The Gentleman from Indiana - Page 10/212

The room was so crowded that the juvenile portion of the assemblage was

ensconced in the windows. Strange to say, the youth of Plattville were not

present under protest, as their fellows of a metropolis would have been,

lectures being well understood by the young of great cities to have

instructive tendencies. The boys came to-night because they insisted upon

coming. It was an event. Some of them had made sacrifices to come,

enduring even the agony (next to hair-cutting in suffering) of having

their ears washed. Conscious of parental eyes, they fronted the public

with boyhood's professional expressionlessness, though they communicated

with each other aside in a cipher-language of their own, and each group

was a hot-bed of furtive gossip and sarcastic comment. Seated in the

windows, they kept out what small breath of air might otherwise have

stolen in to comfort the audience.

Their elders sat patiently dripping with perspiration, most of the

gentlemen undergoing the unusual garniture of stiffly-starched collars,

those who had not cultivated chin beards to obviate such arduous

necessities of pomp and state, hardly bearing up under the added anxiety

of cravats. However, they sat outwardly meek under the yoke; nearly all of

them seeking a quiet solace of tobacco--not that they smoked; Heaven and

the gallantry of Carlow County forbid--nor were there anywhere visible

tokens of the comforting ministrations of nicotine to violate the eye of

etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.

Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the room.

Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the aisle to the

platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a cordial eye and a

handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was bent and trembled

slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high brow, deeply lined,

the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white beard that covered his

chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young women was tall and had

the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father, who preceded her. The

other was the strange lady.

A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had

known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a

pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs. Columbus

Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a lady

in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so much

she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got a kind

of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so,

somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration,

however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long

bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to

make sure one's hat remained in place.