brothers and sisters who pulled
at the rope, but of finer clay, in some way belonging to a higher order
of beings who might justly expect to be drawn. This seems
unaccountable, but, as I once rode on this very coach and shared that
very hallucination, I ought to be believed. The strangest thing about
the hallucination was that those who had but just climbed up from the
ground, before they had outgrown the marks of the rope upon their
hands, began to fall under its influence. As for those whose parents
and grand-parents before them had been so fortunate as to keep their
seats on the top, the conviction they cherished of the essential
difference between their sort of humanity and the common article was
absolute. The effect of such a delusion in moderating fellow feeling
for the sufferings of the mass of men into a distant and philosophical
compassion is obvious. To it I refer as the only extenuation I can
offer for the indifference which, at the period I write of, marked my
own attitude toward the misery of my brothers.

In 1887 I came to my thirtieth year. Although still unmarried, I was
engaged to wed Edith Bartlett. She, like myself, rode on the top of the
coach. That is to say, not to encumber ourselves further with an
illustration which has, I hope, served its purpose of giving the reader
some general impression of how we lived then, her family was wealthy.
In that age, when money alone commanded all that was agreeable and
refined in life, it was enough for a woman to be rich to have suitors;
but Edith Bartlett was beautiful and graceful also.

My lady readers, I am aware, will protest at this. "Handsome she might
have been," I hear them saying, "but graceful never, in the costumes
which were the fashion at that period, when the head covering was a
dizzy structure a foot tall, and the almost incredible extension of the
skirt behind by means of artificial contrivances more thoroughly
dehumanized the form than any former device of dressmakers. Fancy any
one graceful in such a costume!" The point is certainly well taken, and
I can only reply that while the ladies of the twentieth century are
lovely demonstrations of the effect of appropriate drapery in accenting
feminine graces, my recollection of their great-grandmothers enables me
to maintain that no deformity of costume can wholly disguise them.

Our marriage only waited on the completion of the house which I was
building for our occupancy in one of the most desira