en Henry needs me, I'll help him," said Adam.

"Henry will never need you. Look at all he's got!"

"Well, then, I don't need him," declared Adam, as he walked away. He
went back to his saddler shop, where he sat all day stitching. He had
ample time to think of Henry and the past.

"Brought up like twins!" he would say. "Sharing like brothers! Now
he has a fine business and a fine house and fine children, and I have
nothing. But I have my principles. I ain't never truckled to him. Some
day he'll need me, you'll see!"

As Adam grew older, it became more and more certain that Henry would
never need him for anything. Henry tried again and again to make
friends, but Adam would have none of him. He talked more and more to
himself as he sat at his work.

"Used to help him over the brook and bait his hook for him. Even built
corn-cob houses for him to knock down, that much littler he was than me.
Stepped out of the race when I found he wanted Annie. He might ask me
for _something_!" Adam seemed often to be growing childish.

By the year 1875 fifteen of Fosterville's thirty-five veterans had died.
The men who survived the war were, for the most part, not strong men,
and weaknesses established in prisons and on long marches asserted
themselves. Fifteen times the Fosterville Post paraded to the cemetery
and read its committal service and fired its salute. For these parades
Adam did not put on his gray uniform.

During the next twenty years deaths were fewer. Fosterville prospered
as never before; it built factories and an electric car line. Of all
its enterprises Henry Foust was at the head. He enlarged his house and
bought farms and grew handsomer as he grew older. Everybody loved him;
all Fosterville, except Adam, sought his company. It seemed sometimes
as though Adam would almost die from loneliness and jealousy.

"Henry Foust sittin' with Ed Green!" said Adam to himself, as though he
could never accustom his eyes to this phenomenon. "Henry consortin' with
Newt Towne!"

The Grand Army post also grew in importance. It paraded each year with
more ceremony; it imported fine music and great speakers for Memorial
Day.

Presently the sad procession to the cemetery began once more. There
was a long, cold winter, with many cases of pneumonia, and three
veterans succumbed; there was an intensely hot summer, and twice in
one month the post read its committal service and fired its salute.
A few years more, and the post numbere