To Solon Denney the thing came as a deep and divine relief. In the satisfaction induced by it, he penned an obituary of Potts in which he employed the phrase "grim messenger of death" very cleverly indeed. For matters had been going from bad to worse. Murmurs at the demands of Mrs. Potts--likened by Asa Bundy to a daughter of the horse leech--had become passionately loud as our masses toiled expensively up that Potts-defined path of enlightenment. The old sneer at Solon's Boss-ship was again to be observed on every hand, that attitude of doubting ridicule, half-playful, half-contemptuous, which your public man finds more dangerous to his influence than downright hostility would be. But the murmurs were again stilled, and Solon might breathe the peace of a golden age when as yet no Potts, male or female, had come unto us. It was not felt at all that Solon's genius for the discretion of public affairs had availed him in this latest crisis. But the benefit was substantial, none the less, and the columns of the _Argus_ were again buoyant as of yore. It was at this time, I remember, that the _Argus_ first spoke of our town as "a gem at beauty's throat," and, touching the rare enterprise of our citizens, declared that, "If you put a Slocum County man astride a streak of lightning, he'd call for a pair of spurs." For myself, I frankly mourned Potts. For I saw now that he had been truly and finely of that Greek spirit--one accepting gifts from the gods with a joyous young faith in their continuance. I felt that he had divined more of the lesson of Greek art than his one-time love could write down in papers unending. I should not have wished him back in Little Arcady, but I did breathe a prayer that he might in some early Greek elysium be indeed "Potts forever." Might it not be? Had not that other paper on "the message of Emerson" hinted of "compensation" in a jargon that sounded authoritative? And now, as I breakfasted, my attention was invited anew to that fateful, never ending extension of the Potts-made ripples in our little pool. I was threatened with the loss of my domestic stay; again might I be forced to the City Hotel's refectory of a thousand blended smells and spotty table-linen; or even to irksome adventure at the board of the self-lauded Budd. There was selfish wonder in my heart as I listened to Clem, who, now that my second cup of coffee competed with the May blossoms, stood by to tell me of his worldly advancement and the nearing of a time when Miss Caroline should come among us to be independent.