under thirty. In the war they fought and marched and sang and starved and died, and were still young. But when the financial panic of '73 spread its dread and its trouble over the land, youth in Sycamore Ridge was gone; it was manhood that faced these things in the Ridge, and manhood had cares, had given hostages to fortune, and life was serious and hard; and big on the horizon was the fear of failure. General Hendricks swayed in the panic of '73; and the time marked him, took the best of the light from his eye, and put the slightest perceptible hobble on his feet. To Martin Culpepper and Watts McHurdie and Philemon Ward and Jacob Dolan and Oscar Fernald, the panic came in their late thirties and early forties, a flash of lightning that prophesied the coming of the storm and stress of an inexorable fate. The wedding of John Barclay and Jane Mason occurred in September, 1873, two days after he had stood on the high stone steps of the Exchange National Bank and made a speech to the crowd, telling them he was the largest depositor in the bank, and begging them to stop the run. But the run did not stop, and the day before John's wedding the bank did not open; the short crop and the panic in the East were more than Garrison County people could stand. But all the first day of the bank's closing and all the next day John worked among the people, reassuring them. So that it was five o'clock in the evening before he could start to Minneola for his wedding. And such a wedding! One would say that when hard times were staring every one in the face, social forms would be observed most simply. But one would say so without reckoning with Mrs. Lycurgus Mason. As the groom and the bridesmaid and best man rode up from Sycamore Valley, two miles from Minneola, in the early falling dusk that night, the Mason House loomed through the darkness, lighted up like a steamboat. "You'll have to move along, John," said Bob Hendricks; "I think I heard her whistle." On the sidewalk in front of the hotel they met Mrs. Mason in her black silk with a hemstitched linen apron over it. She ushered them into the house, took them to their rooms, and whirled John around on a pivot, it seemed to him, with her interminable directions. His mother, who had come over to Minneola the day before, came to his room and quieted her son, and as he got ready for what he called the "ordeal," he could hear Mrs. Mason swinging doors below stairs, walking on her heels through the house, receiving belated guests from Sycamore Ridge and the country,--for the whole county had been invited,--and he heard her carrying out a dog that had sneaked into the dining room. The groom missed the bride, and as he was tying his necktie,--which reminded him of General Ward by its whiteness,--he wondered why she did not come to him. He did not know that she was a prisoner in her room, while all the young girls in Sycamore Ridge and Minneola were looking for pins and hooking her up and stepping on each other's skirts. For one wedding is like all weddings--whether it be in the Mason House, Minneola, or in Buckingham Palace. And some there are who