Precedents sustain us in this. A startled goose rousing the sleeping
sentinels on the ramparts; a dull peasant sending an army in the wrong
direction; the mischievous phrase uttered by an inconspicuous minister
of the gospel to a few auditors,--such unconsidered trifles play havoc
with Fame's calculations. And so in our calendar the disbanding of the
volunteer fire department in 1859 looms gloomily above the highest
altitudes of the strenuous sixties; the fact that Billy Sanderson, after
his father's failure in 1873, became a brakeman on the J.M. & I.
Railroad and invested his first month's salary in a silver-mounted
lantern, is more luminous in the retrospect than the panic itself; the
coming of a lady with a lorgnette in 1889 (the scion of one of our
ancient houses married her in Ohio) overshadows even the passing of
Beecher's church; and the three-days' sojourn of Henry James in 1905
shattered all records and established a new orientation for our people.
It was Sally Owen who said, when certain citizens declared that Mr.
James was inaudible, that many heard him perfectly that night in the
Propylaeum who had always thought Balzac the name of a tooth-powder.
Mrs. Owen's family, the Singletons, had crossed the Ohio into Hoosier
territory along in the fifties, in time for Sally to have been a
student--not the demurest from all accounts--at Indiana Female College.
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