shore to come to the next regular meetin' of the Camp--on Friday night,"
he added.

"I'll be there," said Tilghman. "And I'll try to find that piece of
Colonel Watterson's and send it over to you. I'd like mightily for you
to read it."

He stood at the opening in the vines, with one slightly palsied hand
fumbling at a loose tendril as the judge passed down the short yard-walk
and out at the gate. Then he went back to his chair and sat down again.
All those little muscles in his jowls were jumping.

Clay Street was no longer empty. Looking down its dusty length from
beneath the shelter of his palmleaf fan, Judge Priest saw here and there
groups of children--the little girls in prim and starchy white, the
little boys hobbling in the Sunday torment of shoes and stockings; and
all of them were moving toward a common center--Sunday school. Twice
again that day would the street show life--a little later when grown-ups
went their way to church, and again just after the noonday dinner, when
young people and servants, carrying trays and dishes under napkins,
would cross and recross from one house to another. The Sunday
interchange of special dainties between neighbors amounted in our town
to a ceremonial and a rite; but after that, until the cool of the
evening, the town would simmer in quiet, while everybody took Sunday
naps.

With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as
though trying to fend off something disagreeable--a memory, perhaps, or
it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats
and midges about, for by now--even so soon--the dew was dried. The
leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up
like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the
Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure
enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out.

In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the
small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the
Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of
his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing
an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having
for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter,
in whose gray and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties
took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by
babi