Perhaps halfway along was a particularly shabby little brown house that pushed dose up to the street line. A straggly catalpa tree shaded its narrow porch. This was the home of Lemuel Hammersmith; and Hammersmith seems such a name as should by right belong to a masterful, upstanding man with something of Thor or Vulcan or Judas Maccabaeus in him--it appears to have that sound. But Lemuel Hammersmith was no such man. In a city he would have been lost altogether--swallowed up among a mass of more important, pushing folk. But in a town as small as ours he had distinction. He belonged to more secret orders than any man in town--he belonged to all there were. Their small mummeries and mysteries, conducted behind closed doors, had for him a lure that there was no resisting; he just had to join. As I now recall, he never rose to high rank in any one of them, never wore the impressive regalia and the weighty title of a supreme officer; but when a lodge brother died he nearly always served on the committee that drew up the resolutions of respect. In moments of half-timid expanding he had been known to boast mildly that his signature, appended to resolutions of respect, suitably engrossed and properly framed, hung on the parlor walls of more than a hundred homes. He was a small and inconsequential man and he led a small and inconsequential life, giving his days to clerking in Noble & Barry's coal office for fifty dollars a month, and his nights to his lodge meetings and to drawing up resolutions of respect. In the latter direction he certainly had a gift; the underlying sympathy of his nature found its outlet there. And he had a pale, sickly wife and a paler, sicklier child. On this circus day he had been stationed in front of his house for a good half hour, watching up the street for some one. This some one, as it turned out, was Judge Priest. At sight of the old judge coming along, Mr. Hammersmith went forward to meet him and fell in alongside, keeping pace with him. “Good momin', son,” said the old judge, who knew everybody that lived in town. “How's the little feller this mornin'?” “Judge, I'm sorry to say that Lemuel Junior ain't no better this momin',” answered the little coal clerk with a hitching of his voice. “We're afraid--his mother and me--that he ain't never goin' to be no better. I've had Doctor Lake in again and he says there really ain't anything we can do--he says it's just a matter of a little time now. Old Aunt Hannah Holmes says he's got bone erysipelas, and that if we could 'a' got him away from here in time we might have saved him. But I don't know--we done the best we could. I try to be reconciled. Lemuel Junior he suffers so at times that it'll be a mercy, I reckin--but it's hard on you, judge--it's tumble hard on you when it's your only child.”