Manley,” and a glance showed the reader that it was the description of a battle to a friend. One sentence was underlined. “We also lost Private A. T. Wickliff, killed in the charge—a good man who could always be depended on to do his duty.” The sheriff guided his bewildered visitor opposite these portraits and lifted his hand above the other’s shoulder. “You see them?” said he. “They’re _my_ father and mother. You see that letter? It was wrote by my father’s old captain and sent to me. What he says about my father is everything that I know. But it’s enough. He was ‘a good man who could always be depended on to do his duty.’ You can’t say no more of the President of the United States. I’ve had a pretty tough time of it in my own life, as a man’s got to have who takes up my line; but I’ve tried to live so my father needn’t be ashamed of me. That other picture is my mother. I don’t know nothing about her, nothing at all; and I don’t need to—except those eyes of hers. There’s a look someway about your mother’s eyes like mine. Maybe it’s only the look one good woman has like another; but whatever it is, your mother made me think of mine. She’s the kind of mother I’d like to have; and if I can help it, she sha’n’t know her son’s in the penitentiary. Now come on back.” As silently as he had gone, the prisoner followed the sheriff back to his cell. “Good-bye, Paisley,” said the sheriff, at the door. “Good-bye, sir; I’m much obliged,” said the prisoner. Not another word was said. That evening, however, good Mrs. Raker told the sheriff that, to her mind, if ever a man was struck with death, that new young fellow was; and he had been crying, too; his eyes were all red. “He needs to cry,” was all the comfort that the kind soul received from the sheriff, the cold remark being accompanied by what his familiars called his Indian scowl. Nevertheless, he did his utmost for the prisoner as a quiet intercessor, and his merciful prophecy was accomplished—Edgar S. Paisley was permitted to serve out his sentence in the jail instead of the State prison. His state of health had something to do with the judge’s clemency, and the sheriff could not but suspect that, in his own phrase, “Paisley played his cough and his hollow cheeks for all they were worth.” “But that’s natural,” he observed to Raker, “and he’s doing it partially for the old lady. Well, I’ll try to give her a quiet spell.” “Yes,” Raker responds, dubiously, “but he’ll be at his old games the minute he gits out.” “You don’t suppose”—the sheriff speaks with a certain embarrassment—“you don’t suppose there’d be any chance of really reforming him, so as he’d stick?—he ain’t likely to live long.” “Nah,” says the unbelieving deputy; “he’s a deal too slick to be reformed.”