much interested in what he saw, was
duly inquisitive. Among other things that attracted his attention was a
little one-armed man who seemed to be the life of the place. He was
here, there, and everywhere; and wherever he went the atmosphere seemed
to lighten and brighten. Sometimes he was flying around town in a buggy;
at such times he was driven by a sweet-faced lady, whose smiling air of
proprietorship proclaimed her to be his wife: but more often he was on
foot. His cheerfulness and good humor were infectious. The old men
sitting at Perdue's Corner, where they had been gathering for forty
years and more, looked up and laughed as he passed; the ladies shopping
in the streets paused to chat with him; and even the dry-goods clerks
and lawyers, playing chess or draughts under the China trees that shaded
the sidewalks, were willing to be interrupted long enough to exchange
jokes with him.

"Rather a lively chap that," said the observant commercial traveler.

"Well, I reckon you won't find no livelier in these diggin's," replied
the landlord, to whom the remark was addressed. There was a suggestion
of suppressed local pride in his tones. "He's a little chunk of a man,
but he's monst'us peart."

"A colonel, I guess," said the stranger, smiling.

"Oh, no," the other rejoined. "He ain't no colonel, but he'd 'a' made a
prime one. It's mighty curious to me," he went on, "that them Yankees up
there didn't make him one."

"The Yankees?" inquired the commercial traveler.

"Why, yes," said the landlord. "He's a Yankee; and that lady you seen
drivin' him around, she's a Yankee. He courted her here and he married
her here. Major Jimmy Bass wanted him to marry her in his house, but
Captain Jack Walthall put his foot down and said the weddin' had to be
in _his_ house; and there's where it was, in that big white house over
yander with the hip roof. Yes, sir."

"Oh," said the commercial traveler, with a cynical smile, "he stayed
down here to keep out of the army. He was a lucky fellow."

"Well, I reckon he was lucky not to get killed," said the landlord,
laughing. "He fought with the Yankees, and they do say that Little
Compton was a rattler."

The commercial traveler gave a long, low whistle, expressive of his
profound astonishment. And yet, under all the circumstances, there was
nothing to create astonishment. The lively little man had a history.

Among the genial and popular citizens of Hillsborough, in the days
before the