tacked after his name for two years was miscreant. As for John
Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars
in to Brownwell and come out a statesman, a Croesus or a scholar, as
the exigencies of the case demanded, and for ten dollars he could
combine the three.

Yet for all that Brownwell ever remained a man apart. No one thought
of calling him "Ade." Sooner would one nickname a gargoyle on a tin
cornice. So the editor of the _Banner_ never came close to the real
heart of Sycamore Ridge, and often for months at a time he did not
know what the people were thinking. And that summer when General
Hendricks was walking out of the bank every hour and looking from
under his thin, blue-veined hand at the strange cloud of insects
covering the sky, and when Martin Culpepper was predicting that the
plague of grasshoppers would leave the next day, and when John Barclay
was getting that deep vertical crease between his eyes that made him
look forty while he was still in his twenties, Adrian P. Brownwell was
chirping cheerfully in the _Banner_ about the "salubrious climate of
Garrison County," and writing articles about "our phenomenal prospects
for a bumper crop." And when in the middle of July the grasshoppers
had eaten the wheat to the ground and had left the corn stalks
stripped like beanpoles, and had devoured every green thing in their
path, the _Banner_ contained only a five-line item referring to the
plague and calling it a "most curious and unusual visitation." But
that summer the _Banner_ was filled with Brownwell's editorials on
"The Tonic Effect of the Prairie Ozone," "Turn the Rascals Out," "Our
Duty to the South," and "The Kingdom of Corn." As a writer Brownwell
was what is called "fluent" and "genial." And he was fond of copying
articles from the Topeka and Kansas City papers about himself, in
which he was referred to as "the gallant and urbane editor of the
_Banner_."

But then we all have our weaknesses, and be it said to the everlasting
credit of Adrian Brownwell that he understood and appreciated Watts
McHurdie and Colonel Culpepper better than any other man in town, and
that he printed Watts' poems on all occasions, and never referred to
him as anything less than "our honoured townsman," or as "our talented
and distinguished fellow-citizen," and he never laughed at General
Ward. But the best he could do for John Barclay--even after John had
become one of the world's great captains--was t