he spent much time in sedulously
reading certain volumes which he had brought home with him.

"Spent _money_ fur 'em!" his mother would ejaculate, contemplating this
extreme audacity of extravagance.

As she often observed, "the plough-handles seemed red-hot," and as soon
as political conditions favored he ran for office. On the strength of
his war record, a potent lever in those days, he was elected register of
the county. True, there was only a population of about fifty souls in
the county town, and the houses were log-cabins, except the temple of
justice itself, which was a two-story frame building. But his success
was a step on the road to political preferment, and his ambitious eyes
were on the future. Into the midst of his quiet incumbency as register
came Fate, all intrusive, and found him through the infrequent medium of
a weekly mail. It was at the beginning of the retrospective enthusiasm
that has served to revive the memories of the War, and he received a
letter from an old comrade-in-arms, giving the details of a brigade
reunion shortly to be held at no great distance, and, being of the
committee, inviting him to be present.

Girard had participated in great military crises; he had marshalled his
troop in line of battle; as a mere boy, he had ridden with the guidon
lance planted on his stirrup, with the pennant flying above his head, as
the marker to lead the fierce and famous Dovinger Rangers into the
thickest of the fight; yet he had never felt such palpitant tremors of
excitement as when he stood on the hotel piazza of the New Helvetia
Springs, where the banqueters had gathered, and suffered the ordeal of
introduction to sundry groups of fashionable ladies. He had earlier seen
specimens of the species in the course of military transitions through
the cities of the low-lands, and he watched them narrowly to detect if
they discerned perchance a difference between him and the men of
education and social station with whom his advancement in the army had
associated him. He did not reflect that they were too well-bred to
reveal any appreciation of such incongruity, but he had never
experienced a more ardent glow of gratification than upon overhearing a
friend's remark: "Girard is great! Anybody would imagine he was used to
all this!"

No strategist was ever more wary. He would not undertake to dance, for
he readily perceived that the gyrations in the ball-room were utterly
dissimilar to the clumsy capering