icate delicately that the family afforded
striking contrasts, he added, "_I_ ain't a baddix--I can nearly sing."

The children fribbled about us while we talked away the afternoon. The
woman child at last put me to thinking--to thinking that perhaps
butterflies are not meant to be happily caught. With many shouts she had
clumsily enough imprisoned one--a fairy thing of green and bronze--in a
hand so plump that it seemed to have been quilted. A moment she held it,
then set it free, perhaps for its lack of spirit. It crawled and
fluttered up the vine, trailing a crumpled wing most sadly, and I took
it for my lesson. Assuredly they were not to be caught with any
profit--at least not brutally in an eager hand. Brush them ever so
lightly and the bloom is off the wings. They are to be watched in their
pretty flitting, loved only in their freedom and from afar, with no
clumsy reachings. That was a good thing to know in any world.

The _Argus_ announced my home-coming with a fine flourish of my title in
Solon's best style. It said that I had come back to take up the practice
of the law. Not even Solon knew that I had come back to the memory of
her.

This is how it befell that I was presently engrossed to outward seeming
with the affairs of Little Arcady--even to the extent of a casual Potts,
and those blessed contingencies that were later to unfold from him. Thus
I took my allotted place and the years began.

CHAPTER V

A MAD PRANK OF THE GODS

A week after the publication of that blithe bit of acrimony which opens
this tale, Colonel J. Rodney Potts, recreated and natty in a new summer
suit of alpaca, his hat freshly ironed, sued the town of Little Arcady
for ten thousand dollar damages to his person and announced his
candidacy at the ensuing election for the honorable office of Judge of
Slocum County. He did this at the earnest solicitation of his many
friends, in whose hands he had placed himself,--at least so read his
card of announcement in the _Banner_, our other paper. He did not name
these solicitous friends; but it was an easy suspicion that they were
the Democratic leaders, who thought by this means to draw votes from the
Republican candidate to the advantage of their own, who, otherwise, was
conceded to have no hope of election in a county overwhelmingly
Republican.

It may be told with adequate confidence that Westley Keyts was not of
their number. As to the damage suit, Westley found it unthinkable t