Then awake to the necessity for further guardianship of Weymouth trust funds, the old man started for the bank with the redeemed satchel.

Three hours from Weymouthville, in the gray dawn, Mr. Robert alighted from the train at a lonely flag-station.  Dimly he could see the figure of a man waiting on the platform, and the shape of a spring-waggon, team and driver.  Half a dozen lengthy bamboo fishing-poles projected from the waggon’s rear.

“You’re here, Bob,” said Judge Archinard, Mr. Robert’s old friend and schoolmate.  “It’s going to be a royal day for fishing.  I thought you said—­why, didn’t you bring along the stuff?”

The president of the Weymouth Bank took off his hat and rumpled his gray locks.

“Well, Ben, to tell you the truth, there’s an infernally presumptuous old nigger belonging in my family that broke up the arrangement.  He came down to the depot and vetoed the whole proceeding.  He means all right, and—­well, I reckon he is right.  Somehow, he had found out what I had along—­though I hid it in the bank vault and sneaked it out at midnight.  I reckon he has noticed that I’ve been indulging a little more than a gentleman should, and he laid for me with some reaching arguments.

“I’m going to quit drinking,” Mr. Robert concluded.  “I’ve come to the conclusion that a man can’t keep it up and be quite what he’d like to be—­’pure and fearless and without reproach’—­that’s the way old Bushrod quoted it.”

“Well, I’ll have to admit,” said the judge, thoughtfully, as they climbed into the waggon, “that the old darkey’s argument can’t conscientiously be overruled.”

“Still,” said Mr. Robert, with a ghost of a sigh, “there was two quarts of the finest old silk-velvet Bourbon in that satchel you ever wet your lips with.”

III

THE DISCOUNTERS OF MONEY

The spectacle of the money-caliphs of the present day going about Bagdad-on-the-Subway trying to relieve the wants of the people is enough to make the great Al Raschid turn Haroun in his grave.  If not so, then the assertion should do so, the real caliph having been a wit and a scholar and therefore a hater of puns.

How properly to alleviate the troubles of the poor is one of the greatest troubles of the rich.  But one thing agreed upon by all professional philanthropists is that you must never hand over any cash to your subject.  The poor are notoriously temperamental; and when they get money they exhibit a strong tendency to spend it for stuffed olives and enlarged crayon portraits instead of giving it to the instalment man.