"But your father left you something?"
"The old gentleman left me nothing, and I've been steadily increasing the legacy ever since."
"What did you do before the war?" inquired Clara sympathetically. His mention of his early losses had touched her.
"Oh, a number of things. I read law for a while. At one time I was interested in a large concern for the manufacture of patent metallic burial cases; but nobody seemed to die that year. Good health raged like an epidemic all over the South. Latterly I dabbled a little in stocks—and stocks dabbled in me."
"You were not successful, then?" I said.
"I was at first, but when the war fever broke out and the Southern heart was fired, everything that didn't go down went up."
"And you couldn't meet your obligations?"
"That wasn't the trouble—I couldn't get away from them," replied the colonel, with a winsome smile. "I met them at every corner."
The man had a fashion of turning his very misfortunes into pleasantries. Surely prosperity would be wasted on a person so gifted with optimism. I felt it to be kind and proper, however, to express the hope that he had reached the end of his adversity, and to assure him that I would do anything I could in the world to help him.
"Tom Wesley, I believe you would."