: Vistas of New York by Matthews Brander - New York (N.Y.) Fiction; Short stories American

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cannot know," he wrote, "what this is to me. It is my life--it is the making of my life; and if I should die to-night, I should not have lived in vain, for I have tasted joy, and death cannot rob me of that."

Of course the engagement must needs be long, because he was as yet in no position to support a wife; but he had been admitted to the bar, and he could soon make his way, with the stimulus he had now.

I was called out of town suddenly about that time, and I saw him for a few minutes only before I left New York. He was overflowing with happiness, and he could talk about nothing but the woman he loved--how beautiful she was! how clever! how accomplished! how devoted to his mother! In the midst of his rhapsody he was seized by a fit of violent coughing, and I saw the same danger signal in his cheeks which had preceded the break-down in his senior year. I begged him to take care of himself. With a light laugh he answered that he intended to do so--it was his duty to do so, now that he did not belong to himself.

In the fall, when I came back to the city, I found him in the office of a law firm, the head of which had been an intimate of his father's. The girl he was to marry went one night a week to dine with her grandmother, and he came to me that evening and talked about her. As the cold weather stiffened, his cough became more frequent, and long before Christmas I was greatly alarmed by it. He consulted a distinguished doctor, who told him that he ought to spend the winter in a drier climate--in Colorado, for example.

It was on Christmas eve that year that he brought me the frog that played the trombone. Ever since the first Christmas of our friendship we had made each other little presents.

"This is hardly worth giving," he said, as he placed the china shell on the corner of my desk, where it stands to this day. "But it is quaint and it caught my fancy. Besides, I've a notion that it is the tune of one of Heine's lyrics set by Schubert that the fellow is trying to play. And then I've a certain satisfaction in thinking that I shall be represented here by a performer of marvelous force of lung, since you seem to think my lungs are weak."

A severe cough seized him then, but, when he had recovered his breath, he laughed lightly, and said: "That's the worst one I've had this week. However, when the spring warms me up again I shall be all right once more. It wasn't on me that the spring poet wrote the epitaph:

'It was a cough That carried him off; It was a coffin They carried him off in.'"

"You ought to go away for a month at least," I urged. "Take a run down South and fill your lungs with the balsam of the pines."

"That's what my mother wants me to do," he admitted; "and I've half promised to do it. If I go to Florida for January, can you go with me?"

I knew how needful it was for him to escape from the bleakness of our New York winter, so I made a hasty mental review of my engagements. "Yes," I said, "I will go with you."

He held out his hand and clasped mine firmly. "We'll have a good time," he responded, "just we two. But you must promise not to object if I insist on talking about her all the time."

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