The air is vocal with the home-bound traffic of the day. Cars are crowded; delivery wagons rattle home; buggies clatter by on the pavements; one hears the whisper of a thousand feet treading the hot, crowded street. But Watts works on. So let us go in to bid him a formal good-by. The tinkling door-bell will bring out a bent little old man, with grimy fingers, who will put up his glasses to peer at our faces, and who will pause a moment to try to recollect us. He will talk about John Barclay.
"Yes, yes, I knew him well," says McHurdie; "there by the door hangs a whip he made as a boy. We used to play on that accordion in the case there. Oh, yes, yes, he was well thought of; we are a neighbourly people—maybe too much so. Yes, yes, he died a brave death, and the papers seemed to think his act of sacrifice showed the world a real man—and he was that,—he was surely that, was John; yes, he was a real man. You ask about his funeral? It was a fine one—a grand funeral—every hack in town out—every high-stepping horse out; and the flowers—from all over the world they came—the flowers were most beautiful. But there are funerals and funerals. There was Martin Culpepper's—not so many hacks, not so many high-stepping horses, but the old buggies, and the farm wagons, and the little nigger carts—and man, man alive, the tears, the tears!"
Mr. ROBERT HERRICK'S NOVELS
Cloth, extra, gilt tops, each $1.50
The Gospel of Freedom
"A novel that may truly be called the greatest study of social life, in a broad and very much up-to-date sense, that has ever been contributed to American fiction."—Chicago Inter-Ocean.
The Web of Life