To him the town was a veritable Troy--full of heroes and demigods, and honourables and persons of nobility and quality.

He used no adjective of praise milder than superb, and on the other hand, Lige Bemis once complained that the least offensive epithet he saw in the _Banner_ tacked after his name for two years was miscreant.

As for John Barclay, he once told General Ward that a man could take five dollars in to Brownwell and come out a statesman, a Croesus or a scholar, as the exigencies of the case demanded, and for ten dollars he could combine the three.
Yet for all that Brownwell ever remained a man apart.

No one thought of calling him "Ade." Sooner would one nickname a gargoyle on a tin cornice.

So the editor of the _Banner_ never came close to the real heart of Sycamore Ridge, and often for months at a time he did not know what the people were thinking.