The Reverend Doctor withdrew, his dander much on furious end, and shortly thereafter the tail of my eye caught a picture of him, as--heads close together--he conferred whisperingly with the Reverend Campbell in a corner of the longroom of the Indian Queen. Since I could not think well, I was careful to think nothing at all of these reverend office seekers. In that latter I dropped into error; they were worthy serious respect. I should have borne it more upon my memory how easy comes destruction, and that he who is incapable of building one brick upon another may yet tear down the most stubborn best masonry of man. I should have kept before me those powers for ill which arm the meanest, and not have forgotten how the veriest vermin of a rat might gnaw the canvas of a Rubens. Remembering those ignoble ones that evening, I foolishly burst into disparagement of the clergy as a class. The General was smart for defence. “Humbug!” quoth the General. “Because you have seen the inside of two, you would have it you know them all. It were as wise if you declared Washington to be a traitor for that Arnold would have sold West Point. Every tub, even a pulpit tub, must stand upon its own bottom.” I have told how dumb and dead lay vilification on the masculine lip, and that no man so much as breathed against the fame of Peg. There was notice on its way to show the women were unquelled. It was the day before the General's inauguration, and he over ears with his address, reading and re-reading it, so as to give the periods a best volume and voice, and endow them with that strutting majesty of utterance his vanity conceived belonged in justice to their merit. He would be by himself while thus rehearsing, for he took shame to vapor up and down, and toss about before me, and swore that my presence, glowering from a chair, would have daunted Cicero. I was glad enough to leave him to himself, it being but poor sport to play at audience for a bad orator; moreover, since the speech was written in my Nashville home and wrangled over, as it proceeded, by the General and myself like dogs over a bone, it would come to me as nothing new. And so the General was left to plod about in his paragraphs much like a cow in a morass, difficult and slow, and sinking to the hocks with every step. I could catch the humming roar of him in my parlor, while he swaggered about his rooms, singing out shrill and high in declamation, and reveling in the figure he would cut. While I was idly turning this weakness of the General to think himself a Patrick Henry, when he had no more of eloquence or music than any midnight owl, a nervous tap came on my panels. I was instantly on my feet; the tap quite drove the General and his rhetoric out of my head. By some instinct, or, mayhap, the tap itself was marked of agitation, I not only recognized it for Peg, but knew she was in grief. I threw open the door.