Before a palace gate,
Some wondrous pageant.'

"You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr.
Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I
found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern
poets--Longfellow, for instance--over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of
American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study
for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of
the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and
the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the
end. Timrod, however, is a treat."

That last quiet winter will always be set apart in my memory, as a time
like no other. It was a sitting down on a milestone to rest. Back of us
lay the busy past--busy with trivial things, it seemed to me, but full
of varied activity nevertheless. A boy will desire mightily to finish a
cob-house; and when it is done he will smilingly knock it about the barn
floor. So I was tearing down and leaving the fabric of relationship
which I had once prized so highly.

The life upon which I expected to enter promised well. In fact, to a man
of medium ability, only, and no training in large affairs, it promised
exceedingly well. I knew that Jim was strong, and that his old regard
for me had taken new life and a firm hold upon him. But when, removed
from his immediate influence, I looked the situation in the face, the
future loomed so mysteriously bizarre that I shrank from it. All his
skimble-skamble talk about psychology and hypnotism, and that other
rambling discourse of pirate caves and buccaneering cruises, made me
feel sometimes as if I were about to form a partnership with Aladdin, or
the King of the Golden Mountain. If he had asked me, merely, to come to
Lattimore and go into the real estate and insurance business with him, I
am sure I should have had none of this mental vertigo. Yet what more had
he done?

As to the boom, I had, as yet, not a particle of objective confidence in
it; but, subconsciously, I felt, as did the town "doomed to prosperity,"
a sense of impending events. In spite of some presentiments and doubts,
it was, on the whole, with high hopes that we, on an aguish spring day,
reached Lattimore with our stuff (as the Scriptures term it), and knew
that, for weal or woe, it was our home.

Jim was again at the station to meet us, and seemed delighted at our
arriva