a soldier, save in name. He never had trod the bloody fields of war, but
had won his dignified and honorable title in the quiet ways of peace.
Colonel Price was nothing less than an artist, who painted many things
because they brought him money, and one thing because he loved it and
could do it well.

He painted prize-winning heifers and horses; portraits from the faces of
men as nature had made them, with more or less fidelity, and from faded
photographs and treasured daguerreotypes of days before and during the
war, with whatever embellishments their owners required. He painted
plates of apples which had taken prizes at the county fair, and royal
pumpkins and kingly swine which had won like high distinctions. But the
one thing he painted because he loved it, and could do it better than
anybody else, was corn.

At corn Colonel Price stood alone. He painted it in bunches hanging on
barn doors, and in disordered heaps in the husk, a gleam of the grain
showing here and there; and he painted it shelled from the cob. No
matter where or how he painted it, his corn always was ripe and
seasoned, like himself, and always so true to nature, color, form,
crinkle, wrinkle, and guttered heart, that farmers stood before it
marveling.

Colonel Price's heifers might be--very frequently they were--hulky and
bumpy and out of proportion, his horses strangely foreshortened and
hindlengthened; but there never was any fault to be found with his corn.
Corn absolved him of all his sins against animate and inanimate things
which had stood before his brush in his long life; corn apotheosized
him, corn lifted him to the throne and put the laurel upon his old white
locks.

The colonel had lived in Shelbyville for more than thirty years, in the
same stately house with its three Ionic pillars reaching from ground to
gable, supporting the two balconies facing toward the east. A square
away on one hand was the court-house, a square away on the other the
Presbyterian church; and around him were the homes of men whom he had
seen come there young, and ripen with him in that quiet place. Above him
on the hill stood the famous old college, its maples and elms around it,
and coming down from it on each side of the broad street which led to
its classic door.

Colonel Price turned his thoughts from mint to men as he came across the
dewy lawn, his gleanings in his hand, his bare head gleaming in the
morning sun. He had heard, the evening before, of th