Miss Dangerlie's Roses by Thomas Nelson Page

Henry Floyd was a crank, at least so many people said; a few thought / he was a wonderful person: these were mostly children, old women, and / people not in the directory, and persons not in the directory do not / count for much. He was in fact a singular fellow. It was all natural / enough to him; he was just like what he believed his father had been, / his father of whom his mother used to tell him, and whom he remembered / so vaguely except when he had suddenly loomed up in his uniform at the / head of his company, when they went away on that march from which he / had never returned. He meant to be like him, if he was not, and he / remembered all that his mother had told him of his gentleness, his high / courtesy, his faithfulness, his devotion to duty, his unselfishness. / So it was all natural enough to Floyd to be as he was. But a man can / no more tell whether or not he is a crank than he can tell how old he / looks. He was, however, without doubt, different in certain ways from / most people. This his friends admitted. Some said he was old-fashioned; / some that he was "old-timey"; some that he was unpractical, the shades / of criticism ranging up to those saying he was a fool. This did not mean / intellectually, for none denied his intellect. He drove a virile pen, / and had an epigrammatic tongue. He had had a hard time. He had borne the / yoke in his youth. This, we have strong authority for saying, is good / for a man; but it leaves its mark upon him. He had been desperately / poor. He had not minded that except for his mother, and he had approved / of her giving up every cent to meet the old security debts. It had cut / him off from his college education; but he had worked till he was a / better scholar than he might have been had he gone to college. He had / kept his mother comfortable as long as she lived, and then had put up / a monument over her in the old churchyard, as he had done before to his / father's memory.

This, everyone said, was foolish, and perhaps it was, / for it took him at least two years to pay for them, and he might have / laid up the money and got a start, or, as some charitable persons said, / it might have been given to the poor. However, the monuments were put / up, and on them were epitaphs which recorded at length the virtues of / those to whom they were erected, with their descent, and declared that / they were Christians and Gentlepeople. Some one said to Floyd that he / might have shortened the epitaphs, and have saved something. "I did not / want them shortened," said he.