Colonel Wheeler was the standard-bearer of the flag of independence in the Hissawachee bottom. He had been a Captain in the Revolution; but Revolutionary titles showed a marked tendency to grow during the quarter of a century that followed the close of the war. An ex-officer's neighbors carried him forward with his advancing age; a sort of ideal promotion by brevet gauged the appreciation of military titles as the Revolution passed into history and heroes became scarcer. And emigration always advanced a man several degrees--new neighbors, in their uncertainty about his rank, being prone to give him the benefit of all doubts, and exalt as far as possible the lustre which the new-comer conferred upon the settlement. Thus Captain Wheeler in Maryland was Major Wheeler in Western Pennsylvania, and a full-blown Colonel by the time he had made his second move, into the settlement on Hissawachee Creek. And yet I may be wrong. Perhaps it was not the transplanting that did it. Even had he remained on the "Eastern Shore," he might have passed through a process of canonization as he advanced in life that would have brought him to a colonelcy: other men did. For what is a Colonel but a Captain gone to seed? "Gone to seed" may be considered a slang expression; and, as a conscientious writer, far be it from me to use slang. And I take great credit to myself for avoiding it just now, since nothing could more perfectly describe Wheeler. His hair was grizzling, his shoulders had a chronic shrug, his under lip protruded in an expression of perpetual resistance, and his prominent chin and brow seemed to have been jammed together; the space between was too small. He had an air of defense; his nature was always in a "guard-against-cavalry" attitude. He had entered into the spirit of colonial resistance from childhood; he was born in antagonism to kings and all that are in authority; it was a family tradition that he had been flogged in boyhood for shooting pop-gun wads into the face of a portrait of the reigning monarch.