By the river had come Mr.Mahaffy, as unfit as the judge himself, and for the same reason, but sour and bitter with the world, believing always in the possibility of some miracle of regeneration.
Pleasantville's weekly paper, The Genius of Liberty, had dwelt at length upon those distinguished services judge Slocum Price had rendered the nation in war and peace, the judge having graciously furnished an array of facts otherwise difficult of access.

That he was drunk at the time had but added to the splendor of the narrative.

He had placed his ripe wisdom, the talents he had so assiduously cultivated, at the services of his fellow citizens.

He was prepared to represent them in any or all the courts.

But he had remained undisturbed in his condition of preparedness; that erudite brain was unconcerned with any problem beyond financing his thirst at the tavern, where presently ingenuity, though it expressed itself with a silver tongue, failed him, and he realized that the river's spent floods had left him stranded with those other odds and ends of worthless drift that cumbered its sun-scorched mud banks.
Something of all this passed through his mind as he sat there sodden and dreamy, with the one fierce need of his nature quieted for the moment.
He had been stranded before, many times, in those long years during which he had moved steadily toward a diminishing heritage; indeed, nothing that was evil could contain the shock of a new experience.