University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.
“CHARLEY GAY.”

ZHEN Miss Kathreine Lightwait was yet in her
teens she had a lover; one Charles Parsons Gayfeather,
a student, at the time, in the university
near the residence of her father. He was a
stranger in the neighborhood — a handsome,
light-hearted, good-humored fellow, that everybody liked
but few persons trusted much. He was known in his college
as Charley Gay, and if an old horse were to be got into
chapel, or a trap to be set for the legs of some innocent professor,
Charley Gay was on hand.

He had a great knack of committing his lessons, so that
he could keep up with his class and still devote a good portion
of his time to mischief. He had pretty hands, set off
with a variety of costly rings; hair colored like a ripe acorn,
and as bright and shining as that, and eyes that all the girls
thought marvels of depth and tenderness. He dressed well,
though rather jauntily, perhaps, and was always to be seen
at church, because the girls were there, most likely, and at
all gatherings of every kind that took place.

“He was open-hearted as well as open-eyed, and everybody
came to know him, and to like him as before said, with
that sort of easy liking that stops short of trusting. Among
the young ladies there were many perhaps who might have
trusted, but we have only to do with the one who did trust.

Katherine Lightwait was almost as gay and careless as he
in those times, and somehow her heart-strings got into his
beautiful white hands, and stayed there, in despite of all
efforts of father and mother to pull them thence.

“You must not see the young fellow, Kate,” the bishop
had said; “not alone, certainly; I don't like him — that is,
I don't believe in him; and it is much wiser and better that
you should do as I wish, and be guided by your mother and
me in this thing; promise me, my dear, and Heaven help
you to keep your promise sacred!”

And Katherine fell pouting, at first, and then to pleading,
and in the end to tears: but the father could not relent,
conscientiously, and therefore would not relent at all; and
Katherine, seeing how matters stood, dried her eyes and
gave the required promise, secretly resolved that she would
see “Charley” when and where she could.

“Our Kate is a good girl, Bethy,” the bishop said, kissing
the pale cheek of his wife, “and we must give her more
head since we deny her her heart.”

So Katherine had her head and went about where she
would, seeing her Charley and confiding to him all her troubles
under the influence of the girlish delusion that he could
make everything right.

And for the time being, when he kissed her and called her
his pretty Kate, and his poor Kate, and his own Kate, everything
was right.

He could not study his books, he said, and he didn't care
whether he knew his lessons or not; he didn't care for the
college fellows any more; he didn't care for anything in the
world but her! “O Kate, if you cared half as much for
me!”

At first they were very cautious in choosing the time and
place of their interviews, but success gradually emboldened
them; and what seemed at first a hazardous thing began to
seem in its frequent repetitions but a small thing, and from
the grape-vine bower in Cousin Martha's garden, or the violet
bank under the beech tree, Charley would sometimes
walk with Kate almost to the very gate of home. How
could she refuse him when it drove him to despair to lose
her out of his sight!

If she would only run away with him and escape the cruel
oppression in which she was forced to live! “Dear, dear

Kate, if you only would, you should never have your sweet
will crossed again, never! I can never love but you, my
Kate, and your image must follow me to the grave!”

One summer night when Katherine was in her night-dress,
and just about going to bed, she heard a little noise at her
window, like the flutter of a bird's wing, and turning hastily
round, there, sure enough, was something white as snow
coming through the open sash. The next moment she was
standing by the lamp reading, all of a tremble; it was a
love-letter that had been tossed in at the window.

When Katherine had read the writing she would not forbear
peeping out, and there, crouching under the ivy-vine
that clambered against the wall up to the very gable, who
should she see but Charley!

“Do not bid me go away, sweet Kate,” he whispered up
to her; “it is better to lie here and die here, than to live
anywhere else!”

Then she kissed her hand to him: “O Charley, Charley,
you must go! What if you should be found there? for
mercy's sake, for your own dear sake, rise and go!” But
he would not go for mercy's sake nor for his own sake; if
it were for her sake, why then he would go.

“For my sake, then, dear Charley!” And she reached
her arms down low as though she would fain touch his head
and bless him.

“Some token, then, my Kate; some precious little token
of your love? A tress from that dear head; a flower; the
smallest leaf of a flower; anything that you have touched
and blessed!”

“But, Charley, I have no flower, and I cannot tear for
you a tress of my hair; go with just my love — you have
all that!”

“Cruel Kate; I cannot, will not go — not without some
precious sign of your love!”

Then she tore the lace from her sleeve and threw it down
to him, and with a thousand whispered thanks and blessings
he stole away.

After this there were other interviews at the chamber window,
continued longer and full of all the promises and protestations
that can be imagined, from midsummer till autumn,
and from autumn till early winter they had gone on; and at
last one night, when a quarterly meeting kept the good

bishop and his wife late from home, Charley stayed to a
very imprudent hour.

Katherine might have seen him at the garden gate, or in
the parlor, but she had said to her father, “I will not go
out of my chamber while you are gone;” and so true was
she in her falsehood, that she would not break her promise,
and the interview was held in the accustomed way. And
yet not quite in the accustomed way.

It was cloudy upon this night, and about nine o'clock the
snow-flakes began to slide slantwise down the air, and the
wind to make moans that were pitiful about the corners of
the old house.

“Dear Kate, I am dying of cold,” says Charley, “and
your bright, warm chamber so near; isn't it cruel?”

“Ah, cruel indeed! What can I do for you; throw you
down my shawl?”

Then he said, “He would climb to the window, and she
should put her arms about him and that would make him so
warm, and O so happy, beside!”

In vain Katherine said no, this could not be; her heart
was all on his side as against her words; this he knew, his
arms were strong, his will stronger, the vine against the
wall served as a sort of ladder, and while she was saying,
“No, Charley, this must not be,” he was there, panting on
the window seat, and her arms were about him and her face
close to his.

The snow wrapt them all round in its mantle, but they did
not feel it, and the hours went by like minutes, and the midnight
drew near. At last Katherine said he must go, she
would not grant another minute; she was doing so wrong,
so very wrong, and it was so late. Then Charley said it
was not late, and she was doing no wrong, and if she loved
him she would never speak such words; for if she thought
them she would hush them up and please him in spite of
them.

Then they had a little quarrel — a very tender, loving quarrel
— but one that required to be made up, nevertheless,
and all this required time; and directly the click of the
gate-latch surprised them and set their hearts beating with
new sensations. It was the bishop coming home with his
wife and much company, to boot.

“What is this?” he cries, swinging his lantern in wide circles

about. “Some thief, perhaps, let us see!” And
straight he began to follow the foot-prints which the slowly-falling
snow had not yet obliterated. Nearer, clearer came
the voices; the light was gleaming round the corner of the
house.

“Now, the Lord have mercy! what shall we do?” cries
Katherine, in an agony of distress.

“This, my sweet Kate, and all shall yet be safe!” and he
leaped into the chamber, leaving all the ivy-vine shaking
from top to bottom, and the snow tumbling from it in thick
showers. There was a flutter of garments still at the window
when the bishop lifted his eyes. “Good wife,” he said,
in a still, slow voice, such as he only used when deeply
moved, “our Kate must be looked after — God knoweth
what may have happened — we are all liable to temptation,
and she among the rest; take with you some one or two of
our sisters here, and go at once to her chamber. She must
not be spared; if she have merited the rod, the rod must
fall, though it were on her naked soul, and though she were
twice my child. Go at once, dear Bethy, and the Lord have
mercy, and make my fears to be without foundation.”

From this command there was no appeal, and the true
wife and tender, trembling mother obeyed without a word.

Alas for Katherine! poor, frightened child, what could
she do? The father beneath the open window, the mother
on the stair — she did the worst that was possible — instinct
taught her to hide, to screen herself and her lover somewhere;
and where of all things should it be but within the
curtains of the bed! So there they were, sitting side by
side, and locked within each other's arms from very fright.

Of course Katherine was disgraced beyond all hope; the
father would not have shielded her if he could, and the mother
dare not. The whole church and the whole neighborhood
were soon aware of the scandal; the bishop made public
acknowledgment of his shameful humiliation in his Sunday
morning sermon, and the grief-stricken mother went out of the
church with her head bowed low, so low that it could never
lift itself up, as it had done, any more. From that sorrowful
day she drooped as a flower from which the dew and the light
are withdrawn, and when the snows of another winter fell,
her tender eyes were done with tears.

Charles Parsons Gayfeather was expelled from college in

disgrace, and left the neighborhood for the neighborhood's
good, as the people said, leaving with Katherine's cousin
Martha a letter for Katherine, in which he called her, as of
old, his sweet Kate, and vowed himself by all that was good
on earth and glorious in heaven, to eternal fidelity. “When
I am rich, as I shall be sometime, my sweet Kate,” he said,
“I shall come back and carry you off in spite of them all;
it may be twenty years hence, but I shall come. Wait in
patience and in hope, sweet Kate, as I shall.”

And while Katherine carried this letter in her bosom,
reading it over and over and finding in it a world of precious
consolation long after she knew it by heart, still deriving
new meanings and new solace from the old, old story, the
good bishop one day said to his wife, “Bethy darling, we
must try to save our remaining child, in spite of our great
enemy, the devil.” So what should they resolve upon in
the end, but to make a preacher of John Hamlyn.

“John!” calls the bishop, “John Hamlyn Lightwait,
come here, instantly!”

The lad thus summoned, was at the moment engaged in
the pleasing occupation of flying his kite, and as it happened,
his kite had gone very high, to the admiration of a dozen
lookers-on as well as of himself, and perhaps no leader ever
hauled down his colors with a keener sense of suffering, than
he that high-soaring kite.

There was no appeal, that he knew very well, and as
he wound in the long line, hand over hand, and the kite
sidled down, the magnificent tail fluttering and flowing behind,
the moisture gathered to drops in his eyes, and
trembled along his cheeks in spite of all he could do.

“Johnny Lightwait's a-cryin'!” shouted a rough lad
whose clothes were not so fine as John's, and whose kite
would not fly so high. “He's a-cryin' like a baby; good,
good!”

There was a shout of derision among those who were looking
on, but from the group one little girl stept forth, her
round face flushed at the indignity, and putting her two
arms, tanned brown as leather, about his neck, kissed him
right before them all.

“Never mind, Johnny,” she says; “I like you whether
your kite is down or up;” and with the corner of her blue
“bib” apron, she wiped the tears from his face. She was

the child of poor parents, evidently; her bare feet, scratched
with briers, her torn dress, and the soiled tangles of her hair,
all bespoke that, but the sweetness of her expression, now
that her sympathy was aroused, was something wonderful.
If a rose-bud should burst into open flower in an instant, it
would not be more strangely sudden than the transformation
of her countenance when the hoot against her favorite was
raised; and as she dropt her brown arms from his neck and
stood trembling and dilating before him, she was like a
rose that has been the sport of some tempest; red, ruffled,
but sweet as she could be, withal.

Her eyes were like a dove's in their soft tenderness, and
her complexion would have been white as milk but for the
tan, as might be seen by the shoulder drawn up out of the
dress above where it was used to be tied, showing a new
moon of pure pearl under the dusky brown.

“O, I don't mind!” says John; he did not say, “so long
as you care for me;” but he looked it, and with his kite in
his arm he went into the house, she following him with her
dove's eyes.

“Your mother and I have concluded to make a preacher
of you, my son,” says the bishop; and denuding the kite of
its very magnificent tail, with a light dash of his hand, he
tossed it into the fire.

“O father! father!” cries John; and then he fell kicking
and screaming and was led away by the ear, and locked
fast in a closet.

After three hours of solitary confinement, he was informed
by the bishop, speaking through the key-hole, that if he
could behave himself, having no more to do with kites and
little beggar girls, he might come out!” to which he replied
only by sullen sobs, and kicks against the door. Three
hours more produced in some sort the desired effect, and he
was let out and sent to bed supperless, for his obstinacy,
where he told his sister confidentially that he would fly a
kite whenever he had a mind, and play with whatever little
girl he fancied, into the bargain!

Thus the work of making a preacher of the bishop's son
began, and the reader knows already how it ended.

Poor Katherine! Months and months she kept her lover's
letter as the most precious of her treasures, clutching it in
all her trouble as though it were the only anchor of her hope.

At last, one day when she saw past all doubt that shadow
we so much fear, sitting at the hearth-side, and making all
her mother's face to be as the face of one who is done with
the things of this world, she went away by herself, and taking
the letter from her bosom, locked it out of her sight.

There came another day, before long, when she took the
letter from the drawer, all sweet with the scent of the rose-leaves
that had been about it, and tearing it to little fragments,
gave it to the winds to carry whithersoever they
would.

Charley, her own Charley, pledged to be faithful unto
death, was married — married to a widow ten years his senior,
and possessed of five children and twenty-five thousand
dollars!

And this, then, was the way he got rich and the way he
did not come back to carry off his sweet Kate!

And what should Katherine do now for consolation but
turn to the church? There was nothing else to do. She
had lost all faith in man, and was driven, as it were, to God.
Not with any childlike confidence and hope, but as a last
desperate refuge. Her heart did not break nor bend under
its affliction, but it slowly withered and hardened, like a
piece of sound timber from which the sap has been all withdrawn.

She stripped off the rings from her fingers, and the furbelows
and flowers from her bonnets — pinned her shawl with
a sort of sad severity, combed her long, bright hair in the
most unbecoming of styles, and betook herself straight to the
church. I said wrongly, she went to God, she only went to
the church; she did not get religion when she renounced
the world, and what had been born in her died out with her
love, so that she was left a creature of mere forms and ceremonies
with dry blood about her heart, and a dry creed
about her soul.

Twenty years she had lived in this state, doing what she
considered to be her duty, in that hard way that begets
neither grace in one's self, nor gratitude in others; that is,
in fact, nothing better than the sowing of withered seed
among rocks, where there is no possibility of quickening in
the first place, and no possibility of taking root if there were
quickening. She seemed constantly to avenge herself on
herself for the burden she had assumed, and not only so, but

also upon her friends, if friends she could be said to have,
who never gave any part of herself with her service. All
men were alike to her, and all women, and both sexes the
same as one, or as neither. Whether it was a child, an old
man, a young man, or a maid with whom she associated, she
remained the same — uninfluenced, untouched, all apart
and separate. She had no need, apparently, that any human
being could fill; she never required any service that a servant
could not as well render as a friend, and never by look
or sign asked sympathy. She dressed with severe simplicity,
ruled her horse and her brother with the authority of
law, and not with the right of gentleness and love; went
abroad only for charitable purposes, and to church, and
commanded from her neighbors a sort of fearful respect,
rather than cheerful admiration.

She ruled her brother, John Hamlyn, not only with the
authority of law, but with a rod of iron as well; a rod that
did not come down upon his bare shoulders, to be sure, but
was always felt to be imminent, so that he lived all his days
in a state of apprehension, as one might with a naked sword
swinging over his pathway, this way and that. She was
as a curb in his mouth, a check-rein upon his neck, and a
general restraint upon all his actions; only in thought was
he free, except it were out of her sight.

This was one reason, perhaps, why he was so prone to
overstep the common and accepted boundaries; they were
made too broad, too high, too offensively conspicuous.
She was older than he by a number of years, and while he
was yet in his boyhood and youth, there was some show of
right in this authority, but when he came to man's estate
she did not in the least relax. She had splinted up the
weak side of her own nature and bore herself as loftily as if
she had never known a weakness.

Twenty years she had been living this life of religious
mechanism, when a little incident occurred one day that
knocked her theories to “everlasting smash,” and left her
on the basis of our common nature and common humanity.

It was about ten days, perhaps, subsequent to the visit
(which was no visit at all) of John Hamlyn to Samuel, that
the brother and sister sat towards the close of the day on
the piazza fronting the main road. The great show had come
to town, the big tent was up on the village common, and

half the day wagon loads of tigers, leopards, curious birds,
and hideous snakes had been stringing along the highway.
The camels with their high backs, and the elephants under
canvas covers, with such big round holes for their eyes,
had gone by, and all about the parsonage, at least, was become
quiet again.

“Of course you will not countenance this vulgar show of
monkey tricks and pony races,” says Katherine, glancing
from the great white tent toward her brother.

“And suppose I should?” says John, making letters
with the point of his forefinger on the baluster.

“Suppose you should? Why John, I can't suppose that,
knowing you as I do.”

“And what if it should turn out that you do not know me
quite so well as you think? What if I should go to the
show and take the prettiest girl the village can muster? I
say what then, Kate? Who would be any the worse for it?”

“Mustering a pretty girl, to be sure! how degenerate
you are! But as for knowing you, I am not quite sure I
do know you, after that disgraceful affair the other day. I
wonder at you, John Hamlyn!” She always called his
name in full when she took him to task with unusual severity.
He understood very well that she alluded to his visit
to Samuel, but more especially with reference to Margaret.

He said, therefore, in reply: “Visit the widow and the
fatherless in their afflictions,” writing all the while on the
baluster to help him out, even though he answered her from
Scripture.

“The devil can quote Scripture,” says Katherine; and
then she says, “I am more and more convinced that I do
not know you, John Hamlyn!”

“Are you quite sure you know yourself, my good sister?”

“Perfectly sure, sir!”

And then she said she was sure of another thing, and that
was that little Margaret Fairfax should never rule her, nor
her house, nor her brother's house, — not if she could prevent
it! She would rather see him dead before her than
come to such a pass!

“Well, Kate, I have not climbed to her chamber-window,
and I don't mean to; what I have done I have done openly
and above board, and I have not seen her since the affair
you are pleased to call disgraceful, if it will do you any good
to know it.”

He had never mentioned the old lover to his sister till
now, even by remote insinuation; he had never, indeed,
addressed her with so much spirit, in all his life, and when
he had done he almost trembled at his own audacity, and
wrote very hard upon the baluster, looking down.

There are women who never fully appreciate kindness and
forbearance, — women to whom, indeed, a little restraint is
wholesome, — who constantly impinge more and more upon
liberty, until they come to regard concession as their right,
and their own wills as supreme. Such a woman was Katherine
Lightwait; if her father had lived to keep a strong hand
upon her, she would have been a wiser and a worthier
woman. Her brother she had stood in no fear of till now,
when she instantly assumed a more pacific attitude, quietly
turning the conversation to other channels. But somehow
it got back again to the show, by and by.

“You really have no serious intentions of going there?”
said Katherine; “think how it would look!”

“That is a common mistake, sister; we think too much
how things look, and too little what things be; now as to
this show, there is one light in which it may be really regarded
as a benefaction; the weary, worn-out wives and
daughters of farmers, who see no holiday from year's end to
year's end, find there recreation that is pleasant and not
unprofitable. They take a lesson in natural history while at
the same time they take pleasure; nor is it for us to despise
any of the works of God, as you seem to do. He made the
beast of the field, and the bird of the air, and all the scaly
tribes of the waters, and when He had made them He pronounced
them good. So, Kate, I am inclined to go to the
show, after all, shake hands with my neighbors, and wonder
at the monkeys and the ponies, and Kate, do you know I
would like to ride the elephant!”

“John Hamlyn!” Then Katherine repressed herself
and said the more was the pity, and she was sorry for it.

“And so, dear Kate, am I, but you see when I was a boy,
when it was my time to ride an elephant, that natural desire
was repressed and crushed down within me, not crushed out,
and the consequence is, I cannot this day see an elephant
without an almost insane longing to be boosted up and ride.”

“Boosted! What a shocking word! Will you never
leave off such things, John?”

“You see, Kate, the boost period did not have its needful
and rightful expression, and therefore I have never really
grown out of it, as I should if I had been boosted in the
boost season!”

He shook back his loose locks and laughed heartily at the
droll light in which the veritable truth had presented itself
to his mind, but Katherine only sighed and looked distressed.
At last she said, “You do not seem to understand, John,
that your light remarks reflect upon the discipline of our
good father, the bishop!”

“Yes I do, Kate, understand it fully, but I find it possible
for even a bishop, though he were my father, to have
been mistaken. He ruled us with the same iron hand,
whereas only you, pardon me, required it, and you, Kate,
pardon me again, have made the same mistake after him.
You have governed me completely, but you have not changed
my nature one whit. Now, would it not have been better
to have taken the original wild stock and to have engrafted
upon it something finer and higher, rather than to have
pruned me off thus, and to leave me but an artificial wilding
after all. O Kate, I wish you, or any one, had ever understood
me! I am in a false position every way, too bad or
too good, and sometimes I don't know which; and to come
to the worst, Kate, I am half in love with this little Margaret
you so look down on.”

“Half in love with what, pray? She has neither mind,
manners, nor education, and is in no way fitted to be your
mate, with her rustic bringing up, her low stature, and doll-baby
face! I am surprised, mortified, and ashamed; but
let us say no more about it; marriage with her is not to be
thought of.”

“You ask what I am in love with?” said John, a good
deal taken down in spite of himself; “I am in love just as I
am with a rose, or with any other sweet and exquisite thing.”

“Yes, and would wear the sweetness out and toss her
away just as soon as you would the flower.”

“Will you just tell me what you were in love with, when
you were in love?”

“That was in my salad days, and I beg you will never
speak of it again; if I were to fall in love now, I should
know what it was with, and you are a man, with sense and
judgment, and in the full maturity of all your powers.”

“I don't see that all that helps me much.”

“Nor I, to my sorrow; but promise me, at least, that
you will not take this girl to the show, and let us say no
more about it; the whole subject is abhorrent to me.”

Then he gave the promise, and they fell into uncomfortable
silence; the one feeling outraged, and the other that he
was cut off from human help and sympathy, and that he was
not strong enough to stand alone. Many a time before the
brother had sought to open his heart to his sister, though he
had never braved it out so courageously, but she had always
as now pressed it back upon itself and into itself with the
same iron hand. He said at last, perhaps to say something,
“Shall you go with me to the Bible class this evening,
Kate?”

“Certainly,” she replied; “why should you ask so foolish
a question?” He made no answer but wrote again on
the baluster.

The day was ended now and the long shadows joined
into one soft shadow that spread over all the landscape.
The sun, large and dim, was going down behind a bank of
rosy mist, and all the air was filled with that gentle murmur
that is soothing as a lullaby. It failed of its usual effect
upon the brother and sister, and each felt it to be a relief
when the evening stage coach came rattling over the neighboring
hill. The eyes of both were fixed upon it as the
four grays labored up the ascent, stretching their broad
flanks, and nodding their glossy necks as they dragged the
great lumbering coach behind them. There was but one
passenger outside; a man of middle age, dressed neatly but
rather finely for a traveller. He held his hat in his hand,
and seemed to be looking about him with a wide-awake interest
and keen sense of enjoyment.

“One of the managing showmen, I judge,” says John
Lightwait, glancing from the stranger to his sister.

“Why should you so judge?” says Katherine sharply;
“he looked to me like anything but a showman!” She
averted her face as she said this and directly rose and went
into the house.

“At the tea-table she seemed strangely absent-minded,
breaking the bread into little crumbs on her plate, and saying
nothing, and when it was time for the class, she told
her brother she believed he would have to excuse her for

that evening — she had a headache and preferred to be
alone.

Meantime, the outside passenger of the evening coach was
exciting a good deal of attention in the village; he had taken
the best room in the Eagle Hotel, called for the best the
house afforded, feeing the servants with unusual liberality,
and setting things about him in order, as though with the
intention of remaining some time. After supper, with which
he drank wine instead of tea, and which he appeared to relish
with the keenest zest, he strolled about the village, and in
the course of an hour had made the acquaintance of half a
dozen of the foremost town's-people, was hand-in-glove
with the proprietors of the show, and had been admitted to
a sight of the birds and beasts gratuitously.

“That is the parsonage yonder?” he said, as he sat
astride a new-made barrel at the door of the cooper-shop,
his legs deeply buried in shavings, chopping carelessly with
the adze with one hand, and playing with a handsome beard,
that was just touched with gray, with the other.

“You're a werry good guesser,” says the cooper, as he
slipped the apron of bed-ticking over his head — “it is the
preacher's house, and a man of wersatile talents he is too.”

“Ah, indeed: hope I shall have the pleasure of hearing
him; and, by the way, what's his name?”

Then, with a long preface that was no way to the point,
the cooper told his name.

“Humph!” says the stranger, setting the adze deep in
the stick he was driving at, “Lightwait, Lightwait! it can't
be little Bishop John, as his mother used to call him, I
imagine.” He said this in soliloquy, his white fingers
twisting in his beard, and his head turned backward over his
shoulder, as if he were looking away to distant years.

“No, sir,” says the cooper, “he ain't a bishop; not weritable,
though his father was, and he is sometimes called the
Bishop's son; it's a kind of woluntary compliment like that
we pay to him, you understand.”

“Yes, I understand — a sort of acknowledgment of his
virtues and Christian graces.”

“Yes, sir, and not altogether for any walid wirtues, as I
know of; he's good-looking and agreeable.”

“Something like me,” interposed the stranger, and he
laughed lightly; and then he said, hewing very hard with

the adze as he said it, “Is he a man of family? or does he
have that beautiful cottage all to himself?”

The cooper did not reply directly, but, taking up the
thread of his former thought, said, “As I was remarking,
sir, he's agreeable, but as to his wirtues proper, he always
seemed to me to be warnished like, rather than bright all
through.”

“A common case enough, my friend; but did you say he
was married? I'm interested in the ladies, you see.”

“Well, sir, no sir, I didn't say nothing about it; I didn't
understand you to ask.”

“I put my question very awkwardly, I suppose, but I
certainly meant to inquire if he were married; is he?”

“Well, sir, he ain't married, not wisibly, any how; he
hain't been pasture here long.”

“I think I shall go and quarter upon him, if he has that
sweet cottage all to himself. Do you suppose he would
take me in?”

“Well, sir, he might fur's I know. I should think you
was about the sort of a chap he'd take to; but I wouldn't
wenter to perdict a welcome from his sister: she's a bit of
a wixen, I take it.”

The stranger's face flushed suddenly. “So there is a
woman in the house!” he said. And then he said, “Young
and beautiful, of course?” He looked down as he said this,
his face coloring more and more.

“No, sir; she ain't purty according to my taste, and she
ain't in her wernal days, neither. She's old enough for you,
I should say.”

The stranger laughed, but the laughter was forced and
unnatural; and the cooper went on to say that, to his thinking,
the preacher's sister was not nigh so good-looking, nor
so good natured, neither, as what the widder Fairfax was,
who lived in the brown house over the hill, and who had a
daughter old enough to be married.

“Then I shan't find a rival in you? well, so much the
better,” says the stranger, who had recovered himself a
little by this time; “but what's her name — Xantippe?”

“No, sir, you've wentered a wrong guess this time; her
name is Katherine; a kind of cross name, I always thought.”

“And she is married, of course?”

“Why `of course,' Mr.?”

“O, I don't know, I simply took it for granted.”

“Well, you've wentered wrong agin; she ain't married,
and never will be; she's an old maid!”

“Well, I suppose it is not impossible that an old maid
should marry.”

“Jest about the same thing, I take it; no feller'd have
an old maid without he was awful hard run.”

“That's your opinion, sir;” and the stranger spoke with
more spirit than the circumstances seemed to warrant.

“Yes, sir, it's my opinion, and it's the werdict of all men,
too.”

And then he said this old maid they were talking about
had a lover once, in her youth, so report said, but that he
didn't walue her even at her best at a high enough rate to
have her; anyhow, he ran off and left her, but that she
wamped up her heart somehow, and braved it out purty walorously,
considerin'.

The stranger sat for some time after this, twisting his
white fingers silently in his beard, and then he said, abruptly,
“How old should you take me to be, my friend?”

“Well, sir,” says the cooper, eyeing him sharply, “if
you'd a' been left to the nateral disadwantages o' time, and
if you had my old apurn onto you, you'd graze mighty close
onto fifty, but with all your adwantages you'd pass with
most for a leetle up'ards of forty; but what sot you to ask
the question?”

“Simply to know how I appear to strangers; I am, as
you guess, coming in sight of fifty; heigh ho! that's getting
to be an old man, isn't it?”

“Well, not so wery; I'm forty-two.”

“But I have been talking,” says the stranger, standing
up and changing tone and manner, “wide of the purpose of
my visit to your pretty town here; do you happen to know
whether a young man of the name of Samuel Dale lives
hereabouts?”

Here came out all the story about Samuel, which the
reader may be spared.

At the end of it the stranger said he was the uncle of the
young man, and that he had but lately fallen heir to a large
property, through the death of a relative that had cut himself
off with a shilling — one John Cutwild Sparks — a fellow
about as strange as his name. And then he said if

Samuel had suffered at the hands of the people thereabout,
so much the worse for them.

“Maybe you would not be the man to windicate him so
strongly, for all that,” says the cooper, “if it wasn't for the
money?”

Then the stranger said something in an apologetic way
about having known less of his nephew, in the past, than he
had always desired to; their paths in life had kept them separate,
and then Samuel was to him, a mere boy!

When the stranger returned to the Eagle Hotel he went
straight to the register and making a dash or two across the
name he had set down, wrote another beneath it; the name
erased was C. G. Parsons; the one substituted was Charles
P. Gayfeather. This done, he went to his room, and in the
course of an hour came down very carefully dressed, and
sauntered leisurely towards the parsonage.