This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold clouds.

He continued: "Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?"

"Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant—but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases. For stronger even than his kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He's going to stand up for the 'open shop' and sit down on the 'trust'; and I assure you that I don't in the least resemble the Evening Post."

A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant's features.

"The New York Evening Post," I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry of his face remained.

"Oh, fortunate youth!" I cried. "To have escaped the New York Evening Post!"

"Is it so heinous?"

"Well!... well!... how exactly describe it?... make you see it?... It's partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses. Habitual over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when attempting praise; it's the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious; it's the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it's our Republic's common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a country."

"The paper without a country! That's very good!"

"Oh, no! I'll tell you something much better, but it is not mine. A clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun—"

"I know that paper."

"—what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man to be good in New York."

"I fear I should subscribe to The Sun," said John Mayrant. He took his hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.

For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian of the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in some trifling activity among the flowers—perhaps picking off the faded blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for something—either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or his own delayed decision to utter it at all.

"Mas' John!" he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot a swift look at the bruise on Mayrant's forehead, and another look, equally swift, at me.