local
politics. The evening emphasized the great man's condescension in
accepting this humble office and honouring Green River. Even with the
scandal of Theodore Burr's suicide unexplained still and only two weeks
old, interest centred on the rally. It was a triumph for the town.

Green River was almost ready. Dugan's orchestra was engaged for the
evening, instead of a rival organization from Wells, which the Colonel
often imported upon private and public occasions. Jerry Dugan was
getting old, too, like the Judge and the Honourable Joe. He had not lost
the peculiar wail and lilt from his fiddling, but he had made few recent
additions to his repertoire. Just now the band concert in front of Odd
Fellows' Hall was winding up with his old favourite: "A Day on the
Battlefield."

It had the old swing still, contagious as ever. Loafers in front of the
hall shuffled their feet in time to it. Moon-struck young persons
hanging two by two over the railings of the bridge to gaze at the water
straightened themselves and listened. An ambitious soloist lounging
against the court-house fence across the square began to whistle it with
elaborate variations, at the inspiring moment when "morning in the
forest" had bird-called and syncopated itself into silence, and actual
fighting, and the martial music of the charge began.

High and lilting and shrill, it hung in the still night air, alive for
the hour, challenging the echoes of dead tunes that lingered about the
square, only to die away and be one with them at last; band music,
old-fashioned band music, blatant and empty and splendid, clear through
the still night air, attuned to the night and the town.

"Good old tune. Gets into your feet," Judge Saxon said, while his wife
adjusted his tie before the black walnut mirror in their bedroom, but
his unusual tribute to the tune was perfunctory to-night, and his wife
ignored it, wisely taking this moment of helpfulness to plunge him
suddenly and briskly into a series of questions which she had been
trying in vain for some time to get the correct answers to.

"Hugh," she said, "why wouldn't you take the chair to-night?"

"You were the only thing I ever tried to take away from Joe Grant and
got away with it, Millie," the Judge explained gallantly.

"Don't you think this rally is like old times? Don't you want to see the
town stand on its own feet again, instead of being run from outside?"

"I do, Millie."

Mrs. Saxon made her next