Such is the magic of those large white plumes on Martin Culpepper's
memory. Although John Barclay in that latter day bought a thousand
copies of the Biography and sent them to public libraries all over the
world, he smiled as he read that paragraph referring to Watts
McHurdie's accordion as the "impassioned reeds." When he read it, John
Barclay, grown to a man of fifty-three, sitting at a great mahogany
table, with a tablet of white paper on a green blotting pad before
him, and a gorgeous rose rising from a tall graceful green vase on the
shining table, looked out over a brown wilderness of roofs and
chimneys across a broad river into the hills that were green afar off,
and there, rising out of yesterday, he saw, not the bent little old
man in the harness shop with steel-rimmed spectacles and greasy cap,
whom you may see to-day; but instead, the boy in John Barclay's soul
looked through his eyes, and he saw another Watts McHurdie,--a dapper
little fellow under a wide slouch hat, with a rolling Byronic collar,
and fancy yellow waistcoat of the period, in exceedingly tight
trousers. And then, flash! the picture changed, and Barclay saw Watts
McHurdie under his mushroom hat; Martin Culpepper in his long-tailed
coat; Philemon Ward, tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, slim, and sturdy;
skinny, nervous Lycurgus Mason and husky Gabriel Carnine from
Minneola; Jake Dolan in his shirt sleeves, without adornment of any
kind, except the gold horseshoe pinned on his shirt bosom; Daniel
Frye, the pride of an admiring family, in his best home-made clothes;
Henry Schnitzler, Oscar Fernald, and nearly a hundred other men, to
the boy's eyes so familiar then, now forgotten, and all their faces
blurred in the crowd that stood about the recruiting officer by the
town pump in Sycamore Ridge that summer day of '61. A score or so of
men had passed muster. The line on the post at the wooden awning in
front of Schnitzler's saloon was marked at five feet six. All had
stood by it with their heads above the line. It was Watts McHurdie's