From pioneer days on until this Thomas Albritton became heir to the farm and head of the family, the Albrittons had been a forehanded breed--people with a name for thrift. In fact, I had it that night from the old Judge that, for a good many years after he grew up, this Thomas Albritton enjoyed his due share of affluence. He raised as good a grade of tobacco and as many bushels of corn to the acre as anybody in the Massac Bottoms raised; and, so far as ready money went, he was better off than most of his neighbours. Perhaps, though, he was not so provident as his sire had been; or perhaps, in a financial way, he had in his latter years more than his share of bad luck. Anyhow, after a while he began to go downhill financially, which is another way of saying he got into debt. Piece by piece he sold off strips of the fertile creek lands his father had cleared. There came a day when he owned only the house, standing in its grove of honey locusts, and the twenty acres surrounding it; and the title to those remaining possessions was lapped and overlapped by mortgages. It is the rule of this merry little planet of ours that some must go up while others go down. Otherwise there would be no room at the top for those who climb. Mr. Herman Felsburg was one who steadily went up. When first I knew him he was rated among the wealthy men of our town. By local standards of those days he was rich--very rich. To me, then, it seemed that always he must have been rich. But here Judge Priest undeceived me. When Mr. Felsburg, after four years of honourable service as a private soldier in the army of the late Southern Confederacy, came back with the straggling handful that was left of Company B to the place where he had enlisted, he owned of this world's goods just the rags he stood in, plus a canny brain, a provident and saving instinct, and a natural aptitude for barter and trade. Somewhere, somehow, he scraped together a meagre capital of a few dollars, and with this he opened a tiny cheap-John shop down on Market Square, where he sold gimcracks to darkies and poor whites. He prospered--it was inevitable that he should prosper. He took unto himself a wife of his own people; and between periods of bearing him children she helped him to save. He brought his younger brother, Ike, over from the old country and made Ike a full partner with him in his growing business. Long before those of my own generation were born the little store down on Market Square was a reminiscence. Two blocks uptown, on the busiest corner in town, stood Felsburg Brothers' Oak Hall Clothing Emporium, then, as now, the largest and the most enterprising merchandising establishment in our end of the state. If you could not find it at Felsburg Brothers' you simply could not find it anywhere--that was all. It was more than a store; it was an institution, like the courthouse and the county-fair grounds.