upon his garments.  The beaver was his special crown of dignity.  To lose it was to be reduced to a level with the common woolhat herd.  He did his best, pulling, pressing, and pushing, but the hat did not look natural when he had finished.  It seemed to have been laid off into counties, sections, and town lots.  Like a well-cut jewel, it had a face for him, view it from whatever point he chose, a quality which so impressed him that a lump gathered in his throat, and his eyes winked vigorously.

Elder Brown was not, however, a man for tears.  He was a man of action.  The sudden vision which met his wandering gaze, the donkey calmly chewing scrub buds, with the green juice already oozing from the corners of his frothy mouth, acted upon him like magic.  He was, after all, only human, and when he got hands upon a piece of brush he thrashed the poor beast until it seemed as though even its already half-tanned hide would be eternally ruined.  Thoroughly exhausted at last, he wearily straddled his saddle, and with his chin upon his breast resumed the early morning tenor of his way.

II

“Good-mornin’, sir.”

Elder Brown leaned over the little pine picket which divided the bookkeepers’ department of a Macon warehouse from the room in general, and surveyed the well-dressed back of a gentleman who was busily figuring at a desk within.  The apartment was carpetless, and the dust of a decade lay deep on the old books, shelves, and the familiar advertisements of guano and fertilizers which decorated the room.  An old stove, rusty with the nicotine contributed by farmers during the previous season while waiting by its glowing sides for their cotton to be sold, stood straight up in a bed of sand, and festoons of cobwebs clung to the upper sashes of the murky windows.  The lower sash of one window had been raised, and in the yard without, nearly an acre in extent, lay a few bales of cotton, with jagged holes in their ends, just as the sampler had left them.  Elder Brown had time to notice all these familiar points, for the figure at the desk kept serenely at its task, and deigned no reply.

“Good-mornin’, sir,” said Elder Brown again, in his most dignified tones.  “Is Mr. Thomas in?”

“Good-morning, sir,” said the figure.  “I’ll wait on you in a minute.”  The minute passed, and four more joined it.  Then the desk man turned.

“Well, sir, what can I do for you?”

The elder was not in the best of humor when he arrived, and his state of mind had not improved.  He waited full a minute as he surveyed the man of business.

“I thought I mout be able to make some arrangements with you to git some money, but I reckon I was mistaken.”  The warehouse man came nearer.

“This is Mr. Brown, I believe.  I did not recognize you at once.  You are not in often to see us.”

“No; my wife usually ’tends to the town bizness, while I run the church and farm.  Got a fall from my donkey this morning,” he said, noticing a quizzical, interrogating look upon the face before him, “and fell squar’ on the hat.”  He made a pretense of smoothing it.  The man of business had already lost interest.