When he arrives in Nashville, the Legislature--which still holds that he should be engaged upon some public work--elects him to the supreme bench....
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....objectionable Mr. Bean with those Galway saw-handles; and that violent person surrenders unconditionally. In elucidating his sudden tameness and its causes, Mr. Bean subsequently explains to a disgusted admirer:
“I looks at the Jedge, an' I sees shoot in his eye; an' thar warn't shoot in nary 'nother eye in the crowd. So I says to myse'f, says I, 'Old Hoss, it's about time to sing small!' An' I does.”
Notwithstanding those leaden exchanges with the Governor, and the conquest of the discreet Mr. Bean, our jurist finds the bench inexpressibly tedious. At last he resigns from it, as he did from the Senate, and again retreats to private life.
Here his forethoughtful Scotch blood begins to assert itself, and he goes seriously to the making of money. With his one hundred and fifty slaves, he tills his plantation as no plantation on the Cumberland was ever tilled before; and the cotton crops he “makes” are at once the local boast and wonder. He starts an inland shipyard, and builds keel and flat boats for the river commerce with New Orleans. He opens a store, sells everything from gunpowder to quinine, broadcloth by the bolt to salt by the barrel, and takes his pay in the heterogeneous currency of the region, whereof 'coon skins are a smallest subsidiary coin. Also, it is now that he is made Major General of Militia, an honor for which he has privily panted, even as the worn hart panteth for the water brook.
When he is a general, the blooming Rachel cuts and bastes and stitches a gorgeous uniform for her Bayard, in which labor of love she exhausts the Nashville supply of gold braid. Once the new General dons that effulgent uniform, which he does upon the instant it is completed, he offers a spectacle of such brilliancy that the bedazzled public talks facetiously of smoked glass. The new General in no wise resents this jest, being blandly tolerant of a backwoods sense of humor which suggests it. Besides, while the public has its joke, he has the uniform and his commission; and these, he opines, give him vastly the better of the situation.