ears
seem the longest and the best. And that fateful year of '73 to them
seems the most portentous. For then, perhaps for the first time, they
realized the cruel uncertainty of the struggle for existence. With the
terrible drouth of '60 this realization did not come; for the town was
young, and the people were young; only Ezra Lane was a graybeard in
all the town in the sixties; and youth is so sure; there is no hazard
under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved
and died, and were still young. But when the financial panic of '73
spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore
Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge,
and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was
serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure.
General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him,
took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest
perceptible hobble on his feet. To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie
and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in
their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that
prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate.

The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September,
1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the
Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he
was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the
run. But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the
bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more
than Garrison County people could stand. But all the first day of the
bank's closing and all the next day John worked among the people,
reassuring them. So that it was five o'clock in the evening before he
could start to Minneola for his wedding.

And such a wedding! One would say that when hard times were staring
every one in the face, social forms would be observed most simply. But
one would say so without reckoning with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason. As the
groom and the bridesmaid and best man rode up from Sycamore Valley,
two miles from Minneola, in the early falling dusk that night, the
Mason House loomed through the darkness, lighted up like a steamboat.
"You'll have to move along, John," said Bob Hendricks; "I think I
heard her whistle."

On the sidewalk in front of the hotel they met Mrs. Mason in her