We reckon time in our capital not from fires or floods or even anno urbis conditae, but from seemingly minor incidents that have nevertheless marked new eras and changed the channels of history.  Precedents sustain us in this.  A startled goose rousing the sleeping sentinels on the ramparts; a dull peasant sending an army in the wrong direction; the mischievous phrase uttered by an inconspicuous minister of the gospel to a few auditors,—­such unconsidered trifles play havoc with Fame’s calculations.  And so in our calendar the disbanding of the volunteer fire department in 1859 looms gloomily above the highest altitudes of the strenuous sixties; the fact that Billy Sanderson, after his father’s failure in 1873, became a brakeman on the J.M. & I. Railroad and invested his first month’s salary in a silver-mounted lantern, is more luminous in the retrospect than the panic itself; the coming of a lady with a lorgnette in 1889 (the scion of one of our ancient houses married her in Ohio) overshadows even the passing of Beecher’s church; and the three-days’ sojourn of Henry James in 1905 shattered all records and established a new orientation for our people.  It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr. James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the Propylaeum who had always thought Balzac the name of a tooth-powder.

Mrs. Owen’s family, the Singletons, had crossed the Ohio into Hoosier territory along in the fifties, in time for Sally to have been a student—­not the demurest from all accounts—­at Indiana Female College.  Where stood the college the Board of Trade has lately planted itself, frowning down upon Christ Church, whose admirable Gothic spire chimed for Union victories in the sixties (there’s a story about that, too!) and still pleads with the ungodly on those days of the week appointed by the Book of Common Prayer for offices to be said or sung.  Mrs. Jackson Owen was at this time sixty years old, and she had been a widow for thirty years.  The old citizens who remembered Jackson Owen always spoke of him with a smile.  He held an undisputed record of having been defeated for more offices than any other Hoosier of his time.  His chief assets when he died were a number of farms, plastered with mortgages, scattered over the commonwealth in inaccessible localities.  His wife, left a widow with a daughter who died at fourteen, addressed herself zealously to the task of paying the indebtedness with which the lamented Jackson had encumbered his property.  She had made a point of clinging to all the farms that had been so profitless under his direction, and so successfully had she managed them that they were all paying handsomely.  A four-hundred-acre tract of the tallest corn I ever saw was once pointed out to me in Greene County and this plantation, it was explained, had been a worthless bog before Mrs. Owen “tiled” it; and later I saw stalks of this corn displayed in the rooms of the Agricultural Society to illustrate what intelligent farming can do.