ud, "But 'tis all over; and we are
brothers--one country, one flag, one God, one very kind but very busy
God!" And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing
his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart,
smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have
been.

"Is it not so?" he asked with his voice and his hands at once. "Ah,"
he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, "what better
proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to
you? However dark the night of our national discord--to-day, North,
South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes." He
fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:--

"'O when did morning ever break,
And find such beaming eyes awake.'"

And so he rattled on, and the colonel had to poke his words into the
conversation in wedge-shaped queries, and Mrs. Culpepper, being in due
and proper awe of so much family and such apparent consequence, spoke
little and smiled many times. And if it was "Miss Molly" this and
"Miss Molly" that, when the colonel went into the house to lock the
back doors, and "Miss Molly" the other when Mrs. Culpepper went in to
open the west bedroom windows; and even if it was "Miss Molly, shall
we go down town and refresh ourselves with a dish of ice-cream?" and
even if still further a full-grown man standing at the gate under the
May moon deftly nips a rose from Miss Molly's hair and holds the rose
in both hands to his lips as he bows a good night--what then? What
were roses made for and brown eyes and long lashes and moons and May
winds heavy with the odour of flowers and laden with the faint sounds
of distant herd bells tinkling upon the hills? For men are bold at
thirty-five, and maidens, the best and sweetest, truest, gentlest
maidens in all the world, are shy at twenty-one, and polite to their
elders and betters of thirty-five--even when those elders and betters
forget their years!

As for Adrian P. Brownwell, he went about his daily task, editing the
_Banner_, making it as luscious and effulgent as a seed catalogue,
with rhetorical pictures about as florid and unconvincing. To him the
town was a veritable Troy--full of heroes and demigods, and
honourables and persons of nobility and quality. He used no adjective
of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once
complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in the _Banner_