ith a lorgnette in 1889 (the scion of one of our
ancient houses married her in Ohio) overshadows even the passing of
Beecher's church; and the three-days' sojourn of Henry James in 1905
shattered all records and established a new orientation for our people.
It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr.
James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the
Propylaeum who had always thought Balzac the name of a tooth-powder.

Mrs. Owen's family, the Singletons, had crossed the Ohio into Hoosier
territory along in the fifties, in time for Sally to have been a
student--not the demurest from all accounts--at Indiana Female College.
Where stood the college the Board of Trade has lately planted itself,
frowning down upon Christ Church, whose admirable Gothic spire chimed
for Union victories in the sixties (there's a story about that, too!)
and still pleads with the ungodly on those days of the week appointed by
the Book of Common Prayer for offices to be said or sung. Mrs. Jackson
Owen was at this time sixty years old, and she had been a widow for
thirty years. The old citizens who remembered Jackson Owen always spoke
of him with a smile. He held an undisputed record of having been
defeated for more offices than any other Hoosier of his time. His chief
assets when he died were a number of farms, plastered with mortgages,
scattered over the commonwealth in inaccessible localities. His wife,
left a widow with a daughter who died at fourteen, addressed herself
zealously to the task of paying the indebtedness with which the
lamented Jackson had encumbered his property. She had made a point of
clinging to all the farms that had been so profitless under his
direction, and so successfully had she managed them that they were all
paying handsomely. A four-hundred-acre tract of the tallest corn I ever
saw was once pointed out to me in Greene County and this plantation, it
was explained, had been a worthless bog before Mrs. Owen "tiled" it; and
later I saw stalks of this corn displayed in the rooms of the
Agricultural Society to illustrate what intelligent farming can do.

At the State Fair every fall it was taken as a matter of course that "S.
Owen" (such was her business designation) should win more red ribbons
than any other exhibitor either of cereals or live stock. There was
nothing that Sally Owen did not know about feeding cattle, and a paper
she once read before the Short-Horn Breeders' Associ