I shall keep the book as long as I live. In its thumbed and greasy leaves is written the record of a heroism more lofty and a martyrdom more lustrous than ever lit the page of book before or since. I think I shall have it printed in duplicate, and scattered as leaven throughout the lumpy Sunday-school libraries of the land. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A CORNER LOT. ------- “HE has been at that for thirteen years.” And the speaker laughed as he watched an old man gathering up a bucket of stones and broken bricks. The old man continued his work until his bucket was filled, and then started back toward Spring Street, stopping on the way to resurrect a rusted old hoop that was nearly buried in the gutter. After walking about three blocks he stopped at the corner of Spring and James streets, and laying the rusty hoop carefully upon a great heap of hoops of all kinds and sizes, he carried the bucket to the back of his lot, a part of which was considerably lower than the front, and emptied the bucketful of bricks and stones. He was a very old man—about seventy years old, apparently—in his shirt-sleeves, and wearing a dingy straw hat. He was feeble, too, and his steps were slow, but he stopped only to get a drink of water at the back door, and then ambled off with the empty bucket. The little frame structure is half store and half residence. Just inside the door to the store sat a portly old lady of sixty or thereabouts. “Who is that old man yonder with that empty bucket?” “Him! Why that’s old man Lewis Powell, and he’s my husband. I thought everybody knowed him.” “Is that all he does?” “Fill up the lot, you mean? No, no, he puts hoops on barrels and kegs, and raises calves and such like, but that’s his main business. He’s been at it now for nigh on to fourteen years.” “And how much has he filled in?” “Oh, from the sidewalk on back. The lot is fifty by eighty, and it used to be just one big hole. Now here on Spring Street where the front is, the bank went nearly straight down ’cause the eye of the sewer was right there. Then the sewer was open and run in a gully the whole length of the lot, and just about in the middle of the lot. Here on James Street, at the side there, it wasn’t so steep. The front of the old house was about half-way down the bank, and the pillars at the back was over ten feet high. The house wasn’t more’n twelve feet that way, either, so you can tell how steep it was. And right at the back door the sewer passed.” “How deep was it?” “Well, right here at the front the city men measured to the sewer once, and it was a little over twenty feet below the sidewalk. The back of the lot was a little lower. It was one big hole fifty by eighty, and almost in the bottom of it was the old house.” “Fourteen years ago.”