orman's
Dry Goods store and making Watts McHurdie understand that she had her
choice between a preacher and a drummer. Other girls in the dining
room of the Thayer House were rattling the dinner dishes and singing
"Sweet Belle Mahone" and "Do you love me, Molly Darling?" to ensnare
the travelling public that might be tilted back against the veranda in
a mood for romance. And as John and Bob that hot September afternoon
made the round of the stores and offices bidding the town good-by, it
seemed to them that perhaps they were seizing the shadow and letting
the substance fade. For it was such a good-natured busy little place
that their hearts were heavy at leaving it.

But that evening John in his gorgeous necktie, his clean paper collar,
his new stiff hat, his first store clothes, wearing proudly his
father's silver watch and chain, set out to say good-by to Ellen
Culpepper, and his mother, standing in the doorway of their home,
sighed at his limp and laughed at his strut--the first laugh she had
enjoyed in a dozen days.

John and Bob together went up the stone walk leading across a yard,
still littered with the debris of building, to the unboxed steps that
climbed to the veranda of the Culpepper house. There they met Colonel
Culpepper in his shirt-sleeves, walking up and down the veranda
admiring the tall white pillars. When he had greeted the boys, he put
his thumbs in his vest holes and continued his parade in some pomp.
The boys were used to this attitude of the colonel's toward themselves
and the pillars. It always followed a hearty meal. So they sat
respectfully while he marched before them, pointing occasionally, when
he took his cigar from his mouth and a hand from his vest, to some
feature of the landscape in the sunset light that needed emphatic
attention.

"Yes, sir, young gentlemen," expanded the colonel, "you are doing the
right and proper thing--the right and proper thing. Of all the
avocations of youth, I conceive the pursuit of the sombre goddess of
learning to be the most profitable--entirely the most profitable. I
myself, though a young man,--being still on the right side of
forty,--have reaped the richest harvest from my labours in the
classic shades. Twenty years ago, young gentlemen, I, like you, left
my ancestral estates to sip at the Pierian spring. In point of fact, I
attended the institution founded by Thomas Jefferson, the father of
the American democracy--yes, sir." He put his cigar back in