"Now, Jennie," said he, "we have settled that question a dozen times, and we can't go over it again if I am to catch the 4:48 train. Keep your eye on the men, and keep Baggs up in the collar, and see that Wilkes and Ranger get their just dues. I must have rest, Jennie; and as for the wife, why, there'll be more some day for this purely speculative family of yours if we---- By the way, there's the whistle at Anderson's crossing. Good-by, my dear!" On the 4:48 train, at least until it had aged into the 7:30 or 8:00, Mr. Florian Amidon, banker, and most attractive unmarried man of Hazelhurst, was not permitted to forget that his going away was an important event. The fact that he was rich, from the viewpoint of the little mid-western town, unmarried and attractive, easily made his doings important, had nothing remarkable followed. But he had exceptional points as a person of consequence, aside from these. His father had been a scholar, and his mother so much of a _grande dame_ as to have old worm-eaten silks and laces with histories. The Daughters of the American Revolution always went to the Amidons for ancient toggery for their eighteenth-century costumes--and checks for their deficits. The family even had a printed genealogy. Moreover, Florian had been at the head of his class in the high school, had gone through the family _alma mater_ in New England, and been finished in Germany. Hazelhurst, therefore, looked on him as a possession, and thought it knew him. We, however, may confide to the world that Hazelhurst knew only his outer husk, and that Mr. Amidon was inwardly proud of his psychological hinterland whereof his townsmen knew nothing. To Hazelhurst his celibacy was the banker's caution, waiting for something of value in the matrimonial market: to him it was a bashful and palpitant--almost maidenly--expectancy of the approach of some radiant companion of his soul, like those which spoke to him from the pages of his favorite poets. This was silly in a mere business man! If found out it would have justified a run on the bank. To Hazelhurst he was a fixed and integral part of their society: to himself he was a galley-slave chained to the sweep of percentages, interest-tables, cash-balances, and lines of credit, to whom there came daily the vision of a native Arcadia of art, letters and travel. It was good business to allow Hazelhurst to harbor its illusions; it was excellent pastime and good spiritual nourishment for Amidon to harbor his; and one can see how it may have been with some quixotic sense of seeking adventure that he boarded the train. What followed was so extraordinary that everything he said or did was remembered, and the record is tolerably complete. He talked with Simeon Woolaver, one of his tenants, about the delinquent rent, and gave Simeon a note to Baggs relative to taking some steers in settlement. This was before 5:17, at which time Mr. Woolaver got off at Duxbury.