us slowly. The galloping Time-Spirit will run us down eventually, but on
Sundays that are not too hot or too cold one may even to-day count a
handsome total of bank balances represented in our churches, so strong
is habit in a people bred to righteousness.

"You needn't be afraid of me; my bark is worse than my bite; you have to
talk just that way to these black people. They've all worked for me for
years and they don't any of 'em pay the slightest attention to what I
say. But," she concluded, "they'd be a lot worse if I didn't say it."

We reckon time in our capital not from fires or floods or even _anno
urbis conditæ_, but from seemingly minor incidents that have
nevertheless marked new eras and changed the channels of history.
Precedents sustain us in this. A startled goose rousing the sleeping
sentinels on the ramparts; a dull peasant sending an army in the wrong
direction; the mischievous phrase uttered by an inconspicuous minister
of the gospel to a few auditors,--such unconsidered trifles play havoc
with Fame's calculations. And so in our calendar the disbanding of the
volunteer fire department in 1859 looms gloomily above the highest
altitudes of the strenuous sixties; the fact that Billy Sanderson, after
his father's failure in 1873, became a brakeman on the J.M. & I.
Railroad and invested his first month's salary in a silver-mounted
lantern, is more luminous in the retrospect than the panic itself; the
coming of a lady with a lorgnette in 1889 (the scion of one of our
ancient houses married her in Ohio) overshadows even the passing of
Beecher's church; and the three-days' sojourn of Henry James in 1905
shattered all records and established a new orientation for our people.
It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr.
James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the
Propylæum who had always thought Balzac the name of a tooth-powder.