he brought himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had never before been perpetrated within his establishment.  It was not that he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively, almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference.  It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of—­and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it was heard of, for that matter, though this need not now concern us.

“And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass of wine when your work is done,” concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out.  Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision.  A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger’s—­and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.

Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had been done.  But Arthur had attended a college of pharmacy far away from Slocum County, and it was not unnatural that he should exhibit an alien grace in times of emergency.

With Westley Keyts again, to whose shop Miss Caroline next progressed, it was as with Chester Pierce, a phenomenon of instinctive muscular reaction,—­that of his hat coming off as he greeted the stately little lady at his threshold and apologized for the sawdust on his floor which was compelling her to raise a froth of skirts above the tops of those sinful-looking shoes.  I suspect that Miss Caroline was rather taken with Westley.  She called him “my good man,” which made him feel that he had been distinguished uncommonly, and she chatted with him at some length, asking cordially about cuts of meat and his family, two matters in which Westley was much absorbed.  He declared later that she was “a grand little woman.”

There followed pilgrimages that June morning to the First National Bank and to several of our lesser establishments; pilgrimages rarely diverting to Little Arcady and which invariably provoked bows under strangely lifted hats.

But there were Little Arcadians of Miss Caroline’s own sex to whom she might not so swiftly fetch confusion.  Aunt Delia McCormick devoted a chance view of the newcomer to discovering that the gown of lavender satin had been turned and made over, none too expertly, from one originally built some years before the war.  Later she found what our ladies agreed was its primal design, after much turning of the leaves of ancient Godey’s magazines.