But why Adrian Brownwell had come to the Ridge, and where he had made his money--there myth and fable enter into the composition of the narrative, and one man's opinion is as good as another's. Curiously enough, all who testify claim that they speak by the authority of Mr. Brownwell himself. But he was a versatile and obliging gentleman withal, so it is not unlikely that all those who assembled him from the uttermost parts of the earth into Sycamore Ridge for all the reasons in the longer catechism, were telling the simple truth as they have reason to believe it. What men know of a certainty is that he came, that he hired the bridal chamber of the Thayer House for a year, and that he contested John Barclay's right to be known as the glass of fashion and the mould of form in Garrison County for thirty long years, and then--but that is looking in the back of the book, which is manifestly unfair. It is enough to know now that on that Sunday evening after Memorial Day, in 1874, Adrian P. Brownwell sat on the veranda of the Culpepper home slapping his lavender gloves on his knee by way of emphasis, and told the company what he told General Beauregard and what General Beauregard told him, at the battle of Shiloh; also what his maternal grandfather, Governor Papin, had said to General Jackson, when his grandmother, then Mademoiselle Dulangpre, youngest daughter of the refugee duke of that house, had volunteered to nurse the American soldiers in Jackson's hospital after the battle of New Orleans; also, and with detail, what his father, Congressman Brownwell, had said on the capitol steps in December, 1860, before leaving for Washington to resign his seat in Congress; and also with much greater detail he recounted the size of his ancestral domain, the number of the ancestral slaves and the royal state of the ancestral household, and then with a grand wave of his gloves, and a shrug of which Madam Papin might well have been proud, "But 'tis all over; and we are brothers--one country, one flag, one God, one very kind but very busy God!" And he smiled so graciously through his great mustaches, showing his fine even teeth, that Mrs. Culpepper, Methodist to the heart, smiled back and was not so badly shocked as she knew she should have been. "Is it not so?" he asked with his voice and his hands at once. "Ah," he exclaimed, addressing Mrs. Culpepper dramatically, "what better proof would you have of our brotherhood than our common bondage to you? However dark the night of our national discord--to-day, North, South, East, West, we bask in the sunrise of some woman's eyes." He fluttered his gloves gayly toward Molly and continued:-- "'O when did morning ever break, And find such beaming eyes awake.'"