avior as
juror, the dignified bearing, the well-matured utterances, the
shrewd cross-questioning. At the end of his service his neighbors
would know him for a man of solid judgment, a "safe" man to be
intrusted with weighty affairs.

Mr. Peaslee was fifty-three years old. He had a comfortable figure,
a clean-shaven, round face, and blue eyes much exaggerated for the
spectator by the strong lenses of a pair of great spectacles. These,
with his gray hair, gave him a benevolence of aspect which somewhat
misrepresented him. As a matter of fact, although good-humored and
not without a still surviving capacity for generous impulse, he was
only less "near" than his wife. Childishly vain, he bore himself
with an air of self-satisfaction not without its charm for humorous
neighbors. They said that they guessed he thought himself "some
punkins."

"Some punkins" most people admitted him to be, although how much of
his money and how much of his shrewdness was really his wife's was
matter of debate among those who knew him best. At any rate, the
Peaslees had made money. A few years before, they had sold their
fat farm "down-river" advantageously, and had bought the dignified
white house in Ellmington in which they have just been seen eating a
dinner which looks as if they were "house poor." That they were not;
they had thirty thousand dollars in the local bank, partly invested
in its stock. In Ellmington Mrs. Peaslee was less lonely, and
through Mr. Peaslee was an unsuspected director in the bank, and a
shrewd user of the chances for profitable investment which her
husband's association with the "bank crowd" opened to her.

As for Mr. Peaslee, he did not know that he himself was not the
business head of the house; and his garden, his chickens, and his
pleasant loafing in the bank window kept him contentedly occupied.
For, in spite of her shrewish tongue, Mrs. Peaslee had tact enough
to let her husband have the credit for her business acumen. "I ain't
goin' to let on," she said to herself, "that he ain't just as good
as the rest of 'em." She had her pride.

As Mr. Peaslee stepped along the straight walk which divided his
neat lawn, and opened the neat gate in his neat white fence, he met
Sam Barton, the broad-shouldered, good-humored giant who was
constable of Ellmington. Sam gave him a smiling "How are ye,
squire?" as he passed.

"Guess he's heard," said Mr. Peaslee to himself, much pleased. Yet,
as a matter of fact, the gre