There were the bookcases, with their glass doors and green-silk curtains; the threadbare carpet, the portrait of the Honorable Jeremiah Mason over the fireplace; the old mahogany desk; the little bronze paper- weight in the shape of a horse; the books, brown and faded with years; and at the desk--I brushed my hand across my eyes--at the desk sat old Tuckerman Toddleham himself! For the first time in my entire existence, so far as I can now remember, I was totally nonplussed and abashed.

I could not have been more astonished had I walked into the family lot in the Salem cemetery and found my grandfather sitting on his own tombstone; but there the old lawyer surely was, as certainly as he had been there twenty years before; and the same sensations that I had always experienced as a child while in his presence now swept over me and made me feel like a whipped school-boy.

Not for the world would I have had him see me and be forced to answer his questions as to my business in the city of Boston; so, holding my breath, I tiptoed out of the door, and the last vision I ever had of him was as he sat there absorbed in some legal problem, bending over his books, the sunlight flooding the mote-filled air of the dusty office, the little bronze horse standing before him on the desk and the branches of the trees outside casting flickering shadows upon the walls and bookcases.

Canny old man! He had never put his neck in a noose! I envied him his quiet life among his books and the well-deserved respect and honor that the world accorded him.
Ruminating in this strain, I threaded my way through the crowd in Court Street, and was about to return to my hotel, when to my utter horror I beheld Hawkins, in all his regalia, being marched down the hill between two business-like-looking persons, who were unmistakably officers of police.

He walked dejectedly and had lost all his bravado.