“Have I caught the style?—­have I used ‘in our midst’ correctly?” she asked Solon.  And he protested that her style was faultless but that her matter was grossly misleading.

From this she was presently assuring him, in all pleasantness, that the seed of Cain, descended through Ham, would, by reason of the curse of God, be a “servant of servants” unto the end; while Solon was assuring her, with equal good nature, that this scriptural law had been repealed by President Lincoln.

Her retort, “I dare say your Mr. Lincoln was capable of wishing to repeal the Bible,” was her nearest approach to asperity.

“A battered old woman!” said Solon to me later.  “She looks more like a candy saint, if they make such things,—­one that a child has been careless with.”  We agreed that she was an addition to Little Arcady.

The editor of the Argus sighed at this point, and I thought he might be wishing that all feminine newcomers could be like the latest.  For Mrs. Aurelia Potts, whose leisure Heaven had increased, was now redoubling her efforts to make the Argus a well of English undefiled—­undefiled by what she called “journalisms.”  Solon must not, he confided to me, say “enthuse” nor “we opine” nor “disremember.”  He might not say that the pastor “was given” a donation party when he really meant that the party was given,—­not that the pastor was given.  Further, he must be cautious in the uses of “who” and “whom,” and try to break himself of the “a good time was enjoyed by all present” habit.

“And she always says ‘diddy-you’ instead of ‘dij-you,’” broke in my namesake, who, loitering near us, had overheard the name of Mrs. Potts.

“That will do, Calvin!” said his father, shortly.  It seemed to me that the still young life of Solon was fast being blighted.

CHAPTER XVI

THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED

A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale.  Not with her antiquated gown, her assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.

To “drink” meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as “Big Joe” Kestril did every pay-day.  Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce’s hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had “asked Chet Pierce to have a glass of wine,—­and him a-bowin’ and a-scrapin’ like you’d think he was goin’ to fly off the handle!”

It was enough for the town.  The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew there could be but one result.  That sort of thing might be done in tales of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could not compatibly exist with good conduct.  Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good Methodist as she was, who “put up” a little elderberry wine each year for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to “Touch not, taste not, handle not!”