"But, at that particular moment, he had just failed in an attempt to sell Bill Trescott a bunch of choice outlying gold bricks, and was somewhat heated with wine. This to the haughty Southron was ample excuse for confiding to me the round, unvarnished truth about us mudsills. "Josie and I often talk of you and your wife. I don't know what I'd do out here if it weren't for Josie. She refuses to enthuse over our 'natural, healthy growth,' which we look for; but I guess that's because she doesn't care for the things that the rest of us are striving for. But she's the only person here with whom one can really converse. You'd be astonished to see how pretty she is in her furs, and set like a jewel in my new sleigh; but I'm becoming keenly aware of the fact." We were afterwards told that the trilobites had shaken off their fossilhood, and that the Angus Falls extension, with the engine-house and machine-shops, had been "landed." "This," he wrote, "means enough new families to make a noticeable increase in our population. Things will be popping here soon. Come on and help shake the popper; hurry up with your moving, or it will all be over, including the shouting." We were not entirely dependent upon Jim's letters for Lattimore news. Mrs. Barslow kept up a desultory correspondence with Miss Trescott, begun upon some pretext and continued upon none at all. In one of these letters Josie (for so we soon learned to call her) wrote: "Our little town is changing so that it no longer seems familiar. Not that the change is visible. Beyond an unusual number of strangers or recent comers, there is nothing new to strike the eye. But the talk everywhere is of a new railroad and other improvements. One needs only to shut one's eyes and listen, to imagine that the town is already a real city. Mr. Elkins seems to be the center of this new civic self-esteem. The air is full of it, and I admit that I am affected by it. I have "'A feeling, as when eager crowds await, Before a palace gate, Some wondrous pageant.' "You are indebted to Captain Tolliver for the quotation, and to Mr. Elkins for the idea. The Captain induced me to read the book in which I found the lines. He stigmatizes the preference given to the Northern poets--Longfellow, for instance--over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the end. Timrod, however, is a treat."