tilted the great green fields to the
sun.

Mrs. Shrimplin had been born on the flats, and the flats had witnessed
her meeting and mating with Shrimplin, when that gentleman had first
appeared in Mount Hope in the interest of Whiting's celebrated
tooth-powder, to the use of which he was not personally committed. At
that time he was also an itinerant bill-poster and had his lodgings at
Maxy Schaffer's Railroad Hotel hard by the B. & O. tracks.

Mr. Shrimplin was five feet three, and narrow chested. A drooping flaxen
mustache shaded a sloping chin and a loose under lip, while a pair of
pale eyes looked sadly out upon the world from the shadow of a hooked
nose.

Mr. Joe Montgomery, Mrs. Shrimplin's brother-in-law, present on the
occasion of her marriage to the little bill-poster, had critically
surveyed the bridegroom and had been moved to say to a friend, "Shrimp
certainly do favor a peanut!"

Mr. Montgomery's comparative criticism of her husband's appearance had
in due season reached the ears of the bride, and had caused a rupture
in the family that the years had not healed, but her resentment had been
more a matter of justice to herself than that she felt the criticism to
be wholly inapt.

Mr. Shrimplin had now become a public servant, for certain gasolene
lamps in the town of Mount Hope were his proud and particular care. Any
night he could be seen seated in his high two-wheeled cart drawn by a
horse large in promise of speed but small in achievement, a hissing
gasolene torch held between his knees, making his way through that part
of the town where gas-lamps were as yet unknown. He still further added
to his income by bill-posting and paper-hanging, for he belonged to the
rank and file of life, with a place in the procession well toward the
tail.

But Custer had no suspicion of this. He never saw his father as the
world saw him. He would have described his eye as piercing; he would
have said, in spite of the slouching uncertainty that characterized all
his movements, that he was as quick as a cat; and it was only Custer who
detected the note of authority in the meek tones of his father's voice.

And Custer was as like the senior Shrimplin as it was possible for
fourteen to be like forty-eight. His mother said, "He certainly looks
for all the world like his pa!" but her manner of saying it left doubt
as to whether she rejoiced in the fact; for, while Mr. Shrimplin was
undoubtedly a hero to Custer, he was not a