n at the
graves, after the bugles had blown taps, kept the multitude in tears
for half an hour. John Barclay's address at the Opera House that
afternoon--the address on "The Soldier and the Scholar"--was so
completely overshadowed by the colonel's oratorical flight that Jane
teased her husband about the eclipse for a month, and never could make
him laugh. Moreover, the _Banner_ that week printed the colonel's
oration in full and referred to John's address as "a few sensible
remarks by Hon. John Barclay on the duty of scholarship in times of
peace." But here is the strange thing about it--those who read the
colonel's oration were not moved by it; the charm of the voice and the
spell of the tall, handsome, vigorous man and the emotion of the
occasion were needed to make the colonel's oratory move one. Still,
opinions differ even about so palpable a proposition as the ephemeral
nature of the colonel's oratory. For the _Banner_ that week pronounced
it one of the classic oratorical gems of American eloquence, and the
editor thereof brought a dozen copies of the paper under his arm when
he climbed the hill to Lincoln Avenue the following Sunday night, and
presented them to the women of the Culpepper household, whom he was
punctilious to call "the ladies," and he assured Miss Molly and
Mistress Culpepper--he was nice about those titles also--that their
father and husband had a great future before him in the forum.

It may be well to pause here and present so punctilious a gentleman as
Adrian Pericles Brownwell to the reader somewhat more formally than he
has been introduced. For he will appear in this story many times. In
the first place he wore mustaches--chestnut-coloured mustaches--that
drooped rather gracefully from his lip to his jaw, and thence over his
coat lapels; in the second place he always wore gloves, and never was
without a flower in his long frock-coat; and thirdly he clicked his
cane on the sidewalk so regularly that his approach was heralded, and
the company was prepared for the coming of a serious, rather nervous,
fiery man, a stickler for his social dues; and finally in those days,
those sombre days of Sycamore Ridge after the panic of '73, when men
had to go to the post-office to get their ten-dollar bills changed,
Brownwell had the money to support the character he assumed. He had
come to the Ridge from the South,--from that part of the South that
carried its pistol in its hip pocket and made a large and s