W.A. Baillie-Grohman.
[8] Pöllnitz was at one time court-jester to Frederick II. of Prussia.
A KENTUCKY DUEL.
TWO PARTS.—I.
CHAPTER I.
It was Aunt Fanny Brown who caused the duel between Captain Mason and Bob Nettles. Aunt Fanny was a high-nosed, aristocratic dowager, of a pretty taste in old china, who put her wig in curl papers and came down to breakfast in the roseate bloom of sixty summers, as if defying perfidy to call it paint. A Washington, New Orleans and Louisville belle, she had received from her husband five hundred acres of blue-grass land and the finest racing stables in that part of the State. To the surprise of all but the knowing, she conducted the business with admirable skill. Many a jockey has walked out of the pink boudoir before a crack race so completely dazed and pumped he did not dare to chaff even a stable-boy. The newsboy's stamp, the dissipated buck's allowance and the leakage of the shop-till all found a way to irrigate Aunt Fanny's fat blue-grass pastures and to keep glossy her satin-coated stock. Not that she soiled her aristocratic hands with such canaille, but she domineered the whole race of Brown, from Vandyke Brown the artist, who painted her stud, to little Yelloe Ochre and Burnett Umber of the stable-yard, poor but proud in the aristocracy of horse.
Aunt Fanny proposed to marry her nephew, Lind Mason—or Lindley Brown Mason, for the remotest relation took a color from the parent stock—to little Sue Brown, daughter of her nephew, Walter Brown, Esq., pork merchant. That was her object in the intriguing that led to the duel. Captain Mason was a man-about-town, with no wish to marry any one in particular, but anxious to raise the wind, to clear off his play debts and attend the match race between Kentucky and Asteroid, then much talked of in racing circles. His object, to use his own picturesque language, was "to put the saddle on the right horse."
Bob Nettles, the other party to the duel, was a sort of general clerk or factotum to Walter Brown. He was épris of little Sudie Brown, his employer's daughter, one of those merry little romps no one thinks of as a grown woman until she surprises society by marrying. Bob was a shy, modest little fellow, with scrubby poll, pug nose, stubby palms, like leather, from base ball, and with a habit of laughing in the nose, called sniggering. He had merry gray eyes and hair of a pure tow color, which I take to be the true plebeian tint, without a sanguine shade in it—just the last man you would think of as engaging in a duel. To tell how these various shades were woven into the carmine flower is the purpose of this sketch.