The clerk soon returned with a tin case, and laid it on the table. Mr. Maskelyne took one from among the many papers therein, and, striking it sharply against the arm of his chair, to scatter the dust that invests all things in the garment the outfitter Time warrants such a perfect fit, he spread it out beside the letter he had just read with such blank wonder. “Identically the same,” he muttered. “No other man ever made an _e_ like that.” The clerk had vanished and the lawyer was again alone. He glanced once more at the mysterious missive, and then, with the purposelessness of abstraction, he rose and went to the window. Nothing caught his eye but the sign-bedecked front of the opposite building and one small patch of blue sky—near, gritty, limestone fact and a faraway something without confine. Still, amazed as he was the contagious joy of the time sensibly affected him. [Illustration: [Bridge]] The sparrows, quarrelsome gamins of the air, for the time reformed by honest labor into respectable artisans, upon an opposite entablature, in garrulous amity plied their small, nest-making joinery. The sunlight falling through a haze of wires, wrought into something bright with its own glow a tuft of grass which clumped its spears in its fortalice, taken in assault, on the opposite frieze. Of even these small things, and of much more, Mr. Maskelyne was partially conscious. But the letter! Clear-sighted as he was, he knew but little—so forthright was his look, so fixed toward mere gain—of the wonderful country which lies beneath every man’s nose, less even of the vanishing tracts which retrospection sometimes sees over either shoulder. But the letter! It peopled his vision with things long gone. It brought into view old Bevington—“Dick Bevington,” as he was called to the last day of his life—and a nickname at fifty indicates much of character; brought up before him Dick Bevington as he was before age had stiffened his easy but dignified carriage or taught his once polished but positive utterance to veer and haul in sudden change; brought up old Bevington, as he himself, in childhood, had seen him, stately but debonair, the perfection of aristocratic exclusiveness, affable, however, in the genial kindliness of a kind-hearted man secure in every position—a genuine Knickerbocker in every practice and in every principle—a well-born, well-bred gentleman. And that once active and once ebullient life had long ago gone out! It almost seemed that such vitality, so held in self-contained management, so wisely put forth, so well invested, so to speak, should have lasted forever. But now there was nothing left to bring him to mind but a portrait in the rooms of the Historical Society, or a name in the list of directors when the history of some bank was given, or in the pamphlet in which the story of some charitable institution was told from the beginning—really there was nothing more than this to recall Dick