There is the man who goes about publicly vainglorious of his ownership of the finest gold-embossed shaving mug in the leading barbershop. There is the man--his name is apt to be A. J. Abbott or else August Ackerman--who invariably refers to himself as the first citizen of the place, and then, to make good his joke, shows the stranger where in the city directory he, like Abou ben Adhem--who, since I come to think about it, was similarly gifted in the matter of initials--leads all the rest. There is the town drunkard, the town profligate, the town beau, the town comedian. And finally, but by no means least, there is the man who knows baseball from A, which is Chadwick, to Z, which is Weeghman. These others--the champion whittler, the dog-biter, and the whole list of them--are what you might call perennials, but he is a hardy annual, blossoming forth in the spring when the season opens and His Honour, the Mayor, throws out the first ball, attaining to full-petalled effulgence along toward midsummer, as the fight for the flag narrows, growing fluffy in the pod at the seedtime of the World's Series in October, and through the long winter hibernating beneath a rich mulch of Spalding's guides and sporting annuals. * * * * * The thriving city of Anneburg, situate some distance south of Mason and Dixon's Line at the point where the Tobacco Belt and the Cotton Belt, fusing imperceptibly together, mingle the nitrogenous weed and the bolled staple in the same patchwork strip of fertile loam lands, was large enough to enjoy a Carnegie library, a municipal graft scandal, and a reunion of the Confederate Veterans' Association about once in so often, and small enough to have and to hold--and to value--at least one characteristic example of each of the types just enumerated. But especially did it excel in its exclusive possession of J. Henry Birdseye.