He was a tall stout man in the midst of his forties, with a military goatee and black flowing mustaches, and he wore his campaign hat pinned up at the side with the brass military pin and swayed with some show of swagger as he walked.

His gift of oratory he did not bring to the flower of its perfection except at lodge.

He was always sent as a delegate to Grand Lodge, and when he came home men came from all over the county to see the colonel exemplify the work.

But as he marched to funerals under his large white plume and with his sword dangling at his side, Colonel Martin Culpepper, six feet four one way and four feet two the other, was a regal spectacle, and it will be many years before the town will see his like again.
The colonel walked over to the post-office box and got his mail, then took a backless chair and drew it up to the sand box in which the stove sat, and the conversation became general in its nature, ranging from Emerson's theory of the cosmos and the whiskey ring to the efficacy of a potato in the pocket for rheumatism.

Finally when they had come to their "don't you remembers" about the battle of Wilson's Creek, General Ward, with his long coat buttoned closely about him, came shivering into the store to get some camphor gum and stood rubbing his cold hands by the stove while the clerk was wrapping up the package.