"Oh, yes, I know. Sooner or later there will be advertisements in the papers, and that sort of thing, but that will pass. God knows I would not touch his money with the devil's pitchfork, nor allow anybody whom I loved to touch it. Let him be buried under the name by which he was known here. It is not the name, needless to say, on the bank books. While living under other than his rightful name, he must have gone to New York in person to supply himself with cash. There was some two hundred dollars in bank notes in his wallet. That is with the other things. Let the whole be buried with him, and see to it that Drake does not discover it. You had better take the parcel now. Open the right drawer of the table, and you will find it in the corner. Then, after breakfast, you had better see Drake at once. I will attend to the patients to-day." "You are not able." "Able is a word which I have eliminated from my vocabulary as applied to myself." The funeral, which was held the next afternoon in the parlor of the hotel, was at once a ghastly and a grotesque function. The two doctors, the undertaker and his assistant, Georgie K. and the bar-tender, and Mrs. Slocum with a female friend, and a man, evidently the boarder to whom she had referred, were the only persons present. The boarder wore a hat which had belonged to the dead man. It was many sizes too large for his grayish blond, foolish little head, and, when he put it on, it nearly obscured his eyes. Mrs. Slocum sniffed audibly through the service, which was short, being conducted by the old Presbyterian clergyman of Alton. He hardly spoke above a whisper of "the stranger who had passed from our midst into the beyond." His concluding prayer was quite inaudible. Mrs. Slocum had brought a bouquet of cheerful pink geraniums from her window plants, which on the top of the closed black casket made an odd spot of color and life in the dim room. Among the blossoms were some rose-geranium leaves, whose fragrance seemed to mantle everything like smoke. While the clergyman conducted the inaudible services loud voices were heard in the bar-room, and the yelp of a dog. On one side of the house was the hush of death, on the other the din of life. James wondered what the clergyman found to say: all that he had distinguished was the expression, "The stranger within our midst."