erious
matter of its honour,--that was obvious; he had paid Ezra Lane two
thousand dollars for the _Banner_, that was a matter of record; and he
had marched with some grandeur into General Hendricks' bank one
Saturday and had clinked out five thousand dollars in gold on the
marble slab at the teller's window, and that was a matter attested to
by a crowd of witnesses. Watts McHurdie used to say that more people
saw that deposit than could be packed into the front room of the bank
with a collar stuffer.

But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made
his money--there myth and fable enter into the composition of the
narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously
enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr.
Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman
withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who assembled him from
the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the
reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they
have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he
came, that he hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year,
and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the glass of
fashion and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long
years, and then--but that is looking in the back of the book, which
is manifestly unfair.

It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial
Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper
home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and
told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General
Beauregard told him, at the battle of Shiloh; also what his maternal
grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his
grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpre, youngest daughter of the
refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American
soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also,
and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on
the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Washington to
resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he
recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the
ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and
then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin
might well have been pro