f scarlet
tulips and yellow daffodils. Detached from the Penniman house, but still
in the same yard, was a smaller, one-storied house, also white, with
green blinds, tenanted by Dave Cowan and his twins, who--in Newbern
vernacular--mealed with Mrs. Penniman. It had been the Cowan home when
Dave married the Penniman cousin who had borne the twins. There was a
path worn in the grass between the two houses.

On the Penniman front porch the judge was throned in a wicker chair. He
was a nobly fronted old gentleman, with imposing head, bald at the top
but tastefully hung with pale, fluffy side curls. His face was wide and
full, smoothly shaven, his cheeks pink, his eyes a pure, pale blue. He
was clad in a rumpled linen suit the trousers of which were drawn well
up his plump legs above white socks and low black shoes, broad and loose
fitting. As the shadows had lengthened and the day cooled he abandoned a
palm-leaf fan he had been languidly waving. His face at the moment
glowed with animation, for he played over the deciding game in that
day's match at checkers by which, at the harness shop, he had vanquished
an acclaimed rival from over Higgston way. The fellow had been skilled
beyond the average, but supremacy was still with the Newbern champion.
So absorbed was he, achieving again that last bit of strategy by which
he had gained the place to capture two men and reach the enemy's king
row, that his soft-stepping daughter, who had come from the house, had
to address him twice.

"Have you had a good day, father?"

The judge was momentarily confused. He had to recall that his
invalidism, not his checker prowess, was in question. He regained his
presence of mind; he coughed feebly, reaching a hand tenderly back to a
point between his shoulder blades.

"Not one of my real bad days, Winona. I can't really say I've suffered.
Stuff that other cushion in back of me, will you? I got a new pain kind
of in this left shoulder--neuralgia, mebbe. But my sciatica ain't
troubled me--not too much."

Winona adjusted the cushion.

"You're so patient, father!"

"I try to be, Winona," which was simple truth.

A sufferer for years, debarred by obscure ailments from active
participation in our industrial strife, the judge, often for days at a
time, would not complain unless pressed to--quite as if he had forgotten
his pains. The best doctors disagreed about his case, none of them able
to say precisely what his maladies were. True, one cit