in the war."

Mrs. Owen's white hair was beautifully soft and wavy, and she wore it in
the prevailing manner. Her eyes narrowed occasionally with an effect of
sudden dreaminess, and these momentary reveries seemed to the adoring
Sylvia wholly fascinating. She spoke incisively and her voice was deep
and resonant. She was exceedingly thin and wiry, and her movements were
quick and nervous. Hearing the whirr of a lawn-mower in the yard she
drew a pair of spectacles from a case she produced from an incredibly
deep pocket, put them on, and criticized the black man below sharply for
his manner of running the machine. This done, the spectacles went back
to the case and the case to the pocket. In our capital a woman in a
kimono may still admonish her servants from a second-story window
without loss of dignity, and gentlemen holding high place in dignified
callings may sprinkle their own lawns in the cool of the evening if they
find delight in that cheering diversion. Joy in the simple life dies in
us slowly. The galloping Time-Spirit will run us down eventually, but on
Sundays that are not too hot or too cold one may even to-day count a
handsome total of bank balances represented in our churches, so strong
is habit in a people bred to righteousness.

"You needn't be afraid of me; my bark is worse than my bite; you have to
talk just that way to these black people. They've all worked for me for
years and they don't any of 'em pay the slightest attention to what I
say. But," she concluded, "they'd be a lot worse if I didn't say it."

We reckon time in our capital not from fires or floods or even _anno
urbis conditae_, but from seemingly minor incidents that have
nevertheless marked new eras and changed the channels of history.
Precedents sustain us in this. A startled goose rousing the sleeping
sentinels on the ramparts; a dull peasant sending an army in the wrong
direction; the mischievous phrase uttered by an inconspicuous minister
of the gospel to a few auditors,--such unconsidered trifles play havoc
with Fame's calculations. And so in our calendar the disbanding of the
volunteer fire department in 1859 looms gloomily above the highest
altitudes of the strenuous sixties; the fact that Billy Sanderson, after
his father's failure in 1873, became a brakeman on the J.M. & I.
Railroad and invested his first month's salary in a silver-mounted
lantern, is more luminous in the retrospect than the panic itself; the
coming of a lady w