With his fan, Judge Priest made an angry sawing motion in the air, as though trying to fend off something disagreeable--a memory, perhaps, or it might have been only a persistent midge. There were plenty of gnats and midges about, for by now--even so soon--the dew was dried. The leaves of the silver poplars were turning their white under sides up like countless frog bellies, and the long, podded pendants of the Injun-cigar trees hung dangling and still. It would be a hot day, sure enough; already the judge felt wilted and worn out. In our town we had our tragedies that endured for years and, in the small-town way, finally became institutions. There was the case of the Burnleys. For thirty-odd years old Major Burnley lived on one side of his house and his wife lived on the other, neither of them ever crossing an imaginary dividing line that ran down the middle of the hall, having for their medium of intercourse all that time a lean, spinster daughter, in whose gray and barren life churchwork and these strange home duties took the place that Nature had intended to be filled by a husband and by babies and grandbabies. There was crazy Saul Vance, in his garb of a fantastic scarecrow, who was forever starting somewhere and never going there--because, as sure as he came to a place where two roads crossed, he could not make up his mind which turn to take. In his youth a girl had jilted him, or a bank had failed on him, or a horse had kicked him in the head--or maybe it was all three of these things that had addled his poor brains. Anyhow he went his pitiable, aimless way for years, taunted daily by small boys who were more cruel than jungle beasts. How he lived nobody knew, but when he died some of the men who as boys had jeered him turned out to be his volunteer pallbearers. There was Mr. H. Jackman--Brother Jackman to all the town--who had been our leading hatter once and rich besides, and in the days of his affluence had given the Baptist church its bells. In his old age, when he was dog-poor, he lived on charity, only it was not known by that word, which is at once the sweetest and bitterest word in our tongue; for Brother Jackman, always primped, always plump and well clad, would go through the market to take his pick of what was there, and to the Richland House bar for his toddies, and to Felsburg Brothers for new garments when his old ones wore shabby--and yet never paid a cent for anything; a kindly conspiracy on the part of the whole town enabling him to maintain his self-respect to the last. Strangers in our town used to take him for a retired banker--that's a fact! And there was old man Stackpole, who had killed his man--had killed him in fair fight and had been acquitted--and yet walked quiet back streets at all hours, a gray, silent shadow, and never slept except with a bright light burning in his room.