r own. The town knew him as a trim little
man in a three-buttoned tail-coat, with rather extraordinary neckties,
a well-brushed hat, and shiny shoes. To the country people he was
"limping Johnnie," and General Ward, watching Barclay hustle his way
down Main Street Saturday afternoons, when the sidewalk and the
streets were full of people, used to say, "Busier 'n a tin pedler."
And he said to Mrs. Ward, "Lucy, if it's true that old Grandpa Barclay
got his start carrying a pack, you can see him cropping out in John,
bigger than a wolf."

But the general had little time to devote to John, for he was state
organizer of a movement that had for its object the abolition of
middlemen in trade, and he was travelling most of the time. The dust
gathered on his law-books, and his Sunday suit grew frayed at the
edges and shiny at the elbows, but his heart was in the cause, and his
blue eyes burned with joy when he talked, and he was happy, and had to
travel two days and nights when the fourth baby came, and then was too
late to serve on the committee on reception, and had to be satisfied
with a minor place on the committee on entertainment and amusements of
which Mrs. Culpepper was chairman. But John turned in half of a fee
that came from the East for a lawsuit that both he and Ward had
forgotten, and Miss Lucy would have named the new baby Mary Ward, but
the general stood firm for Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Sitting at Sunday
dinner with the Wards on the occasion of Elizabeth Cady Stanton Ward's
first monthly birthday, John listened to the general's remarks on the
iniquity of the money power, and the wickedness of the national banks,
and kept respectful and attentive silence. The worst the young man did
was to wink swiftly across the table at Watts McHurdie, who had been
invited by Mrs. Ward with malice prepense and seated by Nellie Logan.
The wink came just as the general, waving the carving knife, was
saying: "Gentlemen, it's the world-old fight--the fight of might
against right. When I was a boy like you, John, the fight was between
brute strength and the oppressed; between slaves and masters. Now it
is between weakness and cunning, between those who would be
slaveholders if they could be, and those who are fighting the
shackles." And Mrs. Ward saw the wink, and John saw that she saw it,
and he was ashamed.

So before the afternoon was over, Mr. and Mrs. John Barclay went over
to Hendricks's, picking up Molly Culpepper on the way,