part over the bar, and the balance in other popular ways. He had a face that no one could read, and bluffed as well with a pair of treys as with four aces. But he used to say that such a bluff was to be used rarely, and only on important occasions.

Now and then some opposition to him would arise and a small headway would be made against him. As, for instance, after he advised Squire Jefford's plump and comely daughter, Mary, not to marry Dick Creel, because Dick was too dissipated. There were some who said that the Sheriff had designs himself on Sam Jefford's buxom, black-eyed daughter, while others held that he was afraid of young Dick, who was an amiable and popular young fellow, and that he did not want him to get too much influence in the lower end of the county. However it was, Mary Jefford not only married her young lover, but sobered him, and as she was young, pretty, and ambitious, and worshipped her husband, Dick Creel at the next election, to use the vernacular, "made cornsideruble show runnin' ag'inst the Sheriff, and give him cornsideruble trouble." Still, Thompson was elected overwhelmingly, and few people believed Mary Creel's charge that the Sheriff had got Dick drunk on purpose to beat him. Thompson said, "Did n't anybody have to git Dick drunk—the work was t'other way."

II

The session of the Circuit Court in the "——— year of the Commonwealth," as the writs ran, and "in the sixteenth year of Aleck Thompson's Sheriffalty," as that official used to say, was more than usually important. The noted case of "Dolittle et al. vs. Dolittle's Executrix" was tried at the autumn term of the court, and caused considerable excitement in the county; for, in addition to the amount of property and the nice questions of law which were involved, the two sides had been