Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/26

14 poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been overtaken on the crest of the hill and brought back to the city. A little more, and he would have dipped down the short cut to posterity and escaped.

 

 IV

he came out it was exactly as if he had been in custody, for beside him walked a stout man with a big black beard, who, save that he wore spectacles, might have been a policeman, and in whom at a second glance I recognized the highest contemporary enterprise.

"This is Mr. Morrow," said Paraday, looking, I thought, rather white; "he wants to publish Heaven knows what about me."

I winced as I remembered that this was exactly what I myself had wanted. "Already?" I exclaimed, with a sort of sense that my friend had fled to me for protection.

Mr. Morrow glared, agreeably, through his glasses; they suggested the electric headlights of some monstrous modern ship, and I felt as if Paraday and I were tossing, terrified, under his bows. I saw that his momentum was irresistible. "I was confident that I should be the first in the field," he declared. "A great interest is naturally felt in Mr. Paraday's surroundings." 