to? It was his eminence. While his spree lasts the Colonel buys everything in sight until his money is gone. Then some one has to go an' tow him back to us. Once he returned the proud owner of a carload of goats an' a millinery store.”      

       Mr. Smead also told me of the two judges, Warner and Brooks, the ablest members of the county bar, who, it seems, were always wandering toward the dewy, meadowy path of dalliance. He said that sometimes they hit the path, and sometimes the path hit them and left some bruises. They enjoyed the distinctions of being looked up to and of being looked down upon.     

       “Of course, there are able men in the village who are addicted to sobriety,” he went on. “Some of them have tried to reform, but, alas! the habit of sobriety has become fixed upon them—weak stomachs, maybe. They have to worry along without the stamp o' genius, just commonplace, every-day-alike men. Nobody takes any notice of 'em. Once a prominent citizen denounced one o' them on the street as a damn little-souled, conscientious Christian who could get drunk on a thimble o' whisky. It was one o' the first indictments against virtue on record.     

       “'Ha! I see that you are sober,' said John Griggs to a constituent whom he met in the street one day. I will forgive you, but don't let it happen again. Think of the obscurity that awaits you and of the example you are setting to the young. Think of Deacon Bradley and Priscilla Perkins. Sir, if you keep on you will be wrecked on the hidden reefs of hopeless sobriety.'”      

       Dan'l Webster laughed for a minute and continued: “Griggsby is the home and Paradise of the rural hoss-trader, whose word is as good as his hoss, and who never fools anybody except when he is telling the truth. One of       'em was sued for sellin' a worthless hoss. His defense was that a man who traded with him took his life in his hands, an' everybody ought to know it; an' the justice ruled that there were certain men that it was a crime to believe, an' that he who did it received a natural and deserved punishment.”      

       So in his curious way, which was not to be forgotten, he described this heroism of the human stomach, this adventurous defiance of God and nature. In those callow days that view appealed to my sporting instinct.     

       “You see, the stamp of 

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