"The general's gitting kind of a crank--and I told him so." "What did he say ?" inquired the colonel.
"Oh, he just laughed," replied McHurdie; "he just laughed and said if he was a crank I was a poet, and neither was much good at the note window of the bank, and we kind of made it up." And so the winter evening grew old, and one by one the cronies rose and yawned and went their way.

Evening after evening went thus, and was it strange that in the years that came, when the sunset of life was gilding things for Watts McHurdie, he looked through the golden haze and saw not the sand in the pit under the stove, not the rows of drugs on the wall, not the patent medicine bottles in their faded wrappers, but as he wrote many years after in "Autumn Musing":-- "Those nights when Wisdom was our guide And Friendship was the glow, That warmed our souls like living coals, Those nights of long ago." Nor is it strange that Martin Culpepper, his commentator, conning those lines through the snows of many winters, should be a little misty as to details, and having taken his pen in hand to write, should set down this note:-- "These lines probably refer to the evenings which the poet passed in a goodly company of choice spirits during the early seventies.

E'en as I write, Memory, with tender hand, pushes back the sombre curtain, and I see them now--that charmed circle; the poet with the brow of Jove and Minerva's lips; the rugged warrior at his side, with the dignity of Mars himself; perhaps some Croesus with his gold, drawn by the spell of Wisdom's enchantment into the magic circle; and this your humble disciple of Thucydides, sitting spellbound under the drippings of the sacred font, getting the material for these pages.

That was the Golden Age; there were giants in those days." And so there were, Colonel Martin Culpepper of the Great Heart and the "large white plumes"-- so there were..