not insure against
fire; they insured against the fire company.

CHAPTER 12 -- The Shame of Judge Driscoll
_Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence
of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a
compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose
misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably
the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of
fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will
attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and
strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the
earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and
all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the
immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than
is the man who walks the streets of a city that was
threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we
speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know
what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him
at the head of the procession._ --Pudd'nhead Wilson's
Calendar

Judge Driscoll was in bed and asleep by ten o'clock on Friday night, and
he was up and gone a-fishing before daylight in the morning with his
friend Pembroke Howard. These two had been boys together in Virginia
when that state still ranked as the chief and most imposing member of the
Union, and they still coupled the proud and affectionate adjective "old"
with her name when they spoke of her. In Missouri a recognized
superiority attached to any person who hailed from Old Virginia; and this
superiority was exalted to supremacy when a person of such nativity could
also prove descent from the First Families of that great commonwealth.
The Howards and Driscolls were of this aristocracy. In their eyes, it
was a nobility. It had its unwritten laws, and they were as clearly
defined and as strict as any that could be found among the printed
statutes of the land. The F.F.V. was born a gentleman; his highest duty in
life was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched. He
must keep his honor spotless. Those laws were his chart; his course was
marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as half a point of the
compass, it meant shipwreck to his honor; that is to say, degradation
from his rank as a gentleman. These laws required certain things of him
which his religion might forbid: then his religion must yield--the laws
could not be relaxed to acc