The Cliff-Dwellers | Page 5

hand, regards
his assignment to the West as a mild form of punishment and exile.
"It does give me a little elbow-room, though." This is the silent
acknowledgment that Waiworth sometimes makes to himself but 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