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“He called in old Fes to tell him all about his life insurance. He’d carried a heavy load of it, and it was all paid up; and the sweat it must have took to do it you’d hardly like to think about. He give directions about everything as careful and painstaking as any day of his life. He asked to speak to Fes alone a minute, and later I helped Fes do what he told him. ‘Cousin Fes,’ he says, ‘it’s bad weather, but I expect mother’ll want all the flowers taken out to the cemetery and you better let her have her way. But there wouldn’t be any good of their stayin’ there; snowed on, like as not. I wish you’d wait till after she’s come away, and git a wagon and take ’em in to the hospital. You can fix up the anchors and so forth so they won’t look like funeral flowers.’

“About an hour later his mother broke out with a scream, sobbin’ and cryin’, and he tried to quiet her by tellin’ over one of their old-time family funny stories; it made her worse, so he quit. ‘Oh, Mel,’ she says, ‘you’ll be with your father–‘

“I don’t know as Mel had much of a belief in a hereafter; certainly he wasn’t a great churchgoer. ‘Well,’ he says, mighty slow, but hearty and smiling, too, ‘if I see father, I–guess–I’ll–be–pretty– well–fixed!’ Then he jest lay still, tryin’ to quiet her and pettin’ her head. And so–that’s the way he went.”

Fiderson made one of his impatient little gestures, but Mr. Martin drowned his first words with a loud fit of coughing.

“Well, sir,” he observed, “I read that ‘Leg-long’ book down home; and I heard two or three countries, and especially ourn, had gone middling crazy over it; it seemed kind of funny that we should, too, so I thought I better come up and see it for myself, how it was, on the stage, where you could look at it; and–I expect they done it as well as they could. But when that little boy, that’d always had his board and clothes and education free, saw that he’d jest about talked himself to death, and called for the press notices about his christening to be read to him to soothe his last spasms–why, I wasn’t overly put in mind of Melville Bickner.”

Mr. Martin’s train left for Plattsville at two in the morning. Little Fiderson and I escorted him to the station. As the old fellow waved us good-bye from within the gates, Fiderson turned and said:

“Just the type of sodden-headed old pioneer that you couldn’t hope to make understand a beautiful thing like ‘L’Aiglon’ in a thousand years. I thought it better not to try, didn’t you?”