Mr. Temple was one of the leading citizens of Buffland.  He was the vice-president of the great rolling-mill company, whose smoke darkened the air by day and lighted up the skies at night as with the flames of the nether pit.  He was very tall and very slender, with reddish-brown hair, eyes and mustache.  Though a man of middle age, his trim figure, his fashionable dress, and his clean shaven cheek and chin gave him an appearance of youth.  He was president of the local jockey club, and the joy of his life was to take his place in the judges’ stand, and sway the destinies of the lean, keen-faced trainers who drove the trotting horses.  He had the eye of a lynx for the detection of any crookedness in driving, and his voice would ring out over the track like the trump of doom, conveying fines and penalties to the luckless trickster who was trying to get some unfair advantage in the start.  His voice, a deep basso, rarely was heard, in fact, anywhere else.  Though excessively social, he was also extremely silent.  He gave delightful dinner-parties and a great many of them, but rarely spoke, except to recommend an especially desirable wine to a favored guest.  When he did speak, however, his profanity was phenomenal.  Every second word was an oath.  To those who were not shocked by it there was nothing more droll and incongruous than to hear this quiet, reserved, well-dressed, gentleman-like person pouring out, on the rare occasions when he talked freely, in a deep, measured, monotonous tone, a flood of imprecations which would have made a pirate hang his head.  He had been, as a boy, clerk on a Mississippi River steamboat, and a vacancy occurring in the office of mate, he had been promoted to that place.  His youthful face and quiet speech did not sufficiently impose upon the rough deck-hands of that early day.  They had been accustomed to harsher modes of address, and he saw his authority defied and in danger.  So he set himself seriously to work to learn to swear; and though at first it made his heart shiver a little with horror and his cheek burn with shame, he persevered, as a matter of business, until his execrations amazed the roustabouts.  When he had made a fortune, owned a line of steamboats, and finally retired from the river, the habit had been fastened upon him, and oaths became to him the only form of emphatic speech.  The hardest work he ever did in his life was, while courting his wife, a Miss Flora Ballston, of Cincinnati, to keep from mingling his ordinary forms of emphasis in his asseverations of affection.  But after he was married, and thrown more and more into the company of women, that additional sense, so remarkable in men of his mould, came to him, and he never lapsed, in their presence, into his natural way of speech.  Perhaps this was the easier, as he rarely spoke at all when they were by—­not that he was in the least shy or timid, but because they, as a rule, knew nothing about stocks, or pig-iron, or wine, or trotting horses,—­the only subjects, in his opinion, which could interest any reasonable creature.