“It's good,” the Squire would say, licking off the corn-cob stopper of a molasses jug and driving it with a sticky _plop_ into its appointed orifice, “And then agin it's bad. Some things air sellin' off very well and some things ain't hardly sellin' off a'tall.” The Squire was no great shakes of a talker, but as a listener he was magnificent. He would sit silently hour after hour with his hands laced over his paunch, only occasionally spitting over the banisters with a strident tearing sound. Nor was the assemblage complete without Captain Shelby Woodward. Captain Shelby Woodward's specialty in conversation was the Big War. From him I first heard the story of how Lieutenant Gracey of the County Battery floated down the river on a saw log and single handed, captured the Yankee gunboat and its sleepy-headed crew. From him I learned the why and wherefore of how our town although located right on the border of North and South, came in '61 to be called the Little Charleston, and from him also I got the tale of that lost legion of Illinois men, a full battalion of them, who crossing out of their own State by stealth were joyously welcomed into ours, and were mustered into the service and thereafter for four years fought their own kinspeople and neighbors--the only organized command, so Captain Shelby Woodward said, that came to the army from the outside. Frequently he used to tell about Miss Em. Garrett, who when Grant came up from Cairo on his gunboats, alone remembered what all the rest of the frightened town forgot--that the silken flag which the women had made with loving hands, was still floating from its flag pole in front of the engine house; and she drove her old rock-away down to the engine house and made her little negro house boy shin up the pole and bring the flag down to her, he greatly fearing the shells from the gunboats that whistled past his head, but fearing much more his mistress, standing down below and looking up at his bare legs with her buggy whip. “So then,” Captain Woodward would go on, “she put the flag under her dress and drove on home. But some Union sympathizer told on her when the troops landed and a crowd of them broke away and went out to her place and called on her to give it up. She was all alone except for the darkeys, but she wasn't scared, that old woman. They sassed her and she sassed 'em back, and they were swearing they'd burn the house down over her head, and she was daring 'em to do it, when an officer came up and drove 'em off. And afterwards when the warehouses and the churches and the Young Ladies' Seminary were chuck full of sick and wounded, brought down from Donaldson and Shiloh, she turned in and nursed them all alike, not caring which side they'd fought on. And so, some of the very men that had threatened her, used to salute when she passed them on the street.