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Updated: June 21, 2025
"Well," said the young man, pausing carefully as if to make a selection from a large and tempting assortment, but really swinging his arms for a long jump into the heart of the matter in his mind, "have you heard that John Barclay has given the town his pipe organ?" "You don't say!" exclaimed McHurdie.
In time Watts McHurdie was talking to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung it. But who cares now what Lincoln said? It was something kind, you may be sure, with a tear and a laugh in it, and the veterans laughed, while their eyes grew moist as they always did when Watts told it.
Barclay sighed deeply once or twice, but McHurdie paid no heed to him. Finally Barclay rose and went over to the bench. "Watts," cried Barclay, "what do you think about it you, your own self, what do you think way down in your heart?"
"The general's gitting kind of a crank and I told him so." "What did he say?" inquired the colonel. "Oh, he just laughed," replied McHurdie; "he just laughed and said if he was a crank I was a poet, and neither was much good at the note window of the bank, and we kind of made it up." And so the winter evening grew old, and one by one the cronies rose and yawned and went their way.
Time, the great costumer, must change their make-up. So we will fold down the curtain. John Barclay, a Gentleman, must be painted yellow with gold. Philemon Ward, a Patriot, must be sprinkled with gray. Martin Culpepper's Large White Plumes must be towsled. Watts McHurdie, a Poet, must be bent a little at the hips and shoulders. Adrian Brownwell, a Gallant, must creak as he struts.
Was it not natural that Watts McHurdie should dread the white light that beats upon the throne of the sheriff's office?
And tears so dimmed his eyes that he could not see the "large white plumes" of chivalry, but the men in the beds cheered as they heard the words the corporal read. With such music as that in his ears, and with his soul stirred by the events about him, Watts McHurdie, lying in the hospital, wrote the song that made him famous.
And when Molly Culpepper dear little Molly Culpepper came after the bride, blushing through her powder, and looking straight at the floor for fear her eyes would wander after her heart and wondering if the people knew it was of no consequence that John Barclay's voice frazzled on "F"; for if the town wished to notice a man at that wedding, there was Watts McHurdie in a paper collar, with a white embroidered bow tie and the first starched shirt the town had ever seen him wear, badly out of step with the procession, while the best man dragged him like an unwilling victim to the altar; and of course there was the best man, and a handsome best man as men go, fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, with a good glow on his immobile face and rather sad eyes that, being in a man's head, went boldly where they chose and where all the women in the town could see them go.
"I wonder," he has written in that portion of the McHurdie Biography devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are bedraggled.
Dolan shook his head at the banker, and then smiled at him good-naturedly as he finished, "Put that in your knapsack, you son of a gun, and chew on it till I see you again." Whereupon he turned a corner and went his way. Carnine laughed rather unnaturally and said to McHurdie, "That's why he's never got on like the other boys. Whiskey's a bad partner."
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