The Gold Brick

AS HOLMAN loitered along the pavement that June morning, glad once more to be back in Springfield after so many years, he recalled with a sigh another morning, far gone, when first he had come up to the capital of his state. “A morning just like this,” he was thinking, “all green and sunny and hopeful and—pure. My God!” But he put aside regret; it was enough just then to be back after so many years of absence—years of dingy poverty which had kept him down in stupid Jasper, never once able to get back during the session, if only for a day to see the boys!—even as a man of fifty, with gray hair straggling beneath his broad, slouch hat, with his long, dusty coat, and worn, old shoes, that fell softly on the hot sidewalk, far other than the young representative who had come up to the capital so long before.