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once more for the courthouse to settle Abner's little case, as the magnate put it.

As they walked back Mr. Jones rehearsed his non-educational theories very earnestly, after the manner of a man priming himself for a forensic effort.

Abner listened with conviction to the fat man's diatribe against the weakening influence of literacy on the mentality, but on his way through the courthouse yard a recollection of the girl with the corn-silk hair and the lake-blue eyes brushed away the great man's homily. Abner searched the grounds for her with his glances, but she was gone. He scrutinized the groups of women who were still on the lawn, but she was not among them. Her absence gave him a queer tightening of the heart. He had a panicky impulse to desert his companions and search for her over the yard, the square, the stores. He felt sure she was just about to start home, and that if he would hurry he could reach her in time for a word. He did not know her name or where she lived; and indeed he did not know what was this last word which he so ardently desired to express.

But naturally he could not desert his companions on the instant. The greater ponderousness of the purposes of age over the whims of youth swept him irrevocably into the courthouse. He entered the door looking back, searching with a kind of inward ache for some glimpse of her, but the walls closed about him, shutting out the lawn and sunshine, shutting in the gloom, and the girl was lost.

Abner had straggled three or four men behind his monitors. He was in a narrow corridor through which struggled the inflow and outflow of the two courtrooms. The two streams of men ground past each other smelling of sweat, horses, leather, whisky, tobacco. An occasional Negro lent his pungent odour to the mélange. Abner tried to catch up with his friends, but a farmer immediately in front of him told him to "take it ca'm."

The reason for this extraordinary packing was that a jury was being empanelled for the Shelton murder trial in the