whose virtues Lapham did not believe could be overstated,
and himself and his history had been treated with as much
respect as Bartley was capable of showing any one.
He made a very picturesque thing of the discovery of the
paint-mine. "Deep in the heart of the virgin forests
of Vermont, far up toward the line of the Canadian snows,
on a desolate mountain-side, where an autumnal storm had done
its wild work, and the great trees, strewn hither and thither,
bore witness to its violence, Nehemiah Lapham discovered,
just forty years ago, the mineral which the alchemy
of his son's enterprise and energy has transmuted
into solid ingots of the most precious of metals.
The colossal fortune of Colonel Silas Lapham lay at the
bottom of a hole which an uprooted tree had dug for him,
and which for many years remained a paint-mine of no more
appreciable value than a soap-mine."

Here Bartley had not been able to forego another grin;
but he compensated for it by the high reverence with which
he spoke of Colonel Lapham's record during the war of the
rebellion, and of the motives which impelled him to turn aside
from an enterprise in which his whole heart was engaged, and
take part in the struggle. "The Colonel bears embedded in the
muscle of his right leg a little memento of the period in the
shape of a minie-ball, which he jocularly referred to as his
thermometer, and which relieves him from the necessity of
reading 'The Probabilities' in his morning paper. This saves
him just so much time; and for a man who, as he said, has not a
moment of waste time on him anywhere, five minutes a day are
something in the course of a year. Simple, clear, bold, and