The shabby old man stood uncovered, a smile quivering about his eyes. "Maybe so, Mary Barclay, maybe so," he said. The smile fell into his countenance as he added, "That is why I have gone so long without a settlement; with my account so badly overdrawn, too." Then he turned to go and walked as lightly down the street as a man could walk, broken before his time with the weight of a humiliation upon him and a fear greater than his shame burning in his fluttering old heart. And now if you are reading this story to be in the company of the rich Mr. Barclay, to feel the madness of his millions, to enjoy the vain delirium of his power, skip the rest of this chapter. For it tells of a shabby time in the lives of all of the threadbare people who move in this tale. Even John Barclay sees the seams and basting threads of his life here, and as for the others,--the colonel and Jake and the general and Watts, and even Molly,--what do these people mean to you, these common people, in their old clothes, with their old hearts and their rusty sins and their homely sorrows? Milord and his lady will not scamper across these pages; no rooms with rich appointments will gladden your eyes, and perhaps in the whole book you will not find a man in evening dress nor a woman in a dinner gown. And now the only thing there is to offer is Jake Dolan, aged fifty-seven, with scanty, grizzled hair, sitting in his shirt-sleeves in the basement of the court-house, with the canvas cot he sleeps on for a chair, mending his blue army coat. Beside him on the bed are his trousers, thin, almost worn through, patched as to the knees and as to other important places, but clean and without a loose thread hanging from them. Surely an old Irishman mending an old army coat under a dusty electric light bulb in the basement of a court-house, wherein he is janitor by grace of the united demand of Henry Schnitzler Post of the G.A.R. No. 432, is not a particularly inspiring picture. But he has bitten the last thread with his teeth, and is putting away the sewing outfit. And now Mr. Dolan, from the drawer of a little table beside the cot,--a table with Bob Hendricks' picture, framed in plush, sitting on the top,--now Mr. Dolan takes from the drawer a tablet of writing paper printed by the county. It is his particular pride, that writing paper. For upon it at the top is the picture of the new one-hundred-thousand-dollar court-house, and beside the court-house picture are these words: "Office of Jacob Dolan, Custodian of Public Buildings and Grounds of Garrison County." Mr. Dolan will be writing a letter, and so long as it begins with "Dear Sir," and nothing more endearing, surely we may look over his shoulder while he writes,--even though it is bad form. And as Mr. Dolan will be writing to "Robert Hendricks, care of Cook's Hotel, Cairo, Egypt,"--which he spells with an "i," but let that pass, and let some of his literary style and construction pass with it,--and as he will be writing to Mr.