is gold-rimmed Sunday glasses far down on
his nose so that he could see over them, and--wonder of wonders, they
saw a high shiny new silk hat wobbling over his modest head.

He stumbled out of the open hack with his hand on the great stiff
awkward thing, obviously afraid it would fall off, and she that was
Nellie Logan, late of the Thayer House and still later of Dorman's
store, and later still most worshipful, most potent, most gorgeous and
most radiant archangel of seven secret and mysterious covenants,
conclaves, and inner temples, stood beaming at the pitiful sight,
clearly proud of her shameless achievement. Watts, putting his hand to
his mouth to cover his smile, grabbed the shiny thing again as he
nodded cautiously at the crowd. Then he followed her meekly to the
women's waiting room, where the wives and sisters of the comrades were
assembled--and they, less punctilious than the men, burst forth with
a scream of joy, and the agony was over.

And thus Watts McHurdie went to his greatest earthly glory. The
delegation from the Ridge, with the band, had John Barclay's private
car; that was another surprise which Mrs. McHurdie arranged, and when
they got to Washington, where the National Encampment was, opinions
differ as to when Watts McHurdie had his high tide of happiness. The
colonel says that it was in the great convention, where the Sycamore
Ridge band sat in front of the stage, and where Watts stood in front
of the band and led the great throng,--beginning with his cracked
little heady tenor, and in an instant losing it in the awful diapason
of ten thousand voices singing his old song with him; and where, when
it was over, General Grant came down the platform, making his way
rather clumsily among the chairs, and at last in front of the whole
world grasped Watts McHurdie's hands, and the two little men,
embarrassed by the formality of it all, stood for a few seconds
looking at each other with tears glistening in their speaking eyes.

But Jake Dolan, who knows something of human nature, does not hold to
the colonel's view about the moment of McHurdie's greatest joy. "We
were filing down the Avenue again, thousands and ten thousands of us,
as we filed past the White House nearly twenty years before. And the
Sycamore Ridge band was cramming its lungs into the old tune, when up
on the reviewing stand, beside all the big bugs and with the President
there himself, stood little Watts, plug hat in hand, bowing to the