what I would my business cares regained possession of me. I thought rapidly of many things. I wrote three or four urgent letters. I entrusted to my wife a note containing divers directions for my head clerk. And all with that feverish agitation which unforeseen trouble provokes, when grief swoops down with fatal suddenness upon us, and we perceive the unexpected tokens of destiny.
All sorts of ideas jostled each other in my brain, obscuring the vision of suffering and death which had been called up by the telegram, so that in the confusion into which the news from my father had thrown me I hardly thought of him at all.
In the cab that took me to the Lyons station, a new wave of the tumultuous flood that was tossing me about brought his image before me, nor did the vision leave me. I had it all night for company as the train was speeding through the dark.
The last time I had seen my father—but could it be that this was many years ago? That visit to the old country home in which my childhood had been passed, and to which my father had welcomed me and my young family with jocund pleasure, came back to me by small degrees in its least details. I recalled him as he then was, tall, vigorous, solidly built, with roughly-hewn features softened by age, and by the whiten-
