Still pursuing that inspiring music, he turned to the bureau and began to shave the yellow down from his cheeks and chin. Thrust between the exaggerating mirror and its frame were two photographs--the one, a trifle faded, of a matronly, kindly woman of his own race, perhaps fifty years old, stiffly arrayed in a silk dress rigorously American, and the other, a new one, that of a young girl in a great hat and unmistakably Manhattan dress, a young girl with a pretty, piquant face of that distinctively American type--the Irish. Perhaps these photographs distracted the German's attention; perhaps it was only that no man living can successfully whistle and shave at one and the same time. At any rate, his hand shook, and the razor cut a light gash in his upper lip. He flung the offending blade from him, and it struck the mirror, cracking the glass across one corner. "Ach, Gott," he smiled, as he staunched the blood with a heavy pressure through a rough towel; and then, in the English that he used even in his soliloquies: "Dey say now dot means bad luck fer seven year. Lucky is't dot I am not suberstitious!" And then, undisturbed, he quietly resumed his whistling, finished shaving, sleeked down his rebellious tow-colored curls, got into a newly pressed brown suit and yellow shirt, donned a high collar and salmon tie, and, setting a carefully brushed derby upon his head, descended to the narrow street, the strains of "Die Wacht Am Rhein" lingering behind him through the darkened hallway. To accomplish the purpose of his early rising, he took the Third Avenue elevated to the Forty-second Street station. There he bought two bouquets of carnations--one pink and the other white--and boarded a suburban train, which bore him, at last, to one of those little stations that New York, which has so small time for remembrance, has selected for the hiding of its dead. In the warm sunlight of the spring morning, Hermann picked his certain way among the green grass and the white-roofed habitations of the sleepers, until he came upon a little plot, by no means the cheapest or more obscure in the burying-ground, and there, his lips still pursed, but silent now, took off his shining derby and paused before the solitary white stone. With much that was unaffectedly reverent, he knelt, according to his weekly custom, and placed the white carnations on the grave, and with a great deal that was just as unaffectedly proud, he read, also according to that custom, the inscription cut upon the white stone that he had purchased with what, when he paid the bill, happened to be his last dollar: Here In Peace Lies The Body Of WlLHELMINA HOFFMANN, Widow Of Ludwig Hoffmann, Of Andernach, Rhenish Prussia, Who Dep't'd This Life, Jan. 10, 1907. ------ "_Wait thou, wait thou; soon thou shall rest also._"