The Gentleman from Indiana | Page 7

old Tom. Mr. Martin
always spoke in one key, never altering the pitch of his high, dry,
unctuous drawl, though, when his purpose was more than ordinarily
humorous, his voice assumed a shade of melancholy. Now and then he
meditatively passed his fingers through his gray beard, which followed
the line of his jaw, leaving his upper lip and most of his chin
smooth-shaven. "Did you ever reason out why folks laugh so much at
fat people?" he continued. "No, ma'am. Neither'd anybody else."
"Why is it, Mr. Martin?" asked Miss Selina.
"It's like the Creator's sayin', 'Let there be light.' He says, 'Let ladies be
lovely--'" (Miss Tibbs bowed)--"and 'Let men-folks be honest--
sometimes;' and, 'Let fat people be held up to ridicule till they fall off.'
You can't tell why it is; it was jest ordained that-a-way."
The room was so crowded that the juvenile portion of the assemblage
was ensconced in the windows. Strange to say, the youth of Plattville
were not present under protest, as their fellows of a metropolis would
have been, lectures being well understood by the young of great cities
to have instructive tendencies. The boys came to-night because they
insisted upon coming. It was an event. Some of them had made
sacrifices to come, enduring even the agony (next to hair-cutting in
suffering) of having their ears washed. Conscious of parental eyes, they
fronted the public with boyhood's professional expressionlessness,
though they communicated with each other aside in a cipher-language
of their own, and each group was a hot-bed of furtive gossip and
sarcastic comment. Seated in the windows, they kept out what small
breath of air might otherwise have stolen in to comfort the audience.

Their elders sat patiently dripping with perspiration, most of the
gentlemen undergoing the unusual garniture of stiffly-starched collars,
those who had not cultivated chin beards to obviate such arduous
necessities of pomp and state, hardly bearing up under the added
anxiety of cravats. However, they sat outwardly meek under the yoke;
nearly all of them seeking a quiet solace of tobacco--not that they
smoked; Heaven and the gallantry of Carlow County forbid--nor were
there anywhere visible tokens of the comforting ministrations of
nicotine to violate the eye of etiquette. It is an art of Plattville.
Suddenly there was a hum and a stir and a buzz of whispering in the
room. Two gray old men and two pretty young women passed up the
aisle to the platform. One old man was stalwart and ruddy, with a
cordial eye and a handsome, smooth-shaven, big face. The other was
bent and trembled slightly; his face was very white; he had a fine high
brow, deeply lined, the brow of a scholar, and a grandly flowing white
beard that covered his chest, the beard of a patriarch. One of the young
women was tall and had the rosy cheeks and pleasant eyes of her father,
who preceded her. The other was the strange lady.
A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a
pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs.
Columbus Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring
with a lady in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't
so much she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's
got a kind of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it
more so, somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to
awed admiration, however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in
which she wore a long bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a
large sacrifice merely to make sure one's hat remained in place.
The party took seats a little to the left and rear of the lecturer's table,
and faced the audience. The strange lady chatted gaily with the other
three, apparently as unconscious of the multitude of eyes fixed upon
her as the gazers were innocent of rude intent. There were pretty young
women in Plattville; Minnie Briscoe was the prettiest, and, as the local

glass of fashion reflected, "the stylishest"; but this girl was different,
somehow, in a way the critics were puzzled to discover--different, from
the sparkle of her eyes and the crown of her trim sailor hat, to the edge
of her snowy duck skirt.
Judd Bennett sighed a sigh that was heard in every corner of the room.
As everybody immediately turned to look at him, he got up and went
out.
It had long been a jocose fiction of Mr. Martin, who was a widower of
thirty years' standing, that he and the gifted authoress by his side were
in a state of courtship. Now he bent his rugged head toward her