The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 5

grudg ingly.
Walworth Floyd is a sleek, well-fed, prosper ous-looking fellow of thirty. His figure is a trifle too short and dumpy to be pronounced ab solutely good; but it is always strikingly welldressed for he has lived in the West hardly a year as ret. His face is not handsome, but it is gentlemanly quite. One might, indeed, complain of the retreating lines of his forehead, and regret, too, that his chin, once perfect, now shows leanings towards the duplex; but, on the other hand, his well-bridged nose, you are sure, has been figuring in family portraits for the last hundred years, and his plump hands, by reason of the fine texture of the skin and the shapeli ness of the nails, form a point that is distinctly aristocratic. Yet penmanship, under his manipu lations, becomes a very crabbed and laborious affair, and this light species of manual labor is usually performed, so far as he is concerned, by other hands. He has a sort of general clerk, and he shares the services of a stenographer with two or three of his neighbors. He employs, too, an office-boy, who would idle away a good deal of time if Wai worth were not in the habit of sending frequent communications to the steward of his club. Walworth, garmented in his plump placidity, has been accustomed to fare sumptu ously every day, and to worry his head about as few things as possible. His dining he -does for himself; his thinking he has somebody else do for him: His book-keeping and auditing and so on are done in the East, and a friend of his he has no enemiesonce said that his stomach was in Chicago, while his brains were in Boston. "Wai worth, considering his family training and traditions, is inexplicably expansive. Even more than his limited capabilities for business, even more than the exactions of a wife whose pinched girlhood has helped her to a full appreciation of her present membership in a wealthy family, has his own open-hearted bonhomie "kept him back." He is just the man to whom one writes a letter of introduction without any sense of imposing a burden, or to whom one may present it without experiencing any great sense of embarrassment. And it is a letter of introduction, in point of fact, which is now lying half folded on the ex tended elbow-rest of his desk, and has been lying there for a quarter of an hour.
Most of us know something about letters of introduction promised so thoughtlessly, written so glibly, presented so reluctantly, received so grudgingly. But when the letter is merely a trifling and insignificant line a line which has no great importance for the bearer and can cause no great annoyance to the recipient and when its presentation here and its accounting for there may be considered as but a minute item in the general system of social book-keeping, then we have an episode that passes quickly and lightly for all concerned. Such appears to be the situation in the office of the Massachusetts Brass Com pany.
Walworth is tilted back comfortably in one of his handsome chairs and sends out a casual glance through the nearest window. The sun is struggling with a half -luminous haze, and through this haze a hundred streaks of smoke are driving headlong towards the lake. A tall clock-tower looms up three or four streets away, and one of its faces on the looker's own level gives the hour as half-past ten.
""Well, we are living up on Pine Street, Mr. Ogden," he is saying; "just this side of the Water Works the place where the wheels go round, you know. You beat me here by a few minutes this morning, but I think I can promise to be the first on the ground when you call on us there."
He is running his fingers over the edges of several little sheets of brass. A few bunches of these, together with a set or two of brass rings of varying diameters and thicknesses, are the only intimations of merchandise that the office yields. Sometimes even these are bundled away into a drawer, and then commerce is refined com pletely beyond the ken of the senses.
"However, don't go. I am a little late in get ting around this morning, but the mail is light. Ferguson will look after it. Sit down again."
The visitor, thus urged, sank back into the chair from which he had just risen. He was a slender young man, of good height, and his age was perhaps twenty-four. His complexion was of the colorless kind that good health alone keeps from sallowness. His hair was a light brown and fine and thick, and it fell across his temples in the two smooth wings that were made