Two town hacks and two town drays had coursed down the steep gravelled incline, with the draymen standing erect upon the jouncing springless beds of their drays as was their way. In the matter of maintaining a balance over rough going and around abrupt turns, no chariot racers of old could have taught them anything. Only Sergeant Bagby and I, of all in the immediate vicinity, had remained where we were. The Sergeant was not of what you could exactly call a restless nature, and I, for the moment, must have been overcome by one of those fits of languor which occasionally descend upon the adolescent manling. We two bided where we sat. With a tinkle of her engine bells, a calling out of orders and objurgations in the professionally hoarse, professionally profane voice of her head mate and a racking, asthmatic coughing and sighing and pounding from her exhaust pipes, the _Emily Foster_ had found her berth; and now her late passengers came streaming up the slant of the hill--a lanky timberman or two, a commercial traveller--most patently a commercial traveller--a dressy person who looked as though he might be an advance agent for some amusement enterprise, and a family of movers, burdened with babies and bundles and accompanied by the inevitable hound dog. The commercial traveller and the suspected advance agent patronised the hacks--fare twenty-five cents anywhere inside the corporate limits--but the rest entered into the city afoot and sweating. At the very tail of the procession appeared our circuit judge, he being closely convoyed by his black house-boy, Jeff Poindexter, who packed the master's bulging and ancient valise with one hand and bore a small collection of law books under his other arm. Looking much like a high-land terrapin beneath the shelter of his venerable cotton umbrella, Judge Priest toiled up the hot slant. Observed from above, only his legs were visible for the moment. We knew him, though, by his legs--and also by Jeff and the umbrella. Alongside the eastern wall of the boat-store, nearmost of all buildings to the water-front, he halted in its welcome shadows to blow and to mop his streaming face with a vast square of handkerchief, and, while so engaged, glanced upward and beheld his friend, the Sergeant, beaming down upon him across the whittled banister rail. “Hello, Jimmy!” he called in his high whine. “Hello, yourself!” answered the Sergeant. “Been somewheres or jest traveling round?” “Been somewheres,” vouchsafed the newly returned; “been up at Livingstonport all week, settin' as special judge in place of Judge Given. He's laid up in bed with a tech of summer complaint and I went up to git his docket cleaned up fur him. He's better now, but still puny.” “You got back ag'in in time to light right spang in the middle of a warm spell,” said Sergeant Bagby.