Mr. Atherton Bell said, it got him. He said something too about “dramatic interest” and “a good betting chance he'll cut up rough”; but no one answered him.
The procession halted outside the deacon's gate. A tendency to giggle on the part of certain girls was sternly suppressed by Angelica Flint. Willy Flint led Joppa cautiously up the board walk and tied him to a pillar of the porch; the company began to retreat irregularly.
Suddenly the deacon, tall and black-coated, stood in the doorway, Mrs. Crockett at his elbow pouring forth exclamations; and the retreat became a flight. Little Nettie Paulus fell behind; she stood in the middle of the road and wailed piteously.
The deacon glared at Joppa and Joppa's grotesque necklace, looked after the fleeing children and saw on the brow of the hill the group of his fellow-townsmen. His forehead flushed and he hesitated. At last he took the wreath awkwardly from Joppa's neck, went into the house and shut the door. The wreath hung in his front window seven months, and fell to pieces about the end of November. Joppa died long after of old age and rheumatism.
THE ELDER' SEAT
Between the mill and the miller's house in Hagar the Mill Stream made a broad pool with a yellow bottom of pebbles and sand. It was sometimes called the Mediterranean. If you wished to cross the Mill Stream, there was a plank below, which was good to jounce on also, though apt to tip you into the water. The pool was shallow, about twenty feet across and as long as you might care to go upstream,—as far as the clay bank, anyway, where Chub Leroy built the city of Alexandria. Jeannette Paulus walked all over Alexandria to catch a frog, and made a mess of it, and did not catch the frog. That is the way of things in this world. Alexandria fell in a moment, with all her palaces and towers. But there were other cities, and commerce was lively on the Mediterranean.
On the nearer side, against the gray, weatherbeaten flank of the miller's house was a painted bench, for convenience of the morning sun and afternoon shade; and I call it now the Elders' Seat, because Captain David Brett and others were often to be seen sitting there in the sun or shade. I remember the minister was there, and Job Mather, the miller, whenever his grist ran low, so that he let his stem millstones cease to grind. These were the three to whom the Elders' Seat seemed to us to belong by right of continuance, because our short memories ran not to the contrary. Captain David was well in his seventies, the miller not far behind, and Mr. Royce already gray-haired. They sat and watched the rise and fall of cities, the growth and decay of commerce, the tumult of conquests, and the wreck of high ambition. They noticed that one thing did not change nor cease, namely, the ripple of the stream; just as if, in history, there really were a voice distinguishable that went murmuring forever.
After the fall of Alexandria Damascus was built, but inland, so that it had to be reached by caravan; and Moses Durfey laid the foundations of Byzantium where the pool narrowed into rushing water, and Venice was planted low in a marshy place hard by the seven hills of Rome. But you must know that Bobby Bell built the city of Rome absurdly, and filled it with pot-holes to keep frogs in and floating black bugs, so that it was impossible to hold it against the Carthaginians. There were wars in those days. These were the main marts of trade, but there were quays and fortresses elsewhere; and it should be told sometime how the Barbary pirates came down. Rome was in a bad way, for Bobby had one aquarium in the Campus Martius, and another where the Forum should have been. There was nothing flourishing but the aqueducts.