a pride to the church in which he was what has been called an "active
worker." It was discovered that his sensitiveness to his companion's
attack on Joseph Louden arose from the fact that Joe had obtained the
acquittal of an imbecile sister of the blind man, a two-thirds-witted
woman who had been charged with bigamy.

The Tocsin made what it could of this, and so dexterously that the
wrath of Canaan was one farther jot increased against the shyster. Ay,
the town was hot, inside and out.

Let us consider the Forum. Was there ever before such a summer for the
"National House" corner? How voices first thundered there, then
cracked and piped, is not to be rendered in all the tales of the
fathers. One who would make vivid the great doings must indeed "dip
his brush in earthquake and eclipse"; even then he could but picture
the credible, and must despair of this: the silence of Eskew Arp. Not
that Eskew held his tongue, not that he was chary of speech--no! O
tempora, O mores! NO! But that he refused the subject in hand, that
he eschewed expression upon it and resolutely drove the argument in
other directions, that he achieved such superbly un-Arplike
inconsistency; and with such rich material for his sardonic humors, not
at arm's length, not even so far as his finger-tips, but beneath his
very palms, he rejected it: this was the impossible fact.

Eskew--there is no option but to declare--was no longer Eskew. It is
the truth; since the morning when Ariel Tabor came down from Joe's
office, leaving her offering of white roses in that dingy, dusty, shady
place, Eskew had not been himself. His comrades observed it somewhat in
a physical difference, one of those alterations which may come upon men
of his years suddenly, like a "sea change": his face was whiter, his
walk slower, his voice filed thinner; he creaked louder when he rose or
sat. Old always, from his boyhood, he had, in the turn of a hand,
become aged. But such things come and such things go: after eighty
there are ups and downs; people fading away one week, bloom out
pleasantly the next, and resiliency is not at all a patent belonging to
youth alone. The material change in Mr. Arp might have been thought
little worth remarking. What caused Peter Bradbury, Squire Buckalew,
and the Colonel to shake their heads secretly to one another and wonder
if their good old friend's mind had not "begun to go" was something
very different. To come straight down to it