ists. They wore white muslin dresses,
and straw hats with wide and jaunty brims, and the loose ends of gay
ribbons fluttered about them. These young ladies, fresh from school,
and no doubt full of vainglory, greeted the bridal procession with a
little explosion of giggles, and when Puss Pringle pushed back her
gingham sun-bonnet and innocently gazed upon them, they turned up their
noses, sniffed the air scornfully, and made such demonstrations as no
feminine mind, however ignorant in other directions, could fail to
interpret.

Miss Pringle had not learned the art of tossing her head and sniffing
the air, but she half closed her eyes and gave the young ladies a look
that meant something more than scorn. She said nothing to Teague, for
she was in hopes he had not observed the tantrums of the school-girls.

As for Teague, he saw the whole affair, and was out to the quick. In
addition to the latent pride of his class, he inherited the
sensitiveness of his ancestors, but, turning his eyes neither to the
right nor to the left, he jogged along to the wedding. He carried his
wife home, and thereafter avoided Gullettsville. When he was compelled
to buy coffee and sugar, or other necessary luxuries, he rode forty
miles across the mountain to Villa Bay.

He had been married a year or more when, one afternoon, he was
compelled to ride down to Gullettsville under whip and spur for a
doctor. There was a good deal of confused activity in the town. Old men
and young boys were stirring around with blue cockades in their hats,
and the women wore blue rosettes on their bosoms. Three negroes in
uniform--a contribution from the nearest railroad town--were parading
up and down the straggling street with fife and drums, and a number of
men were planting a flag-pole in front of the court-house.

No conscientious historian can afford to ignore a coincidence, and it
so happened that upon the very day that league Poteet's wife presented
him with the puzzle of a daughter, Fate presented his countrymen with
the problem of war. That night, sitting in the door of his house and
smoking his pipe, Teague witnessed other developments of the
coincidence. In the next room the baby-girl squalled most persistently;
down in the valley the premonitions of war made themselves heard
through the narrow throat of a small cannon which, until then, had been
used only to celebrate the Fourth of July.

The noise of a horse's hoofs roused Teague's hounds, and some