hoker
taken back in Brattleboro before he came to Kansas. She looked at it for
a long minute, and then said gaily to Miss Larrabee: "He was a handsome
boy--quite the beau of the State when we were married--Judge of the
District Court at twenty-four." She held the case in her hand and went
on opening the others. She came to one showing a moustached and goateed
youth in a captain's uniform--a slim, straight, soldierly figure. As she
passed it to Miss Larrabee Aunt Martha looked sidewise at her, saying:
"You wouldn't know him now. Yet you see him every day, I suppose." After
the girl shook her head, the elder woman continued: "Well, that's Jim
Purdy, taken the day he left for the army." She sighed as she said: "Let
me see, I guess I haven't happened to run across Jim for ten years or
more, but he didn't look much like this then. Poor old Jim, they tell me
he's not having the best time in the world. Someway, all the old-timers
that are living seem to be hard up, or in bad health, or unhappy. It
doesn't seem right, after what they've done and what they've gone
through. But I guess it's the way of life. It's the way life gets even
with us for letting us outlive the others. Compensation--as Emerson
says."

[Illustration: "Jim Purdy, taken the day he left for the army"]

Miss Larrabee came down the lilac-bordered walk from the stately old
brick house, carrying a great bouquet of sweet peas and nasturtiums and
poppies and phlox, a fleeting memory of some association she had in her
mind of Uncle Jimmy Purdy and Aunt Martha kept tantalising her. She
could not get it out of the background of her consciousness, and yet it
refused to form itself into a tangible conception. It was associated
vaguely with her own grandmother, as though, infinite ages ago, her
grandmother had said something that had lodged the idea in the girl's
head.

When the occasion made itself, Miss Larrabee asked her grandmother the
question that puzzled her, and learned that Martha Perkins and Jim Purdy
were lovers before the war, and that she was wearing his ring when he
went away--thinking he would be back in a few weeks with the Rebellion
put down. In his first fight he was shot in the head and was in the
hospital for a year, demented; when he was put back in the ranks he was
captured and his name given out among the killed. In prison his dementia
returned and he stayed there two years. Then for a year after his
exchange he followed the Union Army like a du