somehow the Christmas spirit must have come in
quietly and touched the rich man too, though even the stenographer did
not see what happened. For he had once been in terrible straits himself,
a quarter of a century ago, and some one had helped him just in time,
and he knew what it meant to slink out of a big bank, in shabby clothes,
his back bowed under the heavy weight of debt and failure.

Overholt never knew; but he expressed his warm thanks for what now
seemed a small favour, and with his wooden model of the casting, done up
in brown paper, under his arm, he went off to the foundry in Long
Island.

Much careful work had been done for him there, and the people were
willing to oblige him, and promised that the piece should certainly be
ready before Christmas Day, and as much earlier as possible, and should
be made with the greatest exactness which the most precise machinery and