Three days had passed, and the excitement in the neighborhood was nearly at an end. The apothecary’s shop at the corner into which John Baker’s body and the living four-year-old child had been carried together immediately after the catastrophe had lost most of its interest for the curious, although the noses of a few idlers were still pressed against the large pane in apparent search of something beyond the brilliant colored bottles or the soda-water fountains. Now that the funeral was over, the womenkind, whose windows commanded a view of the house where the dead man had been lying, had taken their heads in and resumed their sweeping and washing, and knots of their husbands and fathers no longer stood in gaping conclave close to the very doorsill, rehearsing again and again the details of the distressing incident. Even the little child who had been so miraculously saved from the jaws of death, although still decked in the dirty finery which its mother deemed appropriate to its having suddenly become a public character, had ceased to be the recipient of the dimes of the tender-hearted. Such is the capriciousness of the human temperament at times of emotional excitement, the plan of a subscription for the victim’s family had not been mooted until what was to its parents a small fortune had been bestowed on the rescued child; but the scale of justice had gradually righted itself. Contributions were now pouring in, especially since it was reported that the mayor and several other well-known persons had headed the list with fifty dollars each; and there was reason to believe that a lump sum of from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars would be collected for the benefit of the widow and seven children before public generosity was exhausted. Local interest was on the wane; but, thanks to the telegraph and the press, the facts were being disseminated through the country, and every leading newspaper in the land was chronicling, with more or less prominence according to the character of its readers, the item that John Baker, the gate-keeper at a railroad crossing in a Pennsylvania city, had snatched a toddling child from the pathway of a swiftly moving locomotive and been crushed to death. A few days later a dinner-company of eight was gathered at a country house several hundred miles distant from the scene of the calamity. The host and hostess were people of wealth and leisure, who enjoyed inviting congenial parties from their social acquaintance in the neighboring city to share with them for two or three days at a time the charms of nature. The dinner was appetizing, the wine good, and conversation turned lightly from one subject to another.