was well into her teens before she realized the
truth, that he was an excellent harness maker who often brought out of
his quaint little dream world odd-shaped fancies in rhyme,--some
grotesque, some ridiculous, and some that seemed pretty for a
moment,--and who under the stress of a universal emotion had rhymed
one phase of our common nature and set it to a simple tune that moved
men deeply without regard to race or station. So she lived in her
child world--a world quite different from the real world--a world
gilded by the sunrise of consciousness; and because the angels loved
her and kept her heart clean, the gilding never quite wore off her
heroes. And nothing that Heaven gives us in this world is so blessed
as to have the gilding stick to the images of our youth. In Jeanette's
case even Lige Bemis--Judge Bemis, she had been taught to call
him--never showed the tar under the gilding to her eyes. Her first
memory of him was in her father's office in the big City. He was a
tall man, with gray hair that became him well, with sharp black eyes,
and enough flesh on his bones to carry the frock-coats he always wore
and give him a corporosity just escaping the portly. She remembers
seeing the name "E. W. Bemis" in gold letters on the door of his room,
and not being able to figure out how a man whose name began with "E"
or "W" could be called Lige. He was General Counsel of the Corn Belt
Railroad in those days, when her father was president of the road, and
she knew that he was a man always to be considered. And when, as a
woman grown, she learned the truth about Lige Bemis, it was hard to
believe, for all she could find against him was his everlasting smile.

It is a curious and withal a beautiful thing to see a child come into
the worn and weary world that we grownups have made, and make it over
into another world altogether. Perhaps the child's eye and the child's
heart, fresh from God, see and feel more clearly and more justly than
we do. For this much is sure--Jeanette was right in keeping to the
end the image of Colonel Martin Culpepper as a knight-errant, who
needed only a bespangled steed, a little less avoirdupois, and a
foolish cause to set him battling in the tourney. As it was, in this
humdrum world, the colonel could do nothing more heroic than come
rattling down Main Street into the child's heart, sitting with some
dignity in his weather-beaten buggy, while instead of shining armour
and a glistening helmet he wo