the men were all gone to the war, to keep the Union as it was in their fathers’ time, and would doubtless vote the conservative ticket next election because their fathers did, which would make the war a horrible farce.  The town, Blecker thought, had rooted itself in between the hills with as solid a persistence as the prejudices of its builders.  Obstinately steep streets, shaded by gnarled locust-trees; houses drawn back from the sidewalks, in surly dread of all new-comers; the very smoke, vaporing through the sky, had defiance in it of the outer barbarous world and its vulgar newness.  Yet the town had an honest country heart in it, if it was a bit gray and crusty with age.  Blecker, knowing it as he did, did not wonder the boys who left it named a village for it out in Kansas, trying to fancy themselves at home,—­or that one old beggar in it asked to be buried in the middle of the street, “So’s I kin hear the stages a-comin’ in, an’ know if the old place is a-gittin’ on.”

There seemed to be a migration from it to-night:  they met, every minute, buggies, old-fashioned carriages, horsemen.

“Going out to camp,” McKinstry said; “the boys all have some one to bid them good-bye.”

What a lonely, reserved voice the man had!  Blecker had the curiosity of all sensitive men to know the soul-history of people; he glanced again keenly in McKinstry’s face.  Pshaw! one might as well ask their story from the deaf and dumb.  But that they were dumb,—­there was hint of a tragedy in that!

Everybody stopped to speak to the Doctor.  He had been but a few months in the place; but the old church-goers had found him out as a passionate, free-and-easy, honorable fellow, full of joke and anecdote,—­shrewd, too.  They “fellowshipped” with him heartily, and were glad when he got the post of surgeon with their sons.  If there were anything more astringent below this, any more real self in the man, held back, belonging to a world outside of theirs, they did not see it.  They knew him better, they thought, than they did Daniel McKinstry, who had grown up among them, just as mild and silent when he was a tow-haired boy as now, a man of forty-five.  He touched his hat to them now, and went on, while Blecker leaned on the carriage-doors, his brown face aglow with fun, his uneasy fingers drumming boyishly on the panel.  Not knowing that through the changeful face, and fierce, pitiful eyes of the boy, the man Paul Blecker looked coolly out, testing, labelling them.  The boy in him, that they saw, Nature had made; but years of a hand-to-hand fight with starvation came after, crime, and society, whose work is later than Nature’s, and sometimes better done.

“Fine girl!” said the Doctor, touching his hat to Miss Mallard, as she cantered past.  “Got a head of her own, too.  Made a deused good speech, when she presented the flag to-day.”

Miss Mallard overheard him, as he intended she should, and blushed a visible acknowledgment.  All of her character was visible, well-developed as her body:  her timidity showed itself in the unceasing dropping of her eyelid; her arch simplicity in the pouting lips; a coy reserve—­well, that everywhere, to the very rosette on her retreating slipper; and her patriotism was quite palpable in the color of her Balmoral.  She rode Squire Mallard’s gray.