Page:The Sick-A-Bed Lady.djvu/206

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

SOMETHING THAT HAPPENED

for two," and threw himself down on the twiggy ground and began to snap metallically against the cup in his hand.

"Nice little tin cup," he affirmed judicially. "The Blue Serge Man gave it to me. It must have cost as much as fifteen cents. And it will last, I suppose, till the moon is mud and the stars are dough. But the Blue Serge Man himself is—quite gone. Funny idea!" The Partridge Hunter's forehead began to knit into a fearful frown. "Of course it is n't so," he argued, "but it would certainly seem sometimes as though a man's things were the only really immortal, indestructible part of him, and that Soul was nothing in the world but just a composite name for the S-ouvenirs, O-rnaments, U-tensils, L-itter that each man's personality accumulates in the few years time allotted to him. The man himself, you see, is wiped right off the earth like a chalk-mark, but you can't escape or elude in a million years the wizened bronze elephant that he brought home from India, or the showy red necktie that's down behind his bureau, or the floating, wind-blown, ash-barrel bill for violets that turns up a generation hence in a German prayerbook at a French book-stall.

"And is n't Death a teasing teacher? Holds up a personality suddenly like a map—makes you learn by heart every possible, conceivable pleasant

180