The sergeant's trousers were turned high up on his shanks; his shoes reposed side by side alongside him on the floor, each with a white yarn sock crammed into and overflowing it. They were new shoes, but excessively dusty and seamed with young wrinkles; and they bore that look of total disrepute which anything new in leather always bears after its first wearing. With his elbows on his thighs and his hands clasped loosely between his knees, Sergeant Bagby bent forward, looking first up the wide street and then down it. Looking this way he saw four old men, three of them dressed in grey and one in black, straggle limpingly across the road; and one of them carried at a droopy angle a flag upon which were white-scrolled letters to tell the world that here was Lyon's Battery, or what might be left of it. Looking that way he saw a group of ten or fifteen grey heads riding through a cross street upon bay horses; and at a glance he knew them for a detachment of Forrest's men, who always came mounted to reunions. Once they rode like centaurs; now, with one or two exceptions, they rode like sacks or racks. It depended on whether, with age, the rider had grown stout or stayed thin. Having looked both ways, the sergeant addressed himself to a sight nearer home. He considered his feet. Viewed through sundry magnifying and misleading inches of water they seemed pinky white; but when, groaning gently, he lifted one foot clear, it showed an angry chafed red upon toe and heel, with large blis-tery patches running across the instep. With a plop he lowered it back into the laving depths. Then, bending over sideways, he picked up one of his shoes, shaking the crumpled sock out of it and peering down its white-lined gullet to read the maker's tag: “Fall River, Mass.,” the sergeant spelled out the stamped letters--“Reliance Shoe Company, Fall River, Mass.” He dropped the shoe and in tones of reluctant admiration addressed empty space: “Well, now, ain't them Yankees the persistent devils! Waitin' forty-odd years fur a chance to cripple me up! But they done it!” Judge Priest turned in at the front gate and came up the yard walk. He was in white linens, severely and comfortably civilian in cut, but with a commandant's badge upon his lapel and a short, bobby, black ostrich feather in the brim of his hat. He advanced slowly, with a slight outward skew to his short, round legs. “Aha!” he said understandingly. “Whut did I tell you, Jimmy Bagby, about tryin' to parade in new shoes? But no, you wouldn't listen--you would be one of these here young dudes!” “Judge,” pleaded the sergeant, “don't rub it in! I'm about ruint--I'm ruint for life with these here feet of mine.” Still at a somewhat stiff and straddle-legged gait, the judge mounted the porch, and after a quick appraisal of all the chairs in sight eased his frame into one that had a cushioned seat. A small involuntary moan escaped him. It was the sergeant's time to gloat.