"Have you got a nigger here?" he began, and then stopped short, for Jacob Dolph was looking upon the face of his son. Vagabond and outcast, he had the vagabond's quick wit, this leader of infuriate crime, and some one good impulse stirred in him of his forfeited gentlehood. He turned savagely upon his followers. "He ain't here!" he roared. "I told you so--I saw him turn the corner." "Shtap an' burrn the bondholder's house!" yelled a man behind. Eustace Dolph turned round with a furious, threatening gesture. "You damned fool!" he thundered; "he's no bondholder--he's one of _us_. Go on, I tell you! Will you let that nigger get away?" He half drove them down the steps. The old man stepped out, his face aflame under his white hair, his whole frame quivering. "You lie, sir!" he cried; but his voice was drowned in the howl of the mob as it swept around the corner, forgetting all things else in the madness of its hideous chase. When Jacob Dolph returned to his wife's chamber, her feeble gaze was lifted to the ceiling. At the sound of his footsteps she let it fall dimly upon his face. He was thankful that, in that last moment of doubtful quickening, she could not read his eyes; and she passed away, smiling sweetly, one of her white old hands in his, and one in her child's. * * * * * Age takes small account of the immediate flight of time. To the young, a year is a mighty span. Be it a happy or an unhappy year that youth looks forward to, it is a vista that stretches far into the future. And when it is done, this interminable year, and youth, just twelve months older, looks back to the first of it, what a long way off it is! What tremendous progress we have made! How much more we know! How insufficient are the standards by which we measured the world a poor three hundred and sixty-five days back! But age has grown habituated to the flight of time. Years? we have seen so many of them that they make no great impression upon us. What! is it ten years since young Midas first came to the counting-room, asking humbly for an entry-clerk's place--he who is now the head of the firm? Bless us! it seems like yesterday. Is it ten years since we first put on that coat? Why, it must be clean out of the fashion by this time. But age does not carry out the thought, and ask if itself be out of the fashion. Age knows better. A few wrinkles, a stoop in the back, a certain slowness of pace, do not make a man old at sixty--nor at seventy, neither; for now you come to think of it, the ten years we were speaking of is gone, and it is seventy now, and not sixty. Seventy! Why, 'tis not to be thought of as old age--save when it may be necessary to rebuke the easy arrogance of youth.