: A prize
chrysanthemum, wood alcohol whiskey, a Republican Missouri,
cauliflower _au gratin_, and a New Yorker.

Nature is lost quickest in a big city. The cause is geometrical,
not moral. The straight lines of its streets and architecture, the
rectangularity of its laws and social customs, the undeviating
pavements, the hard, severe, depressing, uncompromising rules of
all its ways--even of its recreation and sports--coldly exhibit a
sneering defiance of the curved line of Nature.

Wherefore, it may be said that the big city has demonstrated the
problem of squaring the circle. And it may be added that this
mathematical introduction precedes an account of the fate of a
Kentucky feud that was imported to the city that has a habit of
making its importations conform to its angles.

The feud began in the Cumberland Mountains between the Folwell and
the Harkness families. The first victim of the homespun vendetta was
a 'possum dog belonging to Bill Harkness. The Harkness family evened
up this dire loss by laying out the chief of the Folwell clan. The
Folwells were prompt at repartee. They oiled up their squirrel rifles
and made it feasible for Bill Harkness to follow his dog to a land
where the 'possums come down when treed without the stroke of an ax.

The feud flourished for forty years. Harknesses were shot at
the plough, through their lamp-lit cabin windows, coming from
camp-meeting, asleep, in duello, sober and otherwise, singly and in
family groups, prepared and unprepared. Folwells had the branches of
their family tree lopped off in similar ways, as the traditions of
their country prescribed and authorized.

By and by the pruning left but a single member of each family. And
then Cal Harkness, probably reasoning that further pursuance of the
controversy would give a too decided personal flavour to the feud,
suddenly disappeared from the relieved Cumberlands, baulking the
avenging hand of Sam, the ultimate opposing Folwell.

A year afterward Sam Folwell learned that his hereditary,
unsuppressed enemy was living in New York City. Sam turned over the
big iron wash-pot in the yard, scraped off some of the soot, which he
mixed with lard and shined his boots with the compound. He put on his
store clothes of butternut dyed black, a white shirt and collar, and
packed a carpet-sack with Spartan _lingerie_. He took his squirrel
rifle from its hooks, but put it back again with a sigh. However
ethical and plausible the ha