think will be all right with me,
I guess." And having been dismissed telepathically, Lycurgus hurried
back to his work.

It was when John Barclay was elected President of the Corn Belt
Railway, in the early nineties, that Lycurgus told McHurdie and Ward
and Culpepper and Frye, as the graybeards wagged around the big brown
stove in the harness shop one winter day: "You know ma, she never saw
much in him, and when I came in the room she was about to tell him he
couldn't have her. Now, isn't that like a woman?--no sense about men.
But I says: 'Ma, John Barclay's got good blood in him. His grandpa
died worth a million,--and that was a pile of money for them days;'
so I says, 'If Jane Mason wants him, ma,' I says, 'let her have him.
Remember what a fuss your folks made over me getting you,' I says;
'and see how it's turned out.' Then I turned to John--I can see the
little chap now a-standing there with his dicky hat in his hand and
his pipe-stem legs no bigger than his cane, and his gray eyes lookin'
as wistful as a dog's when you got a bone in your hand, and I says,
'Take her along, John; take her along and good luck go with you,' I
says; 'but,' I says, 'John Barclay, I want you always to remember Jane
Mason has got a father.' Just that way I says. I tell you, gentlemen,
there's nothing like having a wife that respects you." The crowd in
the harness shop wagged their heads, and Lycurgus went on: "Now, they
ain't many women that would just let a man stand up like that and, as
you may say, give her daughter right away under her nose. But my wife,
she's been well trained."

In the pause that followed, Watts McHurdie's creaking lever was the
only sound that broke the silence. Then Watts, who had been sewing
away at his work with waving arms, spoke, after clearing his throat,
"I've heard many say that she was sich." And the old man cackled, and
it became a saying-among them and in the town.

One who goes back over the fifty years that have passed since Sycamore
Ridge became a local habitation and a name finds it difficult to
realize that one-third of its life was passed before the panic of '78,
which closed the Hendricks' bank. For those first nineteen years
passed as the life of a child passes, so that they seem only sketched
in; yet to those who lived at all, to those like Watts McHurdie and
Philemon Ward, who now pass their happiest moments mooning over tilted
headstones in the cemetery on the Hill, those first nineteen y