s time, you know, to bring everything
into the right shape. Have you dined yet?"

"No. Everything looked so dirty at the stage-house, where we stopped to
get dinner, that I couldn't venture upon the experiment of eating. How
long before your supper will be ready?"

"In an hour," replied the landlord.

"That will do. Let me have a nice piece of tender steak, and the loss
of dinner will soon be forgotten."

"You shall have that, cooked fit for an alderman," said the landlord.
"I call my wife the best cook in Cedarville."

As he spoke, a neatly dressed girl, about sixteen years of age, with
rather an attractive countenance, passed through the room.

"My daughter," said the landlord, as she vanished through the door.
There was a sparkle of pride in the father's eyes, and a certain
tenderness in the tones of his voice, as he said "My daughter" that
told me she was very dear to him.

"You are a happy man to have so fair a child," said I, speaking more in
compliment than with a careful choice of words.

"I am a happy man," was the landlord's smiling answer; his fair, round
face, unwrinkled by a line of care or trouble, beaming with
self-satisfaction. "I have always been a happy man, and always expect
to be. Simon Slade takes the world as it comes, and takes it easy. My
son, sir," he added, as a boy, in his twelfth year, came in. "Speak to
the gentleman."

The boy lifted to mine a pair of deep blue eyes, from which innocence
beamed, as he offered me his hand, and said, respectfully--"How do you
do, sir?" I could not but remark the girl-like beauty of his face, in
which the hardier firmness of the boy's character was already visible.

"What is your name?" I asked.

"Frank, sir."

"Frank is his name," said the landlord--"we called him after his uncle.
Frank and Flora--the names sound pleasant to the ears. But you know
parents are apt to be a little partial and over fond."

"Better that extreme than its opposite," I remarked.

"Just what I always say. Frank, my son,"--the landlord spoke to the
boy--"there's some one in the bar. You can wait on him as well as I
can."

The lad glided from the room in ready obedience.

"A handy boy that, sir; a very handy boy. Almost as good, in the bar as
a man. He mixes a toddy or a punch just as well as I can."

"But," I suggested, "are you not a little afraid of placing one so
young in the way of temptation?"

"Temptation!" The open brows of Simon Slade contracted a little.