s presence is known.
And so this arrogant man, this miserable, little, limping, brass-eyed,
leather-skinned man, looked out at the world around him, and did not
see the change that was quickening the hearts of his neighbours.

And yet change was in everything about him. A thousand years are as
but a watch in the night, and tick, tock, tick, tock, went the great
clock, and the dresses of little Jeanette Barclay slipped down, down,
down to her shoe-tops, and as the skirts slipped down she went up. And
before her father knew it her shoe-tops sank out of sight, and she was
a miss at the last of her teens. But he still gave her his finger when
they walked out together, though she was head and shoulders above him.

One day when she led him to the _Banner_ office to buy some fancy
programmes for a party she was giving, he saw her watching young Neal
Ward,--youngest son of the general,--who was sitting at a reporter's
desk in the office, and the father's quick eyes saw that she regarded
the youth as a young man. For she talked so obviously for the Ward
boy's benefit that her father, when they went out of the
printing-office, took a furtive look at his daughter and sighed and
knew what her mother had known for a year.

"Jeanette," he said that night at dinner, "where's my shot-gun?" When
she told him, he said: "After dinner you get it, load it with salt,
and put it in the corner by the front door." Then he added to the
assembled family: "For boys--dirty-faced, good-for-nothing,
long-legged boys! I'm going to have a law passed making an open season
for boys in this place from January first until Christmas."

Jeanette dimpled and blushed, the family smiled, and her mother said:
"Well, John, there'll be a flock of them at Jeanette's party next week
for you to practise on. All the boys and girls in town are coming."

And after dessert was served the father sat chuckling and grinning and
grunting, "Boys--boys," and at intervals, "Measly little milk-eyed
kids," and again "Boys--boys," while the family nibbled at its
cheese.

Those years when the nineteenth century was nearing its close and when
the tide of his fortunes was running in, bringing him power and making
him mad with it, were years of change in Sycamore Ridge--in the old
as well as in the young. In those years the lilacs bloomed on in the
Culpepper yard; and John Barclay did not know it, though forty years
before Ellen Culpepper had guarded the first blossoms from thos