e advanced slowly, an open Victoria drawn by a pair of handsome
Kentucky horses and containing besides the coachman two other persons, a
man and a woman. The man was a product of an oratorical period in
Kentucky; he had the beak nose, the rolling black eyes, long hair and
heavy forensic shoulders that had already landed the Hon. Calvin
Breckenridge Jones as representative of the Pennyroyal district in the
State Capitol at Frankfort, while it was a common supposition that only
a lack of money had kept him from climbing higher. His companion, the
Widow Tarwater, was the richest widow in the county.

Now as the carriage drew near the man at the gate, the bow with which
he greeted the widow had in it the dignity and devotion of a
benediction.

"Lord, what a woman!" he exclaimed a moment later in a deliciously rich
and reasonable voice. "Looks like there's some people same as fruits,
they don't noways mellow till age gets 'em."

Then once more lifting his hat, the speaker, Ambrose Thompson, now a man
of almost sixty, attempted pushing back the hair from his forehead,
apparently forgetting that his hair had retreated so far backward over
his high dome that the few remaining locks tastefully arranged in front
suggested the ripples left by a receding wave along a shore. Also his
face was deeply lined and his shoulders stooped considerably, and yet in
spite of these and other signs of age in some indefinable way Ambrose
Thompson had kept his boyishness. Not having travelled more than a
hundred miles out of Pennyroyal, nevertheless he had the eternal
youthfulness of spirit which belongs to all life's true adventurers.

"Ambrose Thompson's lookin' powerful spruce this evenin', ain't he?" A
woman of about forty, with quick birdlike movements, shrieked this
remark into an ear trumpet which was being held up by a shrivelled
figure in a wheeled chair that had just been projected forth from the
house next door with such suddenness that it seemed likely to spill out
its feeble occupant.

The old woman's head nodded helplessly, and yet out of her withered face
her black eyes still shone with an unquenchable fire. At this instant
Ambrose, catching sight of Mrs. Barrows, blew a kiss across his dividing
fence to her, so that she laughed, before replying, the pleased
monotonous laugh of deafness and old age.

"Ef it's an evergreen spruce you're meanin', Susan Jr., then you're
more'n right, for it seems Ambrose Thompson's leaves are for