Anchored among the ancients the old judge would sit, doing his share of the talking and more than his share of the listening; and late in the afternoon, when the official watermelon, all dripping and cool, had been brought forth from the springhouse, and the shadows were beginning to stretch themselves slantwise across the road, as though tired out completely by a hard day's work in the broiling sun, he and Mittie May would jog back toward town, meeting many an acquaintance on the road, but rarely passing one. And the upshot would be that at the next Democratic primary the opposing candidate for circuit judge--if there was any opposing candidate--got powerfully few votes out of that neighbourhood. Such Sunday excursions as these and such a Sunday dinner as this typical one formed a regular part of Judge Priest's weekly routine through at least nine months of the year. If unforeseen, events conspired to rob him of his trip to the country he felt the week had not rightly rounded itself out; but once a year he attended a dinner beside which all other dinner occasions were, in his estimation, as nothing at all. With regard to this particular affair, he used to say it took him a week to get primed and ready for it, one whole night to properly enjoy it, and another week to recover from the effects of it. I am speaking now of the anniversary banquet of the survivors of Company B--first and foremost of the home companies--which was and still is held always on a given date and at a given place, respectively, to wit: The evening of the twelfth of May and the dining room of the Richland House. Company B held the first of its annual dinners at the Richland House away back in '66. That time sixty and more men--young men, mostly, in their mid-twenties and their early thirties--sat down together to meat and drink, and no less a personage than General Grider presided--that same Meriwether Grider who, going out in the first year of the war as company commander, came back after the Surrender, bringing with him the skeleton remnants of a battered and a shattered brigade. General Meriwether Grider has been dead this many a year now. He gave his life for the women and the children when the _Belle of the Bends_ burned up at Cottonwood Bar; and that horror befell so long ago that the present generation down our way knows it only as a thing of which those garrulous and tiresome creatures, the older inhabitants, are sometimes moved to speak. But the rules for the regulation and conduct of subsequent banquets which were adopted on that long-ago night, when the general sat at the head of the table, hold good, even though all else in our town has changed.