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 boomed in advance, and all of us having made up our minds that he was the biggest prize in the young-man line that was ever likely to come our way.

Then, too, his father and mother were quite the nicest people in Studdingham, and they shed a tone over us all, that papa said enhanced the value of real estate from here to Wiskigee. They were not only rich, for we were all that, more or less—Tonyham and Richville being the slang names for Studdingham outside—but they were tremendously cultured and refined, and good form to us always meant what the Lepperts said and did. The State was a pretty new State, and this idea of being "smart" had only struck us yesterday; and so it was natural for the rest of us to venerate people who had used finger bowls for three generations, and had struggled with butlers and liveried footmen, when people like papa were eating out of tin plates, and pioneering railroads through the alkali.

Of course, I don't blame the Lepperts for