she cannot remember who it was--that as Jake Dolan
gently descended the social and political scale, he sloughed off his
worldly goods, and as he moved about in the court-house from the
sheriff's office to the deputy's office, and from the deputy's to the
bailiff's, and from the bailiff's to the constable's, and from the
constable's to the janitor's room in the basement, he carried with him
the little bundle that contained all his worldly goods, the thin blue
uniform, spotless and trim, and his lieutenant's commission, and
mustering-out papers from the army. It is odd, is it not, that this
prosaic old chap, who smoked a clay pipe, and whose only
accomplishment was the ability to sing "The Hat me Father Wore," under
three drinks, and the "Sword of Bunker Hill," under ten, should have
epitomized all that was heroic in this child's memory. As for General
Philemon Ward,--a dear old crank who, when Jeanette was born, was
voting with the Republican party for the first time since the war, and
who ran twice for President on some strange issue before she was in
long dresses,--General Ward, whose children's ages could be guessed
by the disturbers of the public peace, whose names they bore,--Eli
Thayer, Mary Livermore, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances Willard, Neal
Dow, Belva Lockwood, and Helen Gougar,--General Ward, who scorned her
father's offer of ten thousand dollars a year as state counsel for the
National Provisions Company, and went out preaching fiat money and a
subtreasury for the farmers' crops, trusting to God and the flower
garden about his little white house, to keep the family alive--it is
odd that Jeanette's childish impression was that General Ward was a
man of consequence in the world. Perhaps his white necktie, his long
black coat, and his keen lean face, or his prematurely gray hair, gave
her some sort of a notion of his dignity, but whatever gave her that
notion she kept it, and though in her later life there came a passing
time when she hated him, she did not despise him. And what with the
song that she heard the bands playing all over the country, the song
that the bands sometimes played for Americans in Europe, very badly,
as though it was being translated from English into broken French or
Italian, what with Watts McHurdie's fame and with his verses that
appeared in the _Banner_ on formal occasions, the girl built a fancy
of him as one of the world's great poets--some one like Shakespeare
or Milton; and she