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As we were pushing the chairs back from the table, I was inspired with the idea of taking our guest off to a cafe concert over in the Bowery–a volksgarten very popular in those days. While my whispered suggestion was meeting Clara’s cordial approval, our friend Bleeker dropped in. So the colonel and Bleeker and I passed the evening with “lager-beer and Meyer-beer,” as my lively kinsman put it; after which he spent the night on the sofa in our sitting-room, for we had no spare chamber to place at his disposal.

“I shall be very snug here,” he said, smiling down my apologies. “I’m a ‘possum for adapting myself to any odd hollow.”

The next morning my cousin was early astir, possibly not having found that narrow springless lounge all a ‘possum could wish, and joined us in discussing a plan which I had proposed overnight to Mrs. Wesley, namely, that he should hire an apartment in a quiet street near by, and take his meals–that was to say, his dinner–with us, until he could make such arrangements as would allow him to live more conveniently. To return South, where all the lines of his previous business connections were presumably broken, was at present out of the question.

“The war has ruined our people,” said the colonel. “I will have to put up for a while with a place in a bank or an insurance office, or something in that small way. The world owes me a living, North or South.”

His remark nettled me a little, though he was, of course, unaware of my relations with the Savonarola Fire Insurance Company, and had meant no slight.

“I don’t quite see that,” I observed.

“Don’t see what?”

“How the world contrived to get so deeply into your debt–how all the points of the compass managed it.”

“Thomas, I didn’t ask to be born, did I?”

“Probably not.”

“But I was born, wasn’t I?”

“To all appearances.”

“Well, then!”

“But you cannot hold the world in general responsible for your birth. The responsibility narrows itself down to your parents.”

“Then I am euchred. By one of those laws of nature which make this globe a sweet spot to live on, they were taken from me just when I needed them most–my mother in my infancy, and my father in my childhood.”

“But your father left you something?”

“The old gentleman left me nothing, and I’ve been steadily increasing the legacy ever since.”

“What did you do before the war?” inquired Clara sympathetically. His mention of his early losses had touched her.

“Oh, a number of things. I read law for a while. At one time I was interested in a large concern for the manufacture of patent metallic burial cases; but nobody seemed to die that year. Good health raged like an epidemic all over the South. Latterly I dabbled a little in stocks– and stocks dabbled in me.”

“You were not successful, then?” I said.

“I was at first, but when the war fever broke out and the Southern heart was fired, everything that didn’t go down went up.”

“And you couldn’t meet your obligations?”

“That wasn’t the trouble–I couldn’t get away from them,” replied the colonel, with a winsome smile. “I met them at every corner.”

The man had a fashion of turning his very misfortunes into pleasantries. Surely prosperity would be wasted on a person so gifted with optimism. I felt it to be kind and proper, however, to express the hope that he had reached the end of his adversity, and to assure him that I would do anything I could in the world to help him.

“Tom Wesley, I believe you would.”

Before the close of that day Mrs. Wesley, who is a lady that does not allow any species of vegetation to accumulate under her feet, had secured a furnished room for our kinsman in a street branching off from Clinton Place, and at a moderate additional expense contracted to have him served with breakfast on the premises. Previous to this I had dined down town, returning home in the evening to a rather heavy tea, which was really my wife’s dinner–Sheridan and Ulysses (such were the heroic names under which the two little Wesleys were staggering) had their principal meal at midday. It was, of course, not desirable that the colonel should share this meal with them and Mrs. Wesley in my absence. So we decided to have a six o’clock dinner; a temporary disarrangement of our domestic machinery, for my cousin Flagg would doubtless find some acceptable employment before long, and leave the household free to slip back into its regular grooves.