uncle--had been one of the first United States senators that
went to Washington after our state was admitted into the Union. He had
never married. He had no business or profession. From some property or
other he drew an income, small, but enough to keep him in a sort of
simple and genteel poverty. He belonged to the best club in town and the
most exclusive, the Shawnee Club, and he had served four years in the
Confederate army. That last was the one big thing in his life. To the
major's conceptions everything that happened before 1861 had been of a
preparatory nature, leading up to and paving the way for the main
event; and what had happened since 1865 was of no consequence, except in
so far as it reflected the effects of the Civil War.

Daily, as methodically as a milkwagon horse, he covered the same route.
First he sat in the reading room of the old Gaunt House, where by an
open fire in winter or by an open window in summer he discussed the
blunders of Braxton Bragg and similar congenial topics with a little
group of aging, fading, testy veterans. On his way to the Shawnee Club
he would come by the Evening Press office and stay an hour, or two
hours, or three hours, to go away finally with a couple of favored
exchanges tucked under his arm, and leave us with our ears still dinned
and tingling. Once in a while of a night, passing the Gaunt House on my
way to the boarding house where I lived--for four dollars a week--I
would see him through the windows, sometimes sitting alone, sometimes
with one of his cronies.

Round the office he sometimes bothered us and sometimes he interfered
with our work; but mainly all the men on the staff liked him, I think,
or at least we put up with him. In our home town each of us had known
somebody very much like him--there used to be at least one Major Stone
in every community in the South, although most of them are dead now, I
guess--so we all could understand him. When I say all I mean all but
Devore. The major's mere presence would poison Devore's whole day for
him. The major's blaring notes would cross-cut Devore's nerves as with a
dull and haggling saw. He--Devore I mean--disliked the major with a
dislike almost too deep for words. It had got to be an obsession with
him.

"You fellows that were born down here have to stand for him," he said
once, when the major had stumped out on his short legs after an
unusually long visit. "It's part of the penalty you pay for belonging in
this