But," she concluded, "they'd be a lot worse if I didn't say it." We reckon time in our capital not from fires or floods or even _anno urbis conditae_, but from seemingly minor incidents that have nevertheless marked new eras and changed the channels of history.
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.
Where stood the college the Board of Trade has lately planted itself, frowning down upon Christ Church, whose admirable Gothic spire chimed for Union victories in the sixties (there's a story about that, too!) and still pleads with the ungodly on those days of the week appointed by the Book of Common Prayer for offices to be said or sung.

Mrs.Jackson Owen was at this time sixty years old, and she had been a widow for thirty years.