Back Home by Irvin S. Cobb

YOU might call it a tragedy -- this thing that came to pass down in our country here a few years back. For that was exactly what it was -- a tragedy, and in its way a big one. Yet at the time nobody thought of calling it by any name at all. It was just one of those shifts that are inevitably bound to occur in the local politics of a county or a district; and when it did come, and was through and over with, most people accepted it as a matter of course.

There were some, however, it left jarred and dazed and bewildered -- yes, and helpless too; men too old to readjust their altered fortunes to their altered conditions even if they had the spirit to try, which they hadn't. Take old Major J. Q. A. Pickett now. Attaching himself firmly to a certain spot at the far end of Sherrill's bar, with one leg hooked up over the brass bar-rail -- a leg providentially foreshortened by a Minie ball at Shiloh, as if for that very purpose -- the major expeditiously drank himself to death in a little less than four years, which was an exceedingly short time for the job, seeing he had always been a most hale and hearty old person, though grown a bit gnarly and skewed with the coming on of age. The major had been county clerk ever since Reconstruction; he was a gentleman and a scholar and could quote Latin and Sir Walter Scott's poetry by the running yard. Toward the last he quoted them with hiccups and a stutter.