Soldiers' Pay by William Faulkner

In front of the post office the rector was the center of an interested circle when Mr. Saunders saw him. The gathering was representative, embracing the professions with a liberal leavening of those inevitable casuals, cravatless, overalled or unoveralled, who seem to suffer no compulsions whatever, which anything from a captured still to a negro with an epileptic fit or a mouth organ attracts to itself like atoms to a magnet, in any small southern town -- or northern town or western town, probably.

"Yes, yes, quite a surprise," the rector was saying. "I had no intimation of it, none whatever, until a friend with whom he was traveling -- he is not yet fully recovered, you see -- preceded him in order to inform me."