“Condor,” continued the General, “I’ve had enough of it. I’m going to back out. I’d rather sweep the streets.”
General Belch spoke emphatically, and his friend turned toward him with a pleasant smile.
“Can you make so much in any other way?”
“Perhaps not. But I’d rather make less, and more comfortably.”
“I find it perfectly comfortable,” replied William Condor. “You take it too hard. You ought to manage it with less friction. The point is, to avoid friction. If you undertake to deal with men, you ought to understand just what they are.”
Mr. Condor smoked serenely, and General Belch looked at his slim, clean figure, and his calm face, with curious admiration.
“By-the-by,” said Condor, “when you introduce the resolutions, I shall second them with a few remarks.”
And he did so. At the meeting of the Committee he rose and enforced them with a few impressive and pertinent words.
“Gratitude,” he said, “is instinctive in the human breast. When a man does well, or promises well, it is natural to regard him with interest and affection. The fidelity of our departed brother is worthy of our most affectionate admiration and imitation. If you ask me whether he had faults, I answer that he was a man. Who so is without sin, let him cast the first stone.”
On the same day the Honorable B. Jawley Ele rose in his place in Congress to announce the calamity in which the whole country shared, and to move an adjournment in respect for the memory of his late colleague—“a man endeared to us all by the urbanity of his deportment and his social graces; but to me especially, by the kindness of his heart and the readiness of his sympathy.”