delight in her sharp retorts to the inanities of would-be wits. The episode in Elisha Boone's life, that all his success, wealth, and after exemplary conduct had not condoned in the village mind, was his handiwork in the ruin of Richard Perley, I set this down with something of the delight Carlyle expresses when in the rubbish of history he found, among the shams called kings and nobles, anything like a man.

It is worth the noting, this trait of Acredale, at a time when riches and success are looked upon as condoning every breach of the decalogue. Just how the intimacy between the two men came about was not known. It, however, was known that when Boone first came to Acredale he had been helped in his affairs by Dick Perley's lavish means. In a few years Boone was the patron and Perley the client. As Boone grew rich Perley grew poor, until finally all was gone. Then the fairest lands of the Perley inheritance passed to Boone. It was the fireside history of the whole Caribee Valley that the rich contractor had encouraged the ruined gentleman in the excesses that ended the profligate's career; that the two men had staked large sums at play in Bucephalo, and that inability to meet his losses to Boone had caused Dick Perley's flight. He had been seen by one of the village people a year or two before the war in Richmond, and had been heard of in California later, but no word had ever reached his family, not even when his wife died, two years after his exile. There were those who said that Boone was in correspondence with his victim, and it was known that drafts, made by Dick Perley, had been paid by Boone at the bank in Warchester. Between Boone and the Perley ladies, whose house was separated from "Acre Villa" by a wide lawn and hedge, there had always been the tacit enmity that wrong on one side and meek unreproach on the other breeds. The rancor that manifested itself in Boone's treatment of the Misses Perley was not imitated by them. They never alluded to their affluent neighbor, never suffered gossip concerning the Boones in what Olympia humorously called the "Orphic adytum," the "tabby-shop," as Wesley named the Perley parlors. Young Dick, however, had none of the scruples that kept his aunts silent. One dreadful day, when he had been nagged to fisticuffs with Wesley, whose dudish dignity exacted a certain restraint with the hot-headed youngster, Elisha Boone, behind the thick hedge, heard on the highway outside his grounds this outrageous anathema: