n with Rouen, and with that, and the aid of
"patent insides," began an era of three issues a week, appearing on
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The Plattville Brass Band serenaded
the editor.

During the second month of the new regime of the "Herald," the working
force of the paper received an addition. One night the editor found some
barroom loafers tormenting a patriarchal old man who had a magnificent
head and a grand white beard. He had been thrown out of a saloon, and he
was drunk with the drunkenness of three weeks steady pouring. He propped
himself against a wall and reproved his tormentors in Latin. "I'm
walking your way, Mr. Fisbee," remarked the journalist, hooking his arm
into the old man's. "Suppose we leave our friends here and go home?"

Mr. Fisbee was the one inhabitant of the town who had an unknown past;
no one knew more about him than that he had been connected with a
university somewhere, and had travelled in unheard-of countries before
he came to Plattville. A glamour of romance was thrown about him by the
gossips, to whom he ever proved a fund of delightful speculation. There
was a dark, portentous secret in his life, it was agreed; an opinion
not too well confirmed by the old man's appearance. His fine eyes had a
pathetic habit of wandering to the horizon in a questioning fashion that
had a queer sort of hopelessness in it, as if his quest were one for the
Holy Grail, perhaps; and his expression was mild, vague, and sad. He had
a look of race and blood; and yet, at the first glance, one saw that he
was lost in dreams, and one guessed that the dreams would never be
of great practicability in their application. Some such impression of
Fisbee was probably what caused the editor of the "Herald" to nickname
him (in his own mind) "The White Knight," and to conceive a strong, if
whimsical, fancy for him.

Old Fisbee had come (from nobody knew where) to Plattville to teach,
and had been principal of the High School for ten years, instructing
his pupils after a peculiar fashion of his own, neglecting the ordinary
courses of High School instruction to lecture on archaeology to the
dumfounded scholars; growing year by year more forgetful and absent,
lost in his few books and his own reflections, until, though undeniably
a scholar, he had been discharged for incompetency. He was old; he had
no money and no way to make money; he could find nothing to do. The blow
had seemed to daze him for a time; then he