“By the way, I saw Flagg on the street the other
day in Mobile. He was looking well.”
The bit of melon I had in my mouth refused to be swallowed.
I fancy that my face was a study. A dead silence
followed; and then my wife reached across the table,
and pressing my hand, said very gently—
“Wesley, you were not brilliant, but you were
good.”
All this was longer ago than I care to remember.
I heard no more from Mr. Matthews. Last week,
oddly enough, while glancing over a file of recent
Southern newspapers, I came upon the announcement of
the death of George W. Flagg. It was yellow fever
this time also. If later on I receive any bills
in connection with that event, I shall let my friend
Bleeker audit them.
“For bravery on the field
of battle”
The recruiting-office at Rivermouth was in a small,
unpainted, weather-stained building on Anchor Street,
not far from the custom-house. The tumble-down
shell had long remained tenantless, and now, with its
mouse-colored exterior, easily lent itself to its
present requirements as a little military mouse-trap.
In former years it had been occupied as a thread-and-needle
and candy shop by one Dame Trippew. All such petty
shops in the town were always kept by old women, and
these old women were always styled dames. It
is to be lamented that they and their innocent traffic
have vanished into the unknown.
The interior of the building, consisting of one room
and an attic covered by a lean-to roof, had undergone
no change beyond the removal of Dame Trippew’s
pathetic stock at the time of her bankruptcy.
The narrow counter, painted pea-green and divided
in the centre by a swinging gate, still stretched
from wall to wall at the farther end of the room, and
behind the counter rose a series of small wooden drawers,
which now held nothing but a fleeting and inaccurate
memory of the lavender, and pennyroyal, and the other
sweet herbs that used to be deposited in them.
Even the tiny cow-bell, which once served to warn Dame
Trippew of the advent of a customer, still hung from
a bit of curved iron on the inner side of the street-door,
and continued to give out a petulant, spasmodic jingle
whenever that door was opened, however cautiously.
If the good soul could have returned to the scene
of her terrestrial commerce, she might have resumed
business at the old stand without making any alterations
whatever. Everything remained precisely as she
had left it at the instant of her exit. But a
wide gulf separated Dame Trippew from the present
occupant of the premises. Dame Trippew’s
slight figure, with its crisp, snowy cap and apron,
and steel-bowed spectacles, had been replaced by the
stalwart personage of a sergeant of artillery in the
regular army, between whose overhanging red mustache
and the faint white down that had of late years come
to Dame Trippew’s upper lip, it would have been
impossible to establish a parallel. The only things
these two might have claimed in common were a slackness
of trade and a liking for the aromatic Virginia leaf,
though Dame Trippew had taken hers in a dainty idealistic
powder, and the sergeant took his in realistic plug
through the medium of an aggressive clay pipe.
