bloomed and
with trees that never bore fruit. He passed the hat in church--being a
brother-in-law to the organisation, as he explained; sang "Tramp, Tramp,
Tramp, the Boys Are Marching" at Grand Army entertainments, and always
as an encore dragged "Ma" out to sing with him "Dear, Dear, What Can the
Matter Be." She was a skinny, sharp-eyed, shy little woman in her late
fifties when the trouble came. She rose at every annual meeting of the
church to give a hundred dollars but her voice never lasted until she
got through announcing her donation, and she sat down demurely, blushing
and looking down her nose as though she had disgraced the family. She
had lost a brother in the war, and never came further out of mourning
than purple flowers in her bonnet. She bought John Markley's clothes, so
that his Sunday finery contained nothing giddier than a grey made-up
tie, that she pinned around the collars which her own hands had ironed.

Slowly as their fortune piled up, and people said they had a million,
his brown beard grizzled a little, and his brow crept up and up and his
girth stretched out to forty-four. But his hands did not whiten or
soften, and though he was "Honest John," and every quarter-section of
land that he bought doubled in value by some magic that he only seemed
to know, he kept the habits of his youth, rose early, washed at the
kitchen basin, and was the first man at his office in the morning. At
night, after a hard day's work he smoked a cob-pipe in the basement,
where he could spit into the furnace and watch the fire until nine
o'clock, when he put out the cat and bedded down the fire, while "Ma"
set the buckwheat cakes. They never had a servant in their house.

We used to see John Markley pass the office window a dozen times a day,
a hale, vigorous man, whose heels clicked hard on the sidewalk as he
came hurrying along--head back and shoulders rolling. He was a powerful,
masculine, indomitable creature, who looked out of defiant, cold,
unblinking eyes as though he were just about to tell the whole world to
go to hell! The town was proud of him. He was our "prominent citizen,"
and when he was elected president of the district bankers' association,
and his name appeared in the papers as a possible candidate for United
States Senator or Minister to Mexico or Secretary of the Interior, we
were glad that "Honest John Markley" was our fellow-townsman.

And then came the crash. Man is a curious creature, and, even