l stream of water, which washed some of them
off the roof and nearly drowned the rest. But water was preferable to
fire, and still the stampede from the windows continued, and still the
pitiless drenching assailed it until the building was empty; then the
fireboys mounted to the hall and flooded it with water enough to
annihilate forty times as much fire as there was there; for a village
fire company does not often get a chance to show off, and so when it does
get a chance, it makes the most of it. Such citizens of that village as
were of a thoughtful and judicious temperament did 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 amon