It was twenty seven minutes past two o'clock yesterday afternoon. The
chaste white mystery of Shigo Mountain was already taking on a faint,
almost imperceptible, hint of pink, like the warm cheek of a girl who
hears a voice and anticipates a blush. Yet the rays of the afternoon sun
rested with undiminished radiance on the empty pork-barrel in front of
McMullin's shebang. A small and vagrant infant, whose associations with
empty barrels were doubtless hitherto connected solely with dreams of
saccharine dissipation, approached the bunghole with precocious caution,
and retired with celerity and a certain acquisition of experience. An
unattached goat, a martyr to the radical theory of personal
investigation, followed in the footsteps of infantile humanity, retired
with even greater promptitude, and was fain to stay its stomach on a
presumably empty rend-rock can, afterward going into seclusion behind
McMullin's horse-shed, before the diuretic effect of tin flavored with
blasting-powder could be observed by the attentive eye of science.

Mr. Kilburn emerged from the hostlery without Mr. McMullin. Mr. Kilburn,
as we have before stated at his own request, is a gentleman of imposing
presence. It is well that we made this statement when we did, for it is
hard to judge of the imposing quality in a gentleman's presence when
that gentleman is suspended from the arm of another gentleman by the
collar of the first gentleman's coat. The gentleman in the rear of Mr.
Kilburn was Mr. William Beauvoir, a young Englishman in a check suit.
Mr. Beauvoir is not avowedly a man of imposing presence; he wears a seal
ring, and he is generally a scion of an effete oligarchy, but he has,
since his introduction into this community, behaved himself, to use the
adjectivial adverb of Mr. McMullin, _white_, and he has a very
remarkable biceps. These qualities may hereafter enhance his popularity
in New Centreville.