s, starched shirts, and beaver hats; nor
was his ideal of feminine beauty reached by the village belles, with
their roach-combs, their red and yellow ribbons, and their enormous
flounces. In the mountains, he was to the manner born; in the village,
he was keenly alive to the presence and pressure of the exclusiveness
that is the basis of all society, good, bad, or indifferent; and it
stirred his venom. His revolt was less pronounced and less important
than that of his ancestors; but it was a revolt. Gerard Petit left
France, and Teague Poteet remained away from Gullettsville. Otherwise
there was scarcely a trace of his lineage about him, and it is a
question whether he inherited this trait from France or from the
Euphrates--from Gerard or from Adam.

But he did not become a hermit by any means. The young men of
Gullettsville made Sunday excursions to his farm, and he was pleased to
treat them with great deference. Moreover, he began to go upon little
journeys of his own across Sugar Valley. He made no mystery of his
intentions; but one day there was considerable astonishment when he
rode into Gullettsville on horseback, with Puss Pringle behind him, and
informed the proper authorities of his desire to make her Mrs. Puss
Poteet. Miss Pringle was not a handsome woman, but she was a fair
representative of that portion of the race that has poisoned whole
generations by improving the frying-pan and perpetuating "fatty bread."
The impression she made upon those who saw her for the first time was
one of lank flatness--to convey a vivid idea rather clumsily. But she
was neither lank nor flat. The total absence of all attempts at
artificial ornamentation gave the future Mrs. Poteet an appearance of
forlorn shiftlessness that was not even slightly justified by the
facts. She was a woman past the heyday of youth, but of considerable
energy, and possessed of keen powers of observation. Whatever was
feminine about her was of that plaintive variety which may be depended
upon to tell the story of whole generations of narrow, toilsome, and
unprofitable lives.

There was one incident connected with Miss Pringle's antenuptial ride
that rather intensified the contempt which the Mountain entertained for
the Valley. As she jogged down the street, clinging confidently, if not
comfortably, to Teague Poteet's suspenders, two young ladies of
Gullettsville chanced to be passing along. They walked slowly, their
arms twined about each other's wa