The general's face lighted up again with a grin, and he replied: "Now laugh--dog-gone you--buying flower seeds!" They heard a step at the bottom of the stairs, and the general strode to the door, opened it, and called down, "All right, Lucy--I'm coming," and buttoning up his coat, he whisked himself from the room, and Barclay, looking out of the window, watched the two forms as they disappeared in the dusk. But appearances are so deceptive. The truth is that what he saw was not there at all, but only appeared on his retina; the two forms that he seemed to see were not shivering through the twilight, but were walking among dahlias and coxcombs and four-o'clocks and petunias and poppies and hollyhocks on a wide lawn whereon newly set elm trees were fluttering their faint green foliage in the summer breeze. Yet John Barclay would have sworn he saw them there in the cold street, with the mist beating upon them, and curiously corroborative of this impression is a memory he retained of reflecting that since the general's blue overcoat had disappeared the winter before, he had noticed that little Thayer had a blue Sunday suit and little Elizabeth Cady Stanton had appeared wrapped in a blue baby coat. But that only shows how these matter-of-fact people are fooled. For though the little Wards were caparisoned in blue, and though the general's blue overcoat did disappear about that time, the general and Lucy Ward have no recollection of shivering home that night, but instead they know that they walked among the flowers. And John, looking into the darkening street, must have seen something besides the commonplace couple that he thought he saw; for as he turned away to light his lamp and go to work again, he smiled. Surely there was nothing to smile at in the thing he saw. Perhaps God was trying to make him see the flowers. But he did not see them, and as it was nearly an hour before six o'clock, he turned to his work under the lamp and finished his letter to Bob Hendricks. When it was written, he read it over carefully, crossing his "t's" and dotting his "i's," and as no one was in the room he mumbled it aloud, thus:-- "DEAR BOB:--Don't get blue; it will be all right. Stick to it. I am laying a wire that will get you an audience with Jay Gould. Make the talk of your life there. You may be able to interest him--if just for a few dollars. Offer him anything. Give him the stock if he will let us use his name.