ught himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had
never before been perpetrated within his establishment. It was not that
he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively,
almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while
Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most
suave deference. It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a
lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to
do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of--and a
thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it _was_ heard of, for
that matter, though this need not now concern us.

"And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass of wine when your
work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily
out. Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of
Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting
traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words
unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the
retreating vision. A moment later he was staring with mystified
absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a
stranger's--and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of
his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.

Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well
out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had
been done. But Arthur had attended a college of pharmacy far away from
Slocum County, and it was not unnatural that he should exhibit an alien
grace in times of emergency.

With Westley Keyts again, to whose shop Miss Caroline next progressed,
it was as with Chester Pierce, a phenomenon of instinctive muscular
reaction,--that of his hat coming off as he greeted the stately little
lady at his threshold and apologized for the sawdust on his floor which
was compelling her to raise a froth of skirts above the tops of those
sinful-looking shoes. I suspect that Miss Caroline was rather taken with
Westley. She called him "my good man," which made him feel that he had
been distinguished uncommonly, and she chatted with him at some length,
asking cordially about cuts of meat and his family, two matters in which
Westley was much absorbed. He declared later that she was "a grand
little woman."

There followed pilgrimages that June morning to the First National Bank