As he came opposite Mrs. Morrill's front gate a blast of harmonious sound, floating out into the night, saluted his ears. He looked upward. Behind a front window on the top floor, with his upper lip overlapping the mouthpiece of a handsome clarinet and his fingers flitting upon the polished shaft of the instrument, sat little Emanuel Moon, now, by virtue of appointment, Deputy Circuit Clerk Emanuel Moon, playing The Last Rose of Summer with the fervour inspired of a happy heart, a rehabilitated reputation, a lucrative and honourable employment in the public service, and a newly acquired mastery of the melodic intricacies of the air in question--four things calculated, you will allow, to make anyone blithe of the spirit. The old judge halted and smiled up at the window. Then, as he moved onward, he uttered the very word--a small coincidence, this--which I chose for the opening text of this chapter out of the life and the times of our town. “Poor little ant!” said Judge Priest to himself; and then, as an afterthought: “But a dag-gone clever little feller!” V. SERGEANT JIMMY BAGBY'S FEET SERGEANT JIMMY BAGBY sat on the front porch of the First Presbyterian parsonage with an arched framing of green vines above his head. His broad form reposed in a yet broader porch chair--his bare feet, in a foot-tub of cold water. The sergeant wore his reunion regalia, consisting, in the main, of an ancient fatigue jacket with an absurdly high collar and an even more absurdly short and peaked tail. About his generous middle was girthed a venerable leather belt that snaffled at the front with a broad buckle of age-darkened brass and supported an old cartridge box, which perched jauntily upon a fold of the wearer's plump hip like a birdbox on a crotch. Badges of resplendent new satin, striped in alternate bars of red and white, flowed down over his foreshortened bosom, partly obscuring the scraps of rotted and faded braid and the big round ball buttons of dulled brass, which adhered intermittently to the decayed front of his uniform coat. Against a veranda post leaned the sergeant's rusted rifle, the same he had carried to the war and through the war and home again after the war, and now reserved for occasions of high state, such as the present one.