fifty years shouldn't stand between me and seeing and helping do what must be done down there south of Washington; the bitter part of it is staying here. Next month when the Felton ladies come back, I guess we'll have a telegraph operator right at the station, at least that's what Wheeler their foreman told me yesterday. You see, both Mr. Esterbrook and John Angus are directors in the Railroad Company, and what with one's wanting to hear the good news and the other the bad, we're likely to get it. Come back into the workroom, neighbor Morse. After your long wait you'll find a chair easier sitting than the coal-box lid."

"There's more than you that has to fight it out at home to give those that's gone free minds," replied the old man, shivering as he settled back in a carpet-covered rocker of strange construction. "Dan had turned forty when he went, and now little Dan has run off to follow him and he's scarce sixteen, so my fight must be fit out to keep son's wife and girl children in food meantime; but I hope the Lord'll understand and count it all for the same cause."

Gilbert, who had seated himself at his desk and was fumbling among some papers in an absent-minded way, wheeled toward the old man quickly.

"Of course He will, for that's what Lincoln wrote me, and he and the Lord have got to be of one mind in this business if it's going through as it must."

"Wrote you? Lincoln wrote you? When? How? Why didn't you tell the boys? They'd burst with pride to know a letter from Lincoln was in the town, much less right here in the post-office that's public property, so to speak!" cried Morse, leaving his chair and stiff limbs together, and coming toward the desk almost with a bound.

Gilbert started as he realized what secret had slipped past his lips, hesitated a moment, and then pulling a stool from under the desk, motioned his companion to sit beside him.

On the wall directly in front hung a very good engraving of Washington, in a home-made frame of charred wood; under it was suspended an old flint-lock, worm-eaten in stock and rusty at trigger. Below it, at one side of the desk so that it came face to face with the owner, a large colored lithograph of Lincoln was tacked to the wall, framed only by a wreath of shrivelled ground-pine and wax-berries.

Taking a key from his vest-pocket where it lay in company with bits of sugared flag-root, Gilbert wiped it carefully and unlocking a drawer in the desk that, to the casual 

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