es and grandbabies.

There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who
was forever starting somewhere and never going there--because, as sure
as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his
mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank
had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head--or maybe it
was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he
went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys
who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but
when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be
his volunteer pallbearers.

There was Mr. H. Jackman--Brother Jackman to all the town--who had been
our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his
affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when
he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that
word, which is at once the sweetest and bitterest word in our tongue;
for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would
go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to the
Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new
garments when his old ones wore shabby--and yet never paid a cent for
anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him
to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to
take him for a retired banker--that's a fact!

And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man--had killed him
in fair fight and had been acquitted--and yet walked quiet back streets
at all hours, a gray, silent shadow, and never slept except with a
bright light burning in his room.

The tragedy of Mr. Edward Tilghman, though, and of Captain Abner G.
Tilghman, his elder brother, was both a tragedy and a mystery--the
biggest tragedy and the deepest mystery our town had ever known or ever
would know probably. All that anybody knew for certain was that for
upward of fifty years neither of them had spoken to the other, nor by
deed or look had given heed to the other. As boys, back in sixty-one,
they had gone out together. Side by side, each with his arm over the
other's shoulder, they had stood up with a hundred others to be sworn
into the service of the Confederate States of America; and on the
morning they went away Miss Sally May Ghoulson had given the older
brother her silk sca