once
a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise
_Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_
came to our office we saw the familiar soldier's face in profile, with
a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee,
and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back
jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the
editor says in a note was written in a young woman's angular
handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in
spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor
Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the
friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and
unassuming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that
he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words:
"Heaven's angel gained is Roosevelt's hero lost."
XIV
The Passing of Priscilla Winthrop
What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss
Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we
had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the
town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women's clubs,
and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our
best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these
clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names
were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we
called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out
ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest
social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it
may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but
that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee
we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our
society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque
as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by
that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless
one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond
the hope of a social heaven.
In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin's maiden name;
in the second place,
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