“She does those things constantly,” said the dejected father.  “I don’t see what I can do to her.”

I saw, however, and did it, first wiping the tooth-powder from her face.  She had called me Uncle Maje.

“She’s a regular baddix,” announced my namesake, gravely judicial.  Then, as if with intention to indicate 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 that Potts could deteriorate ten thousand dollars worth and still walk the earth.  Indeed, he believed, and uttered a few rough words to express it, that ten dollars would be an excessive valuation even if Potts were utterly destroyed.