He was a master of human interest, as grizzled as that old Scotch hound which became his constant companion after Mrs. Colfax died, and his contact with all those hosts of men and women, for whom he administered justice so faithfully for more than twenty years, had stamped on his shaven face sad but warm and sympathetic lines. All men liked him and those who knew him best loved him heartily. Under his gruffness there was a lot of sentiment and tenderness. After his reserved moments, when he was silent and cold, he would burst forth into indulgences of fine, dry humor, like an effervescent fluid which gains in sparkling vigor by remaining corked awhile. It was commonly said--and often said by Judge Graver, of the Supreme Court--that old Colfax remained in the comparative obscurity of a probate judgeship simply from an innate modesty and a belief that he had found his work in life in which he might best serve humanity without hope of personal power and glory. Gaunt, tall, stoop-shouldered, gray, walking the same path each day,--home, court-house, club, neighbors, home,--with a grapevine stick as thick as a fence-post in his hand--such was her father. Exactly seven years ago the first of last June, on a spring day when I believe every bird that dared came into the city to make his song heard, I came up from downtown and dropped off a surface car before the gleaming white pillars of the new probate court building. My pocket was stuffed with a lot of documents in that Welson _vs._ Welson litigation, which I had just succeeded in closing. Behind those swinging green doors which flank the big bench is the judge's retiring-room; pushing the crack there wider, I was able to peek in, and saw at once that the old atmosphere of Judge Colfax's study had not remained in the old dingy court-house, where the dismantlers' picks were already breaking up the ancient mortar, but had followed the personality of the man into these new pretentious quarters. The retiring-room already gave forth an alluring odor of law books and document files, the floor already had been forced into use to bear up little piles of transcripts of evidence, tin document boxes and piles of books, open at reference pages, occupying obscure corners. The Judge's black silk hat was in its familiar place, resting with the opening upward, on the old black walnut desk which its owner had affectionately brought with him, and which made a strange and cynical contrast with the mahogany woodwork and new rug. "Come in," he said, and with one of his long-fingered hands he made a gesture toward the opposite side of the room and spoke my name and that of another. She was there! I had never seen her before. She was there. I had no thought of her ancestry, her wealth, or her position. She was there, and into my throat came something I had never felt before, into my face a suffusion of hot blood, into my lungs a long-held inhalation of breath.