Strictly Business: More Stories of the Four Million
John Stuart Mill · en
The erstwhile Major had been found dead on a dark street and brought by
curious and ennuied citizens to the drug store. The late human being
had been engaged in terrific battle—the details showed that. Loafer and
reprobate though he had been, he had been also a warrior. But he had
lost. His hands were yet clinched so tightly that his fingers would not
be opened. The gentle citizens who had known him stood about and
searched their vocabularies to find some good words, if it were
possible, to speak of him. One kind-looking man said, after much
thought: “When ‘Cas’ was about fo’teen he was one of the best spellers
in school.”
While I stood there the fingers of the right hand of “the man that was”
which hung down the side of a white pine box, relaxed, and dropped
something at my feet. I covered it with one foot quietly, and a little
later on I picked it up and pocketed it. I reasoned that in his last
struggle his hand must have seized that object unwittingly and held it
in a death grip.
At the hotel that night the main topic of conversation, with the
possible exceptions of politics and prohibition, was the demise of
Major Caswell. I heard one man say to a group of listeners:
“In my opinion, gentlemen, Caswell was murdered by some of these
no-account niggers for his money. He had fifty dollars this afternoon
which he showed to several gentlemen in the hotel. When he was found
the money was not on his person.”
I left the city the next morning at nine, and as the train was crossing
the bridge over the Cumberland River I took out of my pocket a yellow
horn overcoat button the size of a fifty-cent piece, with frayed ends
of coarse twine hanging from it, and cast it out of the window into the
slow, muddy waters below.
_I wonder what’s doing in Buffalo!_
XIV
PSYCHE AND THE PSKYSCRAPER
If you are a philosopher you can do this thing: you can go to the top
of a high building, look down upon your fellow-men 300 feet below, and
despise them as insects. Like the irresponsible black waterbugs on
summer ponds, they crawl and circle and hustle about idiotically
without aim or purpose. They do not even move with the admirable
intelligence of ants, for ants always know when they are going home.
The ant is of a lowly station, but he will often reach home and get his
slippers on while you are left at your elevated station.
Man, then, to the housetopped philosopher, appears to be but a
creeping, contemptible beetle. Brokers, poets, millionaires,
bootblacks, beauties, hod-carriers and politicians become little black
specks dodging bigger black specks in streets no wider than your thumb.