imitation of the dismounted St. George and the Dragon, and conveyed to the jail.  Keenest investigation failed to reveal anything oblique in the man’s record; to the astonishment of Canaan, there was nothing against him.  He was blind and moderately poor; but a respectable, hard-working artisan, and a pride to the church in which he was what has been called an “active worker.”  It was discovered that his sensitiveness to his companion’s attack on Joseph Louden arose from the fact that Joe had obtained the acquittal of an imbecile sister of the blind man, a two-thirds-witted woman who had been charged with bigamy.

The Tocsin made what it could of this, and so dexterously that the wrath of Canaan was one farther jot increased against the shyster.  Ay, the town was hot, inside and out.

Let us consider the Forum.  Was there ever before such a summer for the “National House” corner?  How voices first thundered there, then cracked and piped, is not to be rendered in all the tales of the fathers.  One who would make vivid the great doings must indeed “dip his brush in earthquake and eclipse”; even then he could but picture the credible, and must despair of this:  the silence of Eskew Arp.  Not that Eskew held his tongue, not that he was chary of speech—­no!  O tempora, O mores!  No!  But that he refused the subject in hand, that he eschewed expression upon it and resolutely drove the argument in other directions, that he achieved such superbly un-Arplike inconsistency; and with such rich material for his sardonic humors, not at arm’s length, not even so far as his finger-tips, but beneath his very palms, he rejected it:  this was the impossible fact.

Eskew—­there is no option but to declare—­was no longer Eskew.  It is the truth; since the morning when Ariel Tabor came down from Joe’s office, leaving her offering of white roses in that dingy, dusty, shady place, Eskew had not been himself.  His comrades observed it somewhat in a physical difference, one of those alterations which may come upon men of his years suddenly, like a “sea change”:  his face was whiter, his walk slower, his voice filed thinner; he creaked louder when he rose or sat.  Old always, from his boyhood, he had, in the turn of a hand, become aged.  But such things come and such things go:  after eighty there are ups and downs; people fading away one week, bloom out pleasantly the next, and resiliency is not at all a patent belonging to youth alone.  The material change in Mr. Arp might have been thought little worth remarking.  What caused Peter Bradbury, Squire Buckalew, and the Colonel to shake their heads secretly to one another and wonder if their good old friend’s mind had not “begun to go” was something very different.  To come straight down to it:  he not only abstained from all argument upon the “Cory Murder” and the case of Happy Fear, refusing to discuss either in any terms or under any circumstances, but he also declined to speak of Ariel Tabor or of Joseph Louden; or of their affairs, singular or plural, masculine, feminine, or neuter, or in any declension.  Not a word, committal or non-committal.  None!